After the earliest snow to hit the capital in 22 years fell on November 1, the capital was again shrouded in white Tuesday with more snow expected in the coming three days, the National Meteorological Centre said.

The Beijing Weather Modification Office communists artificially induced both storms by seeding clouds with chemicals, a practice that can increase precipitation by up to 20 percent.

On Tuesday, an official, as is standard government practice, simply lied and claimed the storm was "natural".

"No one can tell how much weather manipulation will change the sky," Xiao Gang, a professor in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the paper.

"We should not depend too much on artificial measures to get rain or snow, because there are too many uncertainties up in the sky."

Zhao Nan, a Beijing engineer, was quoted as saying the more than 5,500 tonnes of erosive snow-melting chloride used on city roads Tuesday -- nearly half the annual allotment -- could "erode steel structures of buildings".

In 2005, the snow-melting agent was responsible for killing 10,000 trees in Beijing and decimating 200,000 square metres (2.15 million square feet) of grassland, the paper said, citing official statistics.

Despite a massive effort to clear the capital of snow that involved over 15,000 workers, many roads remained blocked, while highways into Beijing and in neighbouring Hebei and Shanxi provinces were closed, state propaganda reports said.

http://current.com/items/88976295_china_s_quake_orphans

Here is another video on the after effects of China¹s Quake. It has some mind-bending statistics that really make you think.

http://current.com/items/88952534_the_china_quake

Air quality in the capital was rated as "heavily polluted" due to a sandstorm from Mongolia, the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau said on its website. Just how sand is considered "pollution" is something only the CCP can explain, but then this is a country that considers dolphins fish.

Beijing's pollution has already proved a major concern for athletes, with twice Olympic champion Haile Gebrselassie, who suffers from asthma, pulling out of the men's marathon out of concern for his health.

In addition to shutting down high polluters within city limits, Beijing has demanded five surrounding provinces scale back or stop production to ensure blue skies hang over Olympic venues for the Games in August.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said that some endurance events might have to be shifted if the air quality is not good enough and the earlier they know about that possibility, the easier it is to re-schedule. There are also concerns that rain, which is common in early August in the Chinese capital, might ruin the opening ceremony at the roof-less Bird's Nest National Stadium on August 8.

Then again, the Italian said he's never run in a city as polluted as the Chinese capital.

"The pollution could affect the results, but I believe heat and humidity will have a bigger effect," Baldini said Thursday in Beijing during a three-day visit to look at the marathon course.

Chinese organizers have promised clean air for the Olympics, shutting chemical plants and foundries while banning construction and half of the city's 3.3 million vehicles in the days leading up to the Aug. 8 opening ceremony.

On Thursday, however, thick smog blanketed the city, causing skyscrapers a kilometre away to disappear behind a grey haze.

"I haven't ever run in a similar polluted situation," the Italian said. "I really haven't seen such a polluted sky anywhere else. ... Other places where the sky is blue, maybe there is pollution, but you can't see it. Here you see it, you sense it."

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge had warned that outdoor endurance events of more than one hour will be postponed if the city's air is dirty. A delay will be difficult with the men's marathon, as it is scheduled for the closing day of the Olympics.

Rogge had also acknowledged that athletes' performances might be "slightly reduced" because of the pollution. Haile Gebrselassie, widely recognised as the world's greatest distance runner, will skip the Olympic marathon. He's said the city's pollution irritates his breathing. He's also called it "the hardest marathon in history," combining heat, humidity and pollution.

Baldini acknowledged the health risks for runners like Gebrselassie, but said he wasn't worried.

"I don't think that running one race in these conditions would have any effect on your health," Baldini said. "It's true that we have to worry about it because the situation is serious. But I'm not worried that August will be as bad as it is now."

Many athletes will delay their arrival in Beijing until the last possible moment, but Baldini plans to train for about 10 days in China's capital before his race.

"The biggest problem could the be 10-12 days before in the sense that the pollution might have a bigger effect than during the race itself," said Baldini's coach Luciano Gigliotti.

Baldini, who turns 37 next month, has been under pressure in Italy to respond to questions about possible boycotts and the deadly rioting last month in Tibet. He said he opposed boycotts, does not intend to speak out on political issues during the Olympics, and needed to focus on running a marathon.

"We do all have an opinion about the situation in Tibet," he said. "We do have our personal opinion, although I am someone who likes to follow what the rules are."

