Beijing Olympics Pollution Watch, part 2

This month, some more news has come out about pollution in Beijing that can only cast further doubts on the city's ability to clean itself up before the Olympics. On January 9, Steven Q. Andrews an independent environmental consultant based in D.C. wrote that we should be skeptical about the Chinese government's claims that the air in Beijing is getting cleaner.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Andrews, who spent 2006 in Beijing, said that the Chinese government claims that the Air Pollution Index (API) has improved significantly from 1998 to 2006. What the government didn't tell us was that the way the API data was collected changed in 2006. Two monitoring stations were dropped and three others were set up in less polluted parts of the city. Stevens states that if the two original stations had been continued, the API would have looked quite different. In fact, in 2006, 38 of Beijing's 241 "blue sky" days would not be counted as such. And, in 2007, 55 out of 246 "blue sky" days would be taken out. Stevens also discusses other ways that the Chinese government has changed data collection to minimize the pollution problem.

In short, what Andrews is saying is that the air in Beijing may not be getting that much better, but we don't really know, because the API numbers are getting better when they really aren't. An API of 100 or less is supposed to be a "blue sky" day and according to the Chinese government the number of "blue sky" days has gone from 100 in 1998 to 246 in 2007. But an API of 100 really doesn't look like a "blue sky" day; it really looks a bit on the hazy side, so you really have to wonder what these numbers mean.

And that really is the moral here, that numbers -- so-called "scientific" statistics -- can be offered up for propaganda purposes and can't be trusted, especially when you have an event that is as big as the Olympics on the line. Maybe it's time to get that mask....