Air pollution in Beijing

There are many stories about the Olympics, not directly related to the athletic competitions themselves. One of those stories is the air pollution in Beijing, although air pollution does directly impact the athletes, especially "high performance" athletes that compete outdoors.

Beijing has had seven years since winning the Olympic bid to improve the air quality in the city. I can honestly say that the first two days that I've been here, I've felt my lungs burn a little and have coughed some funk up as well. I can only imagine what it does to a marathon runner.

So how bad can it be? Here are some pictures:

Here are a couple pics from Tiananmen Square with one of my new friends! You can see the buildings behind starting to grey out. I'm sure Mao Zedong would be very upset if "the people" couldn't see his picture clearly! These two pics were taken at 11:00 am.




Here's a picture of Forbidden City. It's a huge compound of beautiful buildings, but from this vantage point, many of the buildings can't be seen because of the smog and pollution. This picture was taken at 2 pm.

What's that in the sky? You can almost make it out... oh there it is, that must be the sun. This picture was taken at 4:30 pm.

This is the clearest I've seen it in Beijing in the three days I've been here now. This picture was taken 5 pm on the 8th:

So every "dark cloud" has a silver lining, right? Well here's the silver lining... It's been in the low 90's here, with 90% humidity. Fortunately the smog is providing some protection from the sun, so it's not as hot as it could be if the sun was able to fully shine on us, right? How's that for the merits of air pollution?!

If this is what the air quality is like after 7 years of taking steps to improve things, I can't even imagine what it would have been like if they hadn't tried to do anything about it!!