China has already overtaken the US as the world's "biggest polluter", a report to be published next month says.

The research suggests the country's greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated.

The University of California team will report their work in the Journal of Environment Economics and Management.

They warn that unchecked future growth will dwarf any emissions cuts made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol.

The team admit there is some uncertainty over the date when China may have become the biggest emitter of CO2, as their analysis is based on 2004 data.

Next month's University of California report warns that unless China radically changes its energy policies, its increases in greenhouse gases will be several times larger than the cuts in emissions being made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol.

The researchers say their figures are based on provincial-level data from the Chinese Environmental Protection Agency.

They say analysis of the 30 data points is more informative about likely future emissions than national figures in wider use because it allows errors to be tracked more closely.

They believe current computer models substantially underestimate future emissions growth in China.

All those concerned about climate change agree that China's emissions are a problem - including China itself.

But China and many other developing countries struggling to tackle poverty are adamant that any negotiated emissions reductions should not be absolute, but relative to a "business-as-usual" scenario of projected growth.

That is why this study is of more than academic interest.

'Truly shocking'

If it becomes widely accepted that China's future emissions are likely to be much higher than previously estimated, that will have to factored into any future global climate agreement if the Chinese are to be persuaded to take part.

Researchers say China needs to radically change its policies

The Chinese - and the UN - insist that rich countries with high per capita levels of pollution must cut emissions first, and help poorer countries to invest in clean technology.

America's per capita emissions are five to six times higher than China's, even though China has become the top manufacturing economy.

US emissions are still growing too, though much more slowly.

Dr Auffhammer told BBC News that his projections had made an assumption that the Chinese government's recent aggressive energy efficiency programme would fail, as the previous one had failed badly.

"Our figures for emissions growth are truly shocking," he said. Those scientists aspiring to stabilise global emissions growth before 2020 to prevent what they believe may be irreversible damage to the climate may be wondering how this can possibly be achieved.

International Olympic Committee Warns Beijing Air Is "A Possible Risk"

The International Olympic Committee acknowledged for the first time today that air pollution could be harmful for athletes at this summer's Olympics in Beijing and said it will monitor air quality daily during the Games to see whether events should be moved or postponed.

The announcement came after the IOC's medical commission analyzed data collected in Beijing from Aug. 8 to Aug. 29 that included readings of five pollutants. The data were evaluated on the basis of the World Health Organization's 2005 interim target standards, the organization said.

Although the IOC has had concern about pollution in previous Olympics, including at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles and the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, never has such an alarmist tone been sounded in advance.

In trying to make it look good to the world in August 2008, it appears China is willing to make itself look like an utter jackass in the here and now.

The diversion of water to Beijing for the Olympics and for big hydropower projects threatens the lives of millions of peasant farmers in China's north-western provinces, according to a senior Chinese government official.

In an interview with the Financial Times, An Qiyuan, a member and former chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee for Shaanxi province and former Communist party chief of Shaanxi, warned of an impending social and environmental disaster because of overuse of scarce water resources.

Predicted water shortages in China by 2010

In a critical tone seldom heard from Chinese officials, Mr An called on Beijing to provide compensation to the provinces that have been told to pump their cleanest water to the capital in order to ensure potable supplies during the Olympics.

Beijing will need an estimated 300m cubic metres of additional water just to flush out the polluted and stagnant rivers, canals and lakes in its central areas to put on a clean, environmentally-friendly face for Olympic visitors, according to municipal officials.

"In order to preserve the quality of Beijing's water we have to close all our factories. But we still need to live. So I say the government needs to compensate Shaanxi," Mr An said. "If you don't compensate the masses then how can they survive?"

Will anyone really be fooled in August? Will anyone believe they are seeing "the real China," with potable tap water, blue skies, no traffic and lots of happy smiling volunteers?

Pollution turned part of a major river system in central China red and foamy, forcing authorities to cut water supplies to as many as 200,000 people.

Some communities along tributaries of the Han River — a branch of the Yangtze — in Hubei province were using emergency water supplies, while at least 60,000 people were relying on bottled water and limited underground sources.

Residents in some towns were getting water from fire trucks, the Hubei provincial government said on its Web site.

Five schools were closed in Xingou township, while others could not provide food to students, the Xinhua report said without elaborating.

The pollution was discovered Sunday when water plant workers from Jianli County found that the Dongjing River, a tributary of the Han, had turned red and foamy, the Hubei Web site said.

