Haze folks, that’s all it was, a little bit of common, everyday haze. Happens all the time, we knew it was coming, nothing to worry about, everyone just move along.
The wicked foreign press (and not a few Beijing residents) were so quick to jump to conclusions and misreported Beijing’s recent spate of poor visibility as the result of air pollution. It is really fortunate we have folks like Deputy Director Du who can set us straight.
The haze that reduced visibility for a few days till Monday did not mean Beijing’s air quality was bad, a senior city environmental official said Tuesday.
“Clouds and haze are not pollution. This kind of weather is a natural phenomenon. It has nothing to do with pollution,” said Du Shaozhong, deputy director of the Beijing municipal bureau of environmental protection.
A rare dry spell last week is to blame for the haze that shrouded Beijing a couple of weeks before the Olympic Games, Du said at his sixth press conference in five days at the Main Press Center.
An IOC lapdog joined in to complete the Alice in Wonderland feel of this scold fest.
A senior International Olympic Committee (IOC) official knows better about Beijing’ s air quality.
“Most of the people see the fog, they say it’s pollution. But we know here it’s not pollution. It’s mist, a fact of the nature,” IOC’s Olympic Games executive director Gilbert Felli noted.
The foreign media behaved like simpletons when they printed pictures of a murky Beijing.
Photographs do not always tell the real story, he said. Some media agencies have projected the haze over Beijing as smog, and deliberately used it as a sign of the high pollution level in the city.
Such photographs “don’t tell the truth”, he said. “We don’t approve of their use to pass judgment on the air quality … you have to look at the complete monitoring system, and analyze the data scientifically.”
Let’s look at the data then shall we. The most appalling thing about this “pollution denial” story is that Beijing’s own monitoring data revealed that the air was polluted. The average particulate readings from July 23 to July 29 was 104. [go to the WSJ China Blog's Beijing Air Quality widget" and click "other periods," then "past week."] This puts it in the “slight pollution” range according to China’s own definition (but it is more than two times the WHO limit for “good” air quality), and, at the very least, “people with heart and respiratory conditions are told to avoid exertion and outdoor activities.”
I don’t doubt that part of what Beijing experienced was fog, but it also experienced high particulate levels; mix them together and you get “smog.” It was not wrong to say Beijing was polluted. I was prepared to give Beijing a pass on its air, or at least lay off until after the Olympics, but I really don’t like to be lectured to by sanctimonious bureaucrats.
If Deputy Director Du is correct, than this is a “blue sky” day in Beijing.
Who’s not telling the truth?
4 responses so far ↓
1 Crossroads // Jul 30, 2008 at 5:00 pm
The way I heard it was that David Copperfield was dared to make the bird nest disappear like the Statue of Liberty.
R
2 cmcelwee // Jul 30, 2008 at 5:49 pm
That makes for a much more interesting story. Personally, if I got to choose, I’d make “the egg” disappear, but I was not consulted.
3 Rob // Jul 31, 2008 at 9:53 am
I suspect that the Olympics have been held in places at least equally dirty as Beijing with its pollution controls in place. How should they have played this card?
I don’t want to sound too much like I’m defending the place…but I ride my 40 minutes to and from work every day. A year ago, when I got to my destination, I had to work for 20 minutes to get all the black crud out of my nose…these days I don’t have to. I know this probably shouldn’t give me a lot of comfort, but it does :-p
Maybe it is just desserts for athletes to come and compete in the place where most of their athletic wear was made for cheap. After all, 33% of China’s GHG emissions (and who knows about other pollution) are related to export products: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn14412-33-of-chinas-carbon-footprint-blamed-on-exports.html ……
4 cmcelwee // Jul 31, 2008 at 10:09 am
Rob: I agree that progress has been made in Beijing and that in Mexico City, perhaps, things might have been as bad. That’s why I said I wasn’t going to make a big deal out of Beijing’s air quality. The point of my post was that I don’t like it when government officials speak in condescending tones and insist that grey is blue. As to the export-related pollution, I suspect the US would take the jobs back if China is now tired of the environmental consequences.
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