Bingo, again!

My personal opinion: This is part of a propaganda push. When there are bad PM 2.5 levels in the US, they go into endless explanation of what’s causing it, how the weather is to blame, etc. Over here, it’s everything but. The main difference between 10 and 2.5 monitoring is that water vapor and humidity had much less impact on the PM 10 filters, whereas it’s a known flaw of the 2.5s. There are methods to counter it, and it has to do with algorithms that take into account the humidity. However when you’re in a situation where pollution IS a known problem to begin with, the government is constantly bitched at and attacked and an outside government presents higher numbers, there’s not much you can do. The initial setup of 2.5 monitors showed that there were some corrections being made. The differences were blasted as misinformation on the Chinese side. Oddly, now they the same flaws are being ignored on both sides, the systems have similar results.

Actually, even in the US you can see this correlation on more remote test sites. Compare high PM levels with humidity maps and there’s a direct impact. Places that have no real reason for pollution at those levels show high levels. Places that have obvious pollution in person have been tweaked to minimize the official readings.

PM is monitored using filters and airflow control. At the end of each cycle, the various filters are weighed and due to the controlled airflow, you can calculate it. Manual stations have fewer issues. Automated ones… tend to be flawed.

Am I saying there’s no pollution? No, hell no. Yes, it’s not ideal. Yes, in fact on some days it’s downright bad. But it’s still better than before (there was no quantitative data as a baseline previously).

#1 – the Siberian winds which normally come howling out of the north for most of the winter and blow the smog away have been largely non-existent this year.

#2 – Beijing has been much warmer and more humid than normal. Normally at this time of the year the highs are between -5 and 0 and the lows between -15 and -10, with humidity around 20-30%. Instead, this year the highs have been between 0 and +5 and the lows between -10 and -5, with humidity this week in the 80-90% range.

I havn’t even had to wear my heavy winter coat this year, instead walking half an hour to/from work every day wearing nothing but a thermal long-sleeve undershirt, a turtleneck, scarf/hat/gloves, and a windbreaker.

To my (laymans) eyes, the three most important policies should be.

-Massively curbing car use. Aim to make the main cities as car free as possible, couple this with very rigorous emissions standards (no more soot beltching blue lorries). Not going to happen due to cultural resistance; Not only will any policy to this end be resented and restisted it will be so by the rich and powerfull who can’t be trodden on.

-Industrial emission control. Every powerplant and steel mill needs to install and USE Flue-gas desulfurization (FGD),at the very least. -I’d be fairly certain that corruption would knobble this before it even began.

-Domestic emission control. Tax small coal purchases, subsidize alternative heating sources and in particular insulation.

Long term, i’ve no idea. Spanish flu?