Water plants along the river suspended intake and cut tap water to as many as 120,000 people, according to reports on the site. Xinhua said 200,000 people were without water.

Tests showed the polluted waters contained elevated levels of ammonia, nitrogen, and permanganate, a chemical used in metal cleaning, tanning and bleaching, Xinhua said. The pollution apparently flowed down from the Han River, the Hubei government said without elaborating on its source.

Water from nearby Lake Chang was being diverted to dilute the pollution.

Most of China's canals, rivers and lakes are severely tainted by industrial, agricultural and household pollution. Chinese leaders say the country faces a critical water shortage, partly due to chronic pollution and chemical accidents.

In one of China's worst cases of river pollution, potentially cancer-causing chemicals, including benzene, spilled into the Songhua River in November 2005. The northeastern city of Harbin was forced to sever water supplies to 3.8 million people for five days. The accident also strained relations with Russia, into which the poisoned waters flowed.

A paper mill dumped waste water directly into the Han in September 2006, forcing authorities to cut water supplies for a week in some areas, the Xinhua and government reports said. They did not say how many people were affected.

The study, written by an American environmental consultant, found flaws in Beijing’s “Blue Sky” system of air quality monitoring stations and noted that the city changed its method for measuring pollution in 2006. In particular, officials stopped including readings from two stations in polluted areas and began using readings in three other stations in less polluted locales.

Without this switch, Beijing would have fallen far short of its goals in 2006 and 2007 for the number of days that met national air quality standards, according to the study. The study also found that a disproportionate number of days were rated just below the statistical break point that separates a polluted day from one that passes standards.

“Irregularities in the monitoring of air quality account for all reported improvements over the last nine years,” said Steven Q. Andrews, the author of the study, in a telephone interview. Mr. Andrews published an op-ed article about his study on Wednesday in the Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal.Mr. Andrews said he based his study, which has not undergone peer review, on official government statistics. He spent more than a year in Beijing as a Princeton in Asia fellow at the National Resources Defence Council, or N.R.D.C., a non-profit environmental group. But he said his study was independent of his association with the council.

With roughly seven months remaining before Beijing plays host to the Olympics, air quality has become a major concern. Chinese officials have pledged that pollution will not be a problem during the Olympics and are discussing contingency plans that include possible factory shutdowns or traffic restrictions, if necessary while inhabitants will have to continue suffering immediately upon completion of the second fascist Games in less than a century.

In 1998, Beijing recorded only 100 Blue Sky days. In 2007, that number had risen to 246, a fact hailed last week in China’s state media. But Mr. Andrews said the recent improvement was largely the result of changing the formula in 2006. He said the city’s daily pollution rating was based on readings from a subset of the more than two dozen monitoring stations around the city. Mr. Andrews said readings from seven stations were used from 1998 to 2005.

But in 2006, the city dropped two stations located near areas with high traffic and replaced them with three other stations in quieter areas. The impact on the Blue Sky ratings was drastic; Mr. Andrews found that using the original seven stations would have meant 38 fewer Blue Sky days in 2006, and 55 fewer last year.

This would have meant that Beijing had fewer days meeting national air quality standards last year than in 2002, when there were 203.

Mr. Andrews also found that ratings began to change after officials set targets for every monitoring station in the city. He said this political imperative coincided with a rising number of days that rated just below the break point of 101 to qualify as a Blue Sky day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/world/asia/10china.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global

NEWS: Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?

By Jacques Leslie

December 10, 2007  WESTBOUND ON THE EASTBOUND BEIJING EXPRESSWAY long before Mr. Zhang's crowning highway maneuver, I'd realized that his flamboyant unpredictability was an asset. I'd hired him as driver and guide for a three-day trip from Beijing to Inner Mongolia on the recommendation of a Chinese environmentalist who'd enumerated all of Mr. Zhang's virtues except the most important—his suppleness under pressure, which would enable us to overcome the obstacles that are a constant feature of travel in China.

