How Bad Is Beijing Smog? Chinese Man's Daily Photos Track Air Quality - Mother Jones

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During the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing, something remarkable happened, as it does every time the world's news cameras train their sites on the Chinese capital: The toxic gray air turned blue. The state-run press even gave it a name: "APEC blue".

Magic! Not exactly. In a push to impress (pretend?), the magic wand that Beijing authorities waved to banish the smog was in fact a massive bureaucratic effort that could only be pulled off in one-party-rule China. Ten thousand industrial plants were temporarily shuttered, and nearly 40,000 others limited operating hours. An army of 434,000 staff and officials from provinces surrounding Beijing were called up to inspect the plants and enforce the order, according to the South China Morning Post.

In China, extreme tactics like this are not uncommon. The skies for 2008's Beijing Olympics were cleared in part using cloud-seeding, a process that involves lacing clouds with chemicals to increase precipitation. The country boasts "the world's largest rainmaking force, with 6,902 cloud-seeding artillery guns, 7,034 launchers for chemical-bearing rockets, more than 50 planes and 47,700 employees," according to the Washington Post. But now that APEC is over, so is APEC blue. The smog is returning with a vengeance as cars clog the streets and production gets back online:

To get a real sense of just how bad the air is in Beijing most of the time, check out this extraordinary series of photos taken by one Beijing man, who has been waging something of a social media war against the city's toxic air since the beginning of 2013. Zou Yi has been taking photos of the Beijing sky every day and uploading them to his personal Weibo account (the rough equivalent of Twitter). The result—which we first saw in Petapixel and which was also reported in That's, a Beijing expat magazine—is frightening:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/11/photo-daily-beijing-china-air-crisis-weibo-climate