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Comment by idiocratic | Hacker News Reader

Been to Kathmandu several times and I wouldn't say Nepal is industrialised in general, but not even remotely at the level of China. What makes the air really bad in Kathmandu is the amount of old trucks and buses on the very dusty streets of the city. It's a different kind of air pollution to what you might experience in an industrialised nation. When I'm there I always wear a mask, otherwise a cough will develop almost for sure in a few hours. If you go a little bit outside of the city the air is very clean and the views are amazing.

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Kabul is the same with a huge amount of air pollution, like a visible white fog. Kabul is also not incredibly industrialized.

The hard part about Kabul is the geography. It is a raised elevation surrounded by a ring of mountains like a large crater on a giant mountain top. The bowl shape traps the air pollution within the city and it absolutely does obscure visibility.

Were there many of these old trucks and buses around in Kathmandu in the 1920s?

no, but it was still a sprawling metropolis, one assumes there was a lot of wood and coal burning going on.

Here's a picture from Kathmandu in 1920. It appears to have poor visibility, but it's unclear from the picture whether or not that is pollution or weather.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kathmandu_Basantapur_Du...

here's another near the same period that shows similar levels of visibility:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Kathmand...

"Here's a picture from Kathmandu in 1920. It appears to have poor visibility, but it's unclear from the picture whether or not that is pollution or weather."

You don't think it's the quality of a 1920 photograph?

There's a few places in my travels where I've picked black boogers... big cities in Nepal, India, and Venezuela.

London.

Also: burning trash every night

Very true, it's incredible the amount of burning that goes on in front of most houses at sunset. But I guess our cities in Europe were similar in the past, especially in the countryside.

In rural areas of the U.S. some people still burn their trash.

As a kid who watched a lot of 20/20 and 60 Minutes, I was always afraid of the smoke because people would often toss batteries, PVC pipe, etc, in their trash pit. But it was normal behavior, so when visiting someone's house I just tried to stay upwind of the cancer cloud.

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