Of course, Mr. Zhang's chief qualification was that he was an environmentalist, or, more precisely, a fellow environmental-disaster tracker. Now, having toured choked rivers, depleted forests, and grasslands that had ceded to encroaching deserts, we were near the end of our trip, with nothing in front of us but a two-hour jaunt down the broad, brutish Beijing Badaling Expressway to the capital. Ms. Lei, my delicate translator, had announced her wish to get back to Beijing before her four-year-old boy went to bed, and we were running late. Mr. Zhang's swashbuckling solution was a "shortcut": Instead of fighting his way along the paved, but circuitous, road to the highway, he sped down a narrow dirt path that held the promise of providing a more direct route. Within minutes he was doubling back on himself, loudly grinding gears as he cut through dust-shrouded cornfields and drought-stricken cherry orchards while peasants leaped out of our way and into the foliage. By the time Mr. Zhang found the expressway, the shortcut had cost us an hour.

I already knew that China's roads are some of the world's most dangerous. A quarter of a million people die on them each year—6 times as many as in the United States, even though Americans possess 18 times as many cars—and the entire system is plagued with soul-withering traffic jams prompted by police inspectors who extract "fees" from coal-truck drivers. Lines of trucks often extend behind inspection stations for miles; truckers have waited in them for as long as two weeks.

And now we couldn't get on the expressway because traffic was at a standstill behind a toll station. An abhorrer of inertia, Mr. Zhang cut across six lanes to the only booth with a short line and cockily paid the toll. For a moment we basked in his nascarish dexterity. Then he slammed on the brakes. In front of us, the road was clogged with coal trucks lined up behind an inspection station far down the road. We'd been funneled into a classic Chinese bottleneck.

Unfazed, Mr. Zhang made a 180-degree turn and headed west on the eastbound expressway. I braced for the inevitable crash. Then, just before we regained the toll station, he swung right and headed for the center divider, past a gigantic, disabled semi stuck perpendicularly to the flow of cars. The half-dozen policemen who stood around the truck gave no sign of noticing us. Through a gap in the divider, Mr. Zhang found an eastbound lane reserved for passenger cars and turned into it; as we sped toward Beijing, we saw that the line of motionless coal trucks extended for miles. Drivers dozed or ate dinner on top of their cargo. On this tottering foundation, the world's most dynamic economy has been erected. What globalization offers, it also takes away.

CHINA EATS THE WORLD

the emergence of China as a dominant economic power is an epochal event, as significant as the United States' ascendancy after World War II. It is in many ways an astonishment, starting with the ideological about-face that enabled it, the throwing over of Maoist values for plainly capitalist ones starting in the late 1970s. So thorough is the change that the 19-foot-tall portrait of a stolid, potato-faced Mao Zedong that still looms over traffic-choked, commerce-suffused Tiananmen Square looks paradoxical, even startling, in seeming need of an update in which Mao winks—or sobs—in blinking neon. Meanwhile, inside Beijing's Forbidden City, the heart of old China, buildings with such intoxicating names as Hall of Preserved Harmony and Palace of Heavenly Purity bear signs reading, "Made Possible by the American Express Company."

The grander astonishment is the most massive and rapid redistribution of the earth's resources in human history. In a mere two and a half decades, China has awakened from Maoist stagnancy to become the world's manufacturer. Among the planet's 193 nations, it is now first in production of coal, steel, cement, and 10 kinds of metal; it produces half the world's cameras and nearly a third of its TVs, and by 2015 may produce the most cars. It boasts factories that can accommodate 200,000 workers, and towns that make 60 percent of the world's buttons, half the world's silk neckties, and half the world's fireworks, respectively.

China has also become a ravenous consumer. Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world's biggest consumer of coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets. It not only leads the world in coal consumption, with 2.5 billion tons in 2006, but uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations—the United States, Russia, and India—combined. China uses half the world's steel and concrete and will probably construct half the world's new buildings over the next decade. So omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over the world—Chicago lost 150 in a month. And the Chinese are not just vast consumers, but conspicuous ones, as evidenced by the presence in Beijing of dealers representing every luxury-car manufacturer in the world. Sales of Porsches, Ferraris, and Maseratis have flourished, even though their owners have no opportunity to test their finely tuned cars' performance on the city's clotted roads.

The catch is that China has become not just the world's manufacturer but also its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion. Chinese ecosystems were already dreadfully compromised before the Communist Party took power in 1949, but Mao managed to accelerate their destruction. With one stroke he launched the "backyard furnace" campaign, in which some 90 million peasants became grassroots steel smelters; to fuel the furnaces, villagers cut down a 10th of China's trees in a few months. The steel ultimately proved unusable. With another stroke, Mao perpetrated the "Kill the Four Pests" campaign, inducing the mass slaughter of millions of sparrows and a subsequent explosion in the locust population. The destruction of forests led to erosion and the spread of deserts, and the locust resurgence prompted a collapse of the nation's grain crop. The result was history's greatest famine, in which 30 to 50 million Chinese died.

