Absurdity, Allegory and China

Earlier this week while China was (and still is) doing Copenhagen, climate change and carbon chits, Beijing and Tianjin were muffled in a thick toxic fog that held the wintry coal-smoky air low to the ground to mix with the normal, everyday dose of vehicular and factory air pollution. If the air were a hospital patient it wouldn’t have taken much to diagnose this one as “pretty damn sick.” In Tianjin this weather set in for nearly three weeks with only a couple of short breaks. Though I was only in Beijing once during this period, I take it on the good word of more than a handful of people that Beijing was also feeling the same sm(f)oggy air, though I suspect that it wasn’t as bad as Tianjin, which is much closer to the marshy coast. On the morning of December 10 (2009) I returned via train to Tianjin from Beijing, and the closer we got to Tianjin the thicker the soup got.

Personal anecdotal observation: Though I can be a bit obsessive about some things, keeping personal weather records isn’t one of them, though I do have a good memory. When we first arrived in 1998 the fog-days were generally confined to late October/November, picking up again in late February/early March. The dry winter cold would set in, rivers and canals would freeze and the temperature would rarely poke much above 0 (C) during the day, thus ensuring at least 2-3 fog-free months. The warmer winters of the last several years have increased the fog-day possibilities to cover the entire winter, thus playing hell with local air pollution indexes.

Though today is clear in Tianjin, if the last several years are any indication, we will probably not see the temperature drop below zero and stay there for any extended length of time. We will still get those brilliant winter Siberian highs that turn the sky a dazzling Qinghai blue, and there will still be some ice on the rivers and canals, though I suspect that the fog and increased smog days, exacerbated by the ever-increasing number of cars, will continue to grow as the temperature and dew point get closer more often. This is, as I’ve noted above, anecdotal observations on what appears to be, at the very least, a local warming trend.

Below are a few photos from the afternoon of December 9, 2009, along the East Third ring Road in the vicinity of the CCTV HQ project. It was grim. The photos make it appear better than it actually was.

click photo for larger version