Beijing stations - continued
What i reported below seems to be nothing new under the sun; the New York Times carried an article yesterday referring to a study that says:
..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.
Mr Steven Andrews, the author of the study (in his original Wall Street Journal op-ed) also mentions the serious flaws in the Blue Sky days claims as i reported six weeks ago here. It seems the NYT contacted the relevant Chinese authorities to comment on this, but the only response they got was that the situation is improving visibly.
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.
But it seems that people at the top of the system start to see the value of reliable data; there will be a national pollution survey starting in February 2008, calling for ‘true, credible’ data, and no officials will be punished for bringing bad news(!). Unfortunately the results of the survey will only be publicly available in 2009, way after the Olympics…
January 13th, 2008 at 2:03 am
According to Jung Chang’s book “Wild Swans” Mao once opened the floor for critism. But it turned out that he did it only to find out who were his enemies. I suspect Chinese people have a long memory and find out that actually their past measurement have been 100% accurate…
June 17th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Hello recently I watched a special about the Philharmonic orchestra visiting Korea with other discussions involved
I have a bachelors in education and when I was young I was taught many things as a child by teachers such as the importance of recylcing such that we could save along with conserve the worlds resources.
My understanding is Korea has an energy problem that had been trying to handle with nuclear power plants which are some of the most dangerous methods of energy production in the world along with the nuclear waste is difficult to safely dispose of if that is even possible.
In todays world where we are learning to wipe out hunger and disease the populations are growing at an alarming rate thus the problems of disease and starvation are happening in some parts of the world to more people than prior to preventing the losses from terrible childhood diseases.
I had been taught as a child by the Organization called Planned Parenthood in school that every person should only have one child to replace them. Which means if a man and woman marry they should have two children thus sustaining the population.
We know this is not an exacting science because some people cannot have children, some people do not want to have children, or some people have a couple more than two but the places in the world which have an average of seven children per woman born are often over crowded, suffer from war and constant outbreaks of disease such that allowing any part of the world to not be assisted in a choice of the number of children a woman will have such that she does not die in her early years during too many childbirths leaving children alone without the care of a mother should not be allowed to continually transpire.
The number one way to help with preventing overpopulation to the point that all people of a society suffer is to allow all people men, women and children some type of education that is acceptable about how children are born and how to prevent having too many from voluntary operations so that they can stop having more children when they have reached the number they can adequately care for such that things like transpire in poorer nations where children are sold into slavery because the parents cannot feed them does not transpire, utilizing various methodologies of controlling the number of births along with teaching societies and civilizations that it is not acceptable to have more children than one desires and one can adequately care for well.
The other thing is today the world is developing safer alternative fuel and energy production other than nuclear and even petroleum based fuel. Today in France a vehicle that is run by pressurized air exists that can go 300 miles before it needs more pressurized air to run it.
We have solar energy along with wind power being used, along with geothermal and hydroelectric with great success all over the world.
Another thing that should be utilized more are things like natural gas which runs buses in El Paso Texas excellently - I rode in one when I was there not too long ago.
Also methane is a gas that could be used and produced from human sewage or other animal waste along with other methodologies and used for things like electricity production as is done in one city I traveled to which also burns garbage for production of energy because they ran out of land fill areas.
I hope this is of assistance to the people of Korea in resolving their energy crisis.
My best wishes a former musician in a school orchestra as a child and a fan of orchestra music when well performed,
I have been trying to locate an address for someone of relevance to this in Korea to no avail thank you