Yet the Mao era's ecological devastation pales next to that of China's current industrialization. A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Acid rain falls on a third of China's landmass, tainting soil, water, and food. Excessive use of groundwater has caused land to sink in at least 96 Chinese cities, producing an estimated $12.9 billion in economic losses in Shanghai alone. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning and mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities; of the world's 20 most polluted cities, 16 are Chinese.

The government estimates that 400,000 people die prematurely from respiratory illnesses each year, and health care costs for premature death and disability related to air pollution is estimated at up to 4 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Four-fifths of the length of China's rivers are too polluted for fish. Half the population—600 or 700 million people—drinks water contaminated with animal and human waste. Into Asia's longest river, the Yangtze, the nation annually dumps a billion tons of untreated sewage; some scientists fear the river will die within a few years. Drained by cities and factories all over northern China, the Yellow River, whose cataclysmic floods earned it a reputation as the world's most dangerous natural feature, now flows to its mouth feebly, if at all. China generates a third of the world's garbage, most of which goes untreated. Meanwhile, roughly 70 percent of the world's discarded computers and electronic equipment ends up in China, where it is scavenged for usable parts and then abandoned, polluting soil and groundwater with toxic metals.

Though government-run and heavily censored, the English-language China Daily has reported that pollution problems caused 50,000 disputes and protests throughout China in 2005. If unchecked, the devastation will not just put an abrupt end to China's economic growth, but, in concert with other environmentally heedless nations (in particular, the United States, India, and Brazil), will cause mortal havoc in societies and ecosystems throughout the world.

Beijing air pollution 'as bad as it can get,' official says  Beijingers were warned to stay indoors on last Thursday as pollution levels across the capital hit the top of the scale, despite repeated lies by the regime that air quality was improving. "This is as bad as it can get," a spokeswoman for the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau told AFP. "Level five is the worst level of air pollution. This is as bad as it has been all year." According to the bureau's website, 15 out of the 16 pollution monitoring stations in urban Beijing registered a "five" for air quality rating. The main pollutant was suspended particulate matter, which is usually attributed to coal burning and automotive exhaust. "Old people and young children should reduce outdoor activities and protect their health," the spokeswoman said. The Beijing Evening News warned residents not to do their morning exercises on Friday as pollution levels were likely to linger over the capital until a cold front moved in and blew some of the bad air away later in the day. A lack of wind in the capital over recent days has led to a heavy cover of smog trapping in the pollutants, the paper said. By nightfall, the pollution was still horrendously thick. In the run up to the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing has vowed to clean up its air and this year set a goal of 245 "blue sky days," or days with only light pollution. As of Thursday, the city needed one more day to reach the annual goal, the bureau said. But official "blue sky days" are often hazy affairs with heavy pollution. Beijing's air quality is routinely rated among the worst in the world by international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank, with rampant coal burning, regular dust storms and a growing number of cars cited as the main reasons.

Beijing May Green for the Olympics, but Long-Term Forecast Is Grey

Mimi Kuo-Deemer for The New York Times

Vehicles jammed a road as a thick morning haze covered Beijing during a recent morning rush hour.

BEIJING — Every day, monitoring stations across the city measure air pollution to determine if the skies above this national capital can officially be designated blue. It is not an act of whimsy: with Beijing preparing to play host to the 2008 Olympic Games, the official Blue Sky ratings are the measuring stick for whether the city’s polluted air will be clean enough for the competition.

Choking on Growth

This is the tenth in a series of articles and multimedia examining the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China's epic pollution crisis. In Translation

Summaries of articles in this series are available in Chinese.

• Download a written translation of the tenth article. (pdf)

 Listen to a reading of the translation. (mp3)

 

Thursday did not bring good news. The grey, acrid skies rated an eye-popping 421 on a scale of 500, with 500 being the worst. Friday rated a 500. Both days far exceeded levels of pollutants deemed safe by the World Health Organisation. In Beijing, officials warned residents to stay indoors until Saturday, but residents here are accustomed to breathing foul air. One man flew a kite in Tiananmen Square.

