Well, people won't be heading home until early Feb. CNY eve is 8th Feb, so that's when people will want to be home. People will start to stream home about a week before that, but pollution effect, if any, won't happen until the 9th. In the past holiday weeks have been in general pretty pollution-free but this winter has been so bad (easily the worst I have experienced except perhaps 1998/9 when they were still burning coal briquettes everywhere for heating and there were still coal-burning factories inside Beijing) that I will believe it when I see it.
I guess pollution must be having some effect on the infrastructure, but maintenance is so poor most of the time that things fall apart faster than the pollution can get at it. Bit like Italy actually. Chinese are extremely good at building and renovating but they are crap at maintenance.
lol, forget maintenance- try cleaning!
WHAT WOULD EDDIE DO? MAAAATE! Share a cot with Milton?
PM2.5 is 362 and rising this morning, cough, splutter.
I've attached a photo out my window I just took. It's also foggy, but if I look straight up I can see a bit of blue, which suggests pollution is a factor in the visibility as well. Also, if you look on the horizon there is a brown tinge to it. The photo is not all that reliable for colour, because if you use auto white balance it looks much whiter, whereas if you use "shade" white balance it goes almost red. This is using "cloud" white balance which is approximately correct for the conditions, I think. I guess I should have got out my grey card.
The big building in the middle distance is about 450-500m away. The ones you can barely see are about twice that.
But if you smell the air you know it's bad. Coal smoke coming in from somewhere. :-(
Thats the give away about chinese 'fog', it doesnt at all look like you'd take a romantic stroll through it, and second, if you have closely observed real fog, you know it comes in banks, and is consistently changing it's density and atmospherics.
Chinas has a consistency that beggars belief. It like just oozes into everything!
Have to admit, Suzhou has rather blue sky today (vis is probably 4.5km) and sun is warming us.
Things have improved a lot in the last decade. I can even see the moon at night now!
WHAT WOULD EDDIE DO? MAAAATE! Share a cot with Milton?
Thats the give away about chinese 'fog', it doesnt at all look like you'd take a romantic stroll through it, and second, if you have closely observed real fog, you know it comes in banks, and is consistently changing it's density and atmospherics.
Chinas has a consistency that beggars belief. It like just oozes into everything!
Have to admit, Suzhou has rather blue sky today (vis is probably 4.5km) and sun is warming us.
Things have improved a lot in the last decade. I can even see the moon at night now!
Beijing improved consistently for about the first 5 years I was here. In 2003 it was seriously not much worse than Sydney, and definitely much better than Hong Kong. For a while there I could look out my window just about any day (except in winter when it was mostly foggy) and see the western mountains which are a good 50km away.
Then SARS came along and everybody who could afford to get a car got a car. Then their neighbours who couldn't really afford a car got a car.... Since then it has been downhill, and since about 2008 it has been pretty bad.
In Spring, Summer and Autumn it is much better than in winter though. You can see stars most nights which you certainly couldn't in 1998. Also, the days when you can look directly at the sun are still fewer than there were in Germany when I lived there in 1981. I went an entire year without seeing a star then.
Autumn is mostly pretty pleasant here. I took this photo on the mid-autumn festival last year...
For Australia, 2013 looks like being a "year of living extremely" if January is anything to go by.
The Bureau of Meteorology said last month was the country's hottest month in just over a century of records.
Nationwide, the January average maximum temperature was 36.92 degrees. The anomaly was 2.28 degrees, "a substantial increase" on the previous record of 2.17 degrees set in 1932, the bureau said.
Thanks to the massive heatwave that dominated the first half of January, all states and territories posted above-average temperatures, the bureau said.
This week's floods added to the extremes. Queensland Premier Campbell Newman warned damage to the state's economy was $2.4 billion and rising, eclipsing the $2.388 billion bill from the huge flooding of 2011. Insurers don't think it will be that bad for them.
Add record low rainfall for much of southern Australia, a flurry of bushfires and it looks like climate change is kicking in - or does it?
Professor John McAneney, the director of Risk Frontiers, an independent research group funded mostly by the insurance industry, said that based on a database of natural hazard events in Australia, including some dating from 1803, "there has been no increase in the frequency of natural hazard events since 1950".
But what of the spiralling insurance claims in the wake of hailstorms, floods, cyclones (think Yasi at $1.4 billion) and bushfires ($4 billion for Victoria's Black Saturday)?
"When this data set, and many other data sets in different jurisdictions across the world and for many different perils, is corrected for the increases in numbers of buildings at risk and their value, no long-term trend remains," Professor McAneney said. ''It is indisputable that the rising toll of natural disasters is due to more people and assets at risk."
Professor McAneney said US hurricane modelling to identify a signal climate change is contributing to storm strength and suggested that it could be a while before the data is definitive. Averaging 18 different climate models, "it's going to take 260 years", he said. "This whole thing about climate change being responsible for an increase in extreme weather, or natural disasters, is just a fiction really," he said.
Cue howls of protest from climatologists and cries of "gotcha" from climate change doubters? Hardly.
Some climate change signals are clearer than others and there is no reason to ignore the direction most indicators are clearly pointed, said Andrew Ash, director of the Climate Adaptation flagship at the CSIRO.
"It doesn't mean all extremes are changing," Dr Ash said.
Take temperature, for instance. During 2001-11, the frequency of record high temperatures in Australia was 2.8 times (for maximum temperatures) and 5.2 times for minimums than the rate of record low temperatures.
Sea temperatures are also rising with Australian regional waters about 0.6-0.7 degrees warmer than in 1900, said Neil Plummer, assistant director of the weather bureau's climate information services.
Add a warmer atmosphere - with temperatures about 1 degree higher than pre-industrial levels and rising - and it means more moisture can be held and then dumped in the form of more severe rain deluges.
Beijing improved consistently for about the first 5 years I was here. In 2003 it was seriously not much worse than Sydney, and definitely much better than Hong Kong. For a while there I could look out my window just about any day (except in winter when it was mostly foggy) and see the western mountains which are a good 50km away.
Then SARS came along and everybody who could afford to get a car got a car. Then their neighbours who couldn't really afford a car got a car.... Since then it has been downhill, and since about 2008 it has been pretty bad.
In Spring, Summer and Autumn it is much better than in winter though. You can see stars most nights which you certainly couldn't in 1998. Also, the days when you can look directly at the sun are still fewer than there were in Germany when I lived there in 1981. I went an entire year without seeing a star then.
Autumn is mostly pretty pleasant here. I took this photo on the mid-autumn festival last year...
We really shouldn't be discussing localized pollution in a thread about climate change. It doesn't help the confusion around the issues/concepts. These two are not directly related.
The oil companies moved on years ago and are investing their obscene profits in ways to take advantage of a lower-carbon economy. Exxon was/is the last holdout.
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem AREPS™
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