Beijing air quality is like living in an airport smoking lounge

Beijing’s air quality has long been known to be unsafe, and has been over the World Health Organization’s “healthy” limit every day this year. A chart and report from Bloomberg show that it is in fact similar to the air inside an airport smoking lounge.

More: Beijing Air Akin to Living in Smoking Lounge: Chart of the Day - Bloomberg.com.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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The Snowden Principle

http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

Beijing: Come to where the flavour is.
huskerdont

I wonder what the air quality in their smoking lounges is.
- awjt
  
  They don’t have smoking lounges there. Smoking is unrestricted. China is 1 GIANT smoking lounge.
http://japansunset.blogspot.com igzabier

businessman selling canned air in Beijing

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=china-resorting-to-canned-air-becau-2013-01

It comes with atmospheric flavours including pristine Tibet, post-industrial Taiwan and revolutionary Yan’an, the Communist Party’s early base area.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Holmen/562023961 Robert Holmén

This is what that “pro-business” economic policy Mitt Romney admired so much gets you.
- James Slater
  
  Tell us more about how “free market” Mitt Romney and government-run command economy China have in common.
Ben Livengood

2004 in Fairbanks was not a fun summer. Visibility was often less than a mile and of course it smelled like a wet campfire everywhere. But hey, it was all carbon-neutral pollution!
- MollyMaguire
  
  I’d left by then, but I endured a few very smokey summers there myself.
  
  Are you living there now, Ben? Friends tell me, and I have read, that now the air is bad all year because of the rise in popularity of outdoor wood and coal-fired boilers. Sounds awful.
  - Dewgeist
    
    As a current Fairbanksan, I’ll attest to the air pollution that we endure through the winter. Though quality does fluctuate wildly with temperature change. Typically, as the mercury drops, so does the air quality –you remember ice fog don’t you? Unregulated outdoor burners don’t help.
    
    In the absence of wildfire smoke (2004 lives on as the local definition of “bad”) air quality is pretty darn nice during summer.
Glen Able

Bit of an odd y-axis on the graph there – the level for zero pollution is well above the bottom – leaving some room in case they get some negative pollution data?. It makes it look like the WHO are recommending air that’s half the level in a smoking lounge.
- jandrese
  
  That’s a “feature” of many chart making applications that assume you want whitespace around all parts of the chart, even the bottom.
Eark_the_Bunny

We don’t need no regulation, you’re just another brick in the wall! C O U G H!
chaopoiesis

The Communists will furnace the coal with which they will gag themselves.
http://echofox3.blogspot.com efergus3

Actually the US is selling them the coal. http://e360.yale.edu/feature/as_coal_use_declines_in_us_coal_companies_focus_on_china/2474/
- http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
  
  Yeah Australia as well.
http://blog.insightvr.com John Harrison

So… Salt Lake City reaches airport smoking lounge levels in the winter when there is a temperature inversion. Don’t tell us Mormons that we’re smoking.
- jerwin
  
  Somebody already did.
  From the Deseret News
  
  “I feel like I am locking my children in a windowless room full of chain smokers,” said Udell, the founder of Utah Moms for Clean Air. “I feel claustrophobic, I feel frustrated and I feel angry at our political leaders for not taking action on what Utahns consider to be one of the most important issues for Utah’s future.”
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    It’s pretty hard to cure a problem that’s the result of topography and climate. Maybe they need to accept that God led them to a hell-hole instead of a promised land because he hates them.
jerwin

Does anybody have long term data for Beijing? For Salt Lake City?
Jeremy Sebens

Where are the units? Are we measuring air quality in flying unicorns per cubic kilometer? Or perhaps per-capita coughs, in a laplace-filtered square-mile grid? (EDIT: Now I see some text on the units at the bottom – why not put it on the axis, where it belongs?)

It also defies belief that a) we know these measurements to 4 decimal places, and b) that Fairbanks measured at EXACTLY 1000.0000 flying unicorns/km^3.

I will withhold the lengthy rant I have inside, and say just this – poor data presentation erodes the credibility of the presenter and the data presented.

Supporting reference for above statement: http://xkcd.com/833/
- jerwin
  
  PM2.5 levels in fairbanks summer 2004 (pdf)
  
  About the same level as Beijing, actually.
jerwin

From 23 January 2013

The greater Salt Lake region had up to 130 micrograms of soot per cubic meter on Wednesday, or more than three times the federal clean-air limit, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

I used the airnow site to verify this
OK– that’s PM 2.5=116 (Unhealthy for sensitive groups), Ozone =14 (Good).

On January 8, 2013, it was PM-2.5=155 (Unhealthy), Ozone-7 Good.

This is unhealthy, and absurd, and embarrassing. But a PM2.5 of 155 is substantially less than Beijing (Beyond Index should give you a clue)