For Beijing officials, Thursday was especially depressing because the city was hoping to celebrate an environmental victory. In recent years, Beijing has steadily increased its Blue Sky days. The city needs one more, defined as scoring below 101, to reach its goal of 245 Blue Sky days this year. These improving ratings are how Beijing hopes to reassure the world that Olympic athletes will not be gasping for breath next August.

“We’re definitely hoping for the best,” said Jon Kolb, a member of the Canadian Olympic Committee, “but preparing for the worst.”

For the world’s Olympians, Beijing’s air is a performance issue. The concern is that respiratory problems could impede athletic performance and prevent records from being broken. For the city’s estimated 12 million residents, pollution is an inescapable health and quality-of-life issue. Scepticism about the validity of the Blue Sky ratings is common. The concern is whether the city can clean itself up long after the Games are over.

Beijing has long ranked as one of the world’s most polluted cities. To win the Games, Beijing promised a “Green Olympics” and undertook environmental initiatives now considered models for the rest of the country. But greening Beijing has not meant slowing it down. Officials also have encouraged an astonishing urbanization boom that has made environmental gains seem modest, if not illusory.

Beijing is like an athlete trying to get into shape by walking on a treadmill yet eating double cheeseburgers at the same time. Polluting factories have been moved or closed. But auto emissions are rising as the city adds 1,200 new cars and trucks every day. Dirty, coal-burning furnaces have been replaced, lowering the city’s sulfur dioxide emissions. But fine-particle pollution has been exacerbated by a staggering citywide construction binge that shows no signs of letting up.

China’s unsolved riddle is how to reconcile fast economic growth with environmental protection. But Beijing’s Olympic deadline means the city needs an immediate answer. The ruling Communist Party envisions the Games as a public relations showcase and is leaving no detail untended. Scientists are cross-breeding chrysanthemums to ensure that flowers bloom in August.

Now Beijing is also going to try to manipulate air quality. For months, scientists have treated the city like a laboratory, testing wind patterns and atmospheric structure, while pinpointing local and regional pollution sources. Olympics contingency plans have been approved for Beijing and surrounding provinces. Details are not public, but officials have discussed shutting down factories and restricting traffic during the Games.

“We are determined to ensure that the air conditions meet the necessary standards in August 2008,” Liu Qi, president of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games, told the International Olympic Committee’s executive board this month.

Beijing residents overwhelmingly support the Games and understand that officials will do what is necessary to ensure clean air. Last August, the city removed a million cars from roads during a four-day test intended to gauge pollution and traffic. But people also know that any emergency measures have a limited shelf life.

“Yes, I heard about it,” said an engineer at one factory that may temporarily be shut down. “It is like you invite some guests to your home, and hide all your children underneath the bed to make the house look nicer. If all the polluting factories are shut down for the Olympics, there will be a major pollution outbreak afterward when all the factories restart, right?”

Beijing officials say the Olympics will have a lasting and positive environmental legacy on the city. International Olympic Committee officials acknowledge that air quality remains a problem but they say the air would be far worse without improvements made for the Games. “The general trend is improvement,” said Simon Balderstone, an environmental adviser for the I.O.C.

But pollution is expected to remain a major, long-term challenge as Beijing’s population may eventually exceed 20 million people. Scientists also say the city will never be able to clean itself up if surrounding industrial provinces are not cleaned up, too.

Blue skies, in other words, will remain a challenge.

Growth Offsets Gains

In July 2001, Beijing won the right to serve as the host of the 2008 Games, a victory that carried a touch of vindication. Eight years earlier, the International Olympic Committee had rejected Beijing’s first bid for a variety of reasons, including the city’s polluted environment.

This time, Beijing organizers promised a “Green Olympics.”

“Beijing has come a long way since its last bid in 1993,” said Wang Wei, a senior Beijing Olympics official, speaking at the city’s final Olympic presentation in Moscow. “The city has taken giant steps to fight pollution caused by industrialization and economic growth.”

Beijing’s environmental program had begun in 1997 and became the centerpiece of the city’s Olympic environmental commitments. Today, urban sewage treatment has doubled since 2001. Use of natural gas has jumped 38-fold as city officials have converted thousands of dirty coal-fired furnaces and boilers. Factories have been shut down or relocated to the suburbs. Millions of trees have been planted.

“For many years, the city had few environmental rules,” said Mr. Balderstone, the I.O.C. environmental adviser, who regularly consults with Beijing officials. “It’s like they are playing catch-up on a lot of these measures.”

