Beijing Air Quality Shows Hope in the Homestretch of 2013

Tonight's miserable AQI 300+ readings aside, Beijing has declared a minor short-term victory in fighting air pollution: air quality measurements since the city's winter heating was turned on Nov 16 indicating a substantial improvement over the same period last year.

According to a story in Saturday’s Beijing News (Chinese only), the volume of four major pollutants -- Sulfur Dioxide, Nitrogen Dioxide and two sizes of particulate matter -- PM10 and PM2.5 -- has been reduced by 25% compared to the same period last year. While it may seem like minor victory, we’ll take all the good news we can get these days.

Since the heat was turned on across the city – usually synonymous with a major degradation in air quality due to the city’s heavy reliance on coal heating  -- Beijing has only suffered from three seriously polluted days, a reduction from the seven days recorded as heavily polluted during the same period last year.

The Beijing Bureau of Environmental Protection sited two primary reasons for the year-on-year improvement: atmospheric conditions that favored a clearing of the air (including a reduction in overall humidity and an increase in average wind strength) and government initiatives. Among the measures the goverment has taken to clear the air since last winter's meassurements were taken:

  • Dongcheng district has completed converting over 40,000 single-story dwellings from coal to electric heat;
  • Much of the city’s coal-fired boilers used for public heating have been equipped with clean energy technology;
  • Semi-rural areas around the city are predicted to have reduced dependency on coal by 1.3 million tons;
  • Over 300,000 high-emissions vehicles have been taken off the roads; and 
  • Over 300 high-polluting enterprises have been closed down.

While subjective observations indicate December's air quality has indeed been slightly better than normal, it will take a lot more than a few extra blue-sky days to convince shell-shocked Beijingers who lived through last January’s “airpocalypse” that long-term change is afoot. In the mean time, why not use the comments section of this post on how to clean Beijing's air to add your two cents to a solution.

 

Comments

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bluefish wrote:
Took a while to get here and post a comment, but I just really needed to. Pretty disappointing "journalism".

I'm a blogger in my spare time, not a journalist. I do not claim to be a journalist. This is a translation from a news story in a mainstream Chinese newspaper.  Note I say that this is the paragraph that begins: "according to a story in the Beijing News."

bluefish wrote:
But since you caption the picture with assurance that the air is really a little better, along with "swearing" that it's not the wind, you make it clear that you believe this to be true.

Here's what I wrote:

Quote:
Beijing's air has been an eensy weensy bit better over the last month, and its not just because of the wind, I swear. Really.

My apologies for not turning up the sarcasm meter on my caption to "11".

bluefish wrote:
A simple check of a pollution app that shows historical trends indicates that the pollution from the time the heat was turned on in 2012 through Dec 22 was actually quite a bit better than that same time period in 2013.

Please link to your source. My guess is that your app may be tracking the US embassy single-point AQI readings, whereas the source of the data in the article -- the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau -- uses a network of monitoring stations around the city.

If the story's wrong here, it's because the story's wrong in the Beijing News.

Right now it's the word of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau vs your App. I have no reason to believe one set of data over the other -- you could say the government is engaged in a massive coverup, or you could say your app is using a different set of data or a different measurement standard or is otherwise inaccurate.

But given that the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau has not been inclined to cover up ugly facts (see our blog post Fewer Than Half of Beijing's 2013 Days Were Blue Sky Days), I have no reason to believe why they'd lie in this particular case.

 

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Took a while to get here and post a comment, but I just really needed to. Pretty disappointing "journalism".

It would have been ok if you'd just been reporting on what the Beijing News article was said. But since you caption the picture with assurance that the air is really a little better, along with "swearing" that it's not the wind, you make it clear that you believe this to be true. That makes it pretty sad that you couldn't be bothered to check anything before you just started writing stuff.

A simple check of a pollution app that shows historical trends indicates that the pollution from the time the heat was turned on in 2012 through Dec 22 was actually quite a bit better than that same time period in 2013.

Oh, and if it wasn't the wind that cleared things up on the days that were clear, then windless days would be better than they used to be. But we see exactly the same pattern, despite these vaunted changes: If the wind isn't at least 9mph from the N, NW or NNW, the pollution climbs just like normal.

You're probably confusing this period last year (Nov 15 to Dec 22) with last January's horrific readings. Our Nov 15-Dec 22 readings this year were certainly better than last January; but not at all better than 2012 during the same period.

It took me a lot longer to write this little comment then it did to check your facts.