How clean is London’s air?

London Mayor Ken Livingstone, in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum says he wants London to be the greenest city in the world and the leading centre for climate change research within five years.

The mayor says ‘cities produce 75% of global carbon emissions and it is therefore in cities that the battle against climate change will have to be won.’ I guess that means Londoners are going to be hit with more taxes to price them out of using cars and household appliances.

With lots of crap being put out into the atmosphere what’s the quality of the air like around London. You can check by looking at a website called the London Air Quality Network, a project between the London boroughs and Kings College London. It uses hourly data from dozens of monitoring stations throughout London to provide the air quality picture at any time, and gives values for categories such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, sulphur dioxide, PM10 particulate(?) and assigns them a number value, one being the lowest.

If you click on the individual coloured dots on the map of London that comes up, you’ll get different reports under the various section headings. Seems like much of London is suffering from excessive levels of nitrogen dioxide so far this year. For visitors I’d say the air quality is a lot better than it was say 20 years ago, when cars and buses were really pumping it out.