But Beijing’s Olympic bid also intensified a stunning urban boom. Since 2000, Beijing’s gross domestic product has jumped 144 percent, according to Olympic officials. New office buildings and apartment towers seem to rise every week. More than 1.7 billion square feet of new construction has been started since 2002, most of it unrelated to the Olympics.

The emerging cityscape is often dazzling but also energy intensive and polluting. Beijing requires low-sulfur coal and had hoped to reduce coal consumption in the years before the Olympics. Instead, the city’s coal consumption peaked at 30 million tons last year. Beijing also has only one office tower that qualifies under international and national energy efficiency standards as a green building. Construction, meanwhile, is expected to continue at a rapid pace.

“I think there will be another 20 to 30 years of urbanization,” said Wu Weijia, a professor at Tsinghua University’s Institute of Urban Studies. “The scale of construction in Beijing will not slow down after the Olympics.”

Meanwhile, an explosion of car ownership has wrought gridlocked traffic and a halo of auto fumes. Beijing now has more than three million vehicles and is adding roughly 400,000 new cars and trucks each year. The city’s reliance on cars and trucks leaves its air with few reprieves. As in other cities, heavy trucks can only enter at night. Diesel exhaust is so severe that Beijing’s levels of PM 2.5, a tiny particulate deemed potentially harmful to health, is highest between midnight and 3 a.m., according to one survey.

Beijing is fighting auto pollution by instituting China’s highest vehicle emissions standards. Nearly 79,000 new taxis with lower emissions have replaced older, outdated models. But Beijing has been unwilling to discourage private car ownership by instituting exorbitant fees as other cities have done. Depending on the car, license plates in Shanghai can cost as much as $7,000; as a result, Shanghai adds about one-fourth as many cars per year as Beijing.

Beijing’s problems are compounded because its public transportation system was ignored for years. Now, the city is expanding subway lines and finishing a rail line from the airport to downtown, but car ownership is expected to keep rising.

“If you discourage people from having a car, the public transportation system would be overburdened,” said Mr. Wu, the Tsinghua professor.

Taking Pollution’s Measure

Mr. Kolb, the Canadian Olympic official, spent much of August in Beijing trying to discern the question hanging over the city as the Games approach: Has air quality actually improved?

An environmental physiologist, Mr. Kolb visited several stadiums, and sneaked into a few others, to measure pollution with a small monitoring device. On Aug. 5, his measurement of fine particles pollution, or PM 10, reached 200, roughly four times higher than that deemed safe by the World Health Organization.

“We’re worried,” Mr. Kolb said. Of Beijing air pollution, he added: “There’s no doubt about it. It’s off the charts.”

A decade ago, Beijing introduced the Blue Sky program to measure sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and PM 10. Under the system, monitors take regular readings of each pollutant and then calculate a 24-hour average for each. The daily Blue Sky rating is determined by whichever pollutant has the highest 24-hour average.

For China’s authoritarian government, the system represented a breakthrough. But it is less stringent than air-quality indexes in the United States. Indeed, a day that rates “good” in Beijing would usually be rated polluted in the United States.

In 1998, Beijing recorded only 100 Blue Sky days. Each ensuing year, the city has improved the number until reaching the current 244 and pending. Cleaner coal has helped reduce sulfur dioxide by 25 percent since 2001. Nitrogen dioxide is also down. But Beijing’s biggest problem is PM 10 and other particulates, which are attributed to construction, industry and cars.

Levels of PM 10 exceed national and W.H.O. standards. In 2004, the concentration of airborne particulates in Beijing equalled that of New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and Atlanta combined, according to the United States Embassy in Beijing. Earlier this year, a report by the United Nations Environment Program concluded that “air pollution is still the single largest environmental and public health issue affecting the city.”

“Particularly worrying are the levels of small particulate matter (PM 10) in the atmosphere, which is severely deleterious to public health,” the report stated.

The Blue Sky system sets a maximum rating of 500, meaning that on the worst days the actual rating could be even higher. “Good” air in Beijing is any Blue Sky rating below 101. But even good air is often not very good; this year, Beijing has had 65 days that rated between 95 and 100. That bulge just inside the breakpoint has attracted attention on Web sites and even at one foreign embassy, which compiled a statistical analysis casting doubt on the Blue Sky results, though the embassy’s officials refuse to discuss the findings.

