December 1952: The Great Smog of London caused by the burning of coal, and to a lesser extent wood, killed 12,000 people within days to months due to inhalation of the smog.
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Former Canadian Environment Minister Rona Ambrose introduced the second Clean Air Act in mid-October 2006, containing mostly measures to fight smog pollution and greenhouse gases.
Visibility at these times could become as low as a few feet (hence the "London fogs" of movie fame) and when combined with the soot created lethal long-persistence smog: these conditions led to the passing of the UK's "Clean Air Act" which banned the burning of smoke-producing fuel.
After a late ’60s period of self-discovery that saw him residing in Northern California and even attending the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in December 1969, Clic returned to his hometown of Hudson, Ohio and began playing guitar—eventually settling in with a local outfit called Bold Chicken (whose recordings were later documented on a Smog Veil Records release) in 1971.
In 1952, Professor A. J. Haagen-Smit, of the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, postulated that unburned hydrocarbons were a primary constituent of smog, and that gasoline powered automobiles were a major source of those hydrocarbons.
Drugs Are Nice is the memoir of Lisa Crystal Carver published by Soft Skull Press in the US in 2005 and by Snowbooks in the UK in 2006, detailing her early childhood and later romantic relationships with Costes, Boyd Rice and Smog's Bill Callahan.
After a period of inactivity, in 2005 a new incarnation of Golden Smog formed and recorded the Another Fine Day album in the village of El Puerto de Santa María, Spain, produced by Paco Loco.
She was the heroine in Wolfgang Petersen's drama Smog and has also played in films by Werner Schroeter (Palermo oder Wolfsburg, Tag der Idioten) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Berlin Alexanderplatz).
It falls to Albert Campion and Inspector Charles Luke to pit their wits against the killer and hunt him down through the city's November smog before it is too late.
In addition, the killer smog that hit Donora, Pennsylvania in 1948 - which had been covered on When Weather Changed History - will also be covered, along with the 1952 smog that hit London, England.
The beginning of the month was very foggy, with London suffering its last great smog before clean air legislation and the reduction in the use of coal fires had their full effect.