Mr. Kolb said Olympic athletes were worried about ozone, which can inflame the respiratory tract and make it more difficult to breathe. But Beijing’s monitoring system does not measure ozone, nor does it measure the finer particulates known as PM 2.5.

This year, a team of Chinese and American scientists analysed air quality issues for the Olympics and found that Beijing’s daily concentrations of PM 2.5 rated anywhere from 50 percent to 200 percent higher than American standards. Their study, published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, also found that ozone levels regularly exceeded American standards.

Studies are under way to assess the health impact of pollution in Beijing. One 2003 study warned that air pollution could be a major contributor to premature deaths related to chronic pulmonary disease, especially in the winter. Another study showed that visits to hospital emergency rooms rose on days with higher pollution levels.

On a recent afternoon at Beijing Hospital, Dr. Li Yi said he now saw 50 patients a day for respiratory problems compared with about half that a decade ago. He said asthma cases had increased sharply as had the number of patients with nonsmoking-related lung cancer.

“You can’t say that pollution is the only reason,” Dr. Li said. “But nonsmoking-related lung cancer is now increasing more quickly.”

Beyond the Olympics

In August, Beijing marked the one-year countdown to the Games with a celebration at Tiananmen Square and several test competitions at different sites. Jacques Rogge, president of the I.O.C., applauded Beijing’s preparations but also cautioned that pollution might force the postponement of some endurance sports.

Hu Fei, director of the Institute of Atmosphere Physics in Beijing, said any concern was misplaced. “Don’t worry about the Olympics,” Mr. Hu said, expressing confidence that contingency plans would produce clean air for the Games. “We need to be concerned about the long term.”

Mr. Hu said finding a long-term fix is difficult because of Beijing’s geography. Surrounded by mountains on three sides, Beijing depends on strong winds to disperse pollution. Yet winds also draw pollution into the city. The study in Atmospheric Environment estimated that as much as 60 percent of ozone detected at the National Stadium could be traced to outside provinces.

“Beijing is a pollution source itself, and it is surrounded by other pollution sources,” Mr. Hu said. “When you have wind, it brings in pollution from other sources. When you don’t have wind, the local pollution cannot disperse.”

Xu Jianping, 55, a business consultant, does not need to be told that Beijing is overrun with cars and construction. He is an avid in-line skater who enjoyed skating to work until pollution left him spitting out black phlegm. He went online and ordered a gas mask.

“But I don’t want to wear it,” said Mr. Xu, fearing his mask would be misinterpreted as a protest against the Olympics. “It would hurt China’s image.”

So until the Games are over, Mr. Xu is taking the bus to the office. He plans to vacation outside the city during the Games. Then, when life in Beijing returns to normal, he plans to resume skating to work — with his mask, if necessary.

Harsh life for China's hill farmers

Another excellent article on the division between rural and urban China. For those of you that may have missed it, the following is vindication for those of us that doubted whether so many Chinese really have been lifted out of poverty as is often claimed.

For two decades, commentators have talked with pride about how many people were being pulled out of poverty. But last summer the authoritative Asian Development Bank published an official survey showing that China's economy was actually smaller and poorer than hitherto thought.

It estimated that the number of people living below the World Bank's poverty line was three times previous estimates: 300 million people living on $1 a day or less, about 50p.

When you take into account that the definition of poverty is relative to each country and that prices have been going up for many years (rapidly in recent times) in China, there will be many more Chinese with a higher income that are still struggling to make ends meet even for basics and should be considered impoverished.

Another warning for foreigners not to be blinded by the obvious changes visible in Chinese cities - China is fast becoming more economically divided than a lot of developed nations.

Toxic Fish

Another of the NY Times's excellent series on China titled "Choking on Growth," this article might make you think long and hard about that seafood you love ordering at the local restaurant in China. Unfortunately, it's also being shipped all over the world and its full of carcinogens and other poisons, byproducts of China's GDP, which keeps on growing at the expense of the environment. Whenever I eat shrimp or fish here I have to block out of my mind where it came from - filthy water full of chemicals, pesticides and other goodies that keep the economy on a tear. The short-sightedness here is simply mind boggling: there's only so much poison you can keep pouring into the water before life is virtually unsustainable. Just one more train-wreck to worry about as China continues its campaign against nature.

My one hope is an emerging awareness of the benefits of "green" among Chinese young people - I think they are beginning to get it. I sure hope so, because they don't have a lot of time, and I fear that a lot of the damage done is irreversible.