The official daily Air Pollution Index (API) scores for leading Chinese cities - which used to be displayed in a constantly moving slideshow display (rotating a little too fast to be easy to read!) in the sidebar on the first page of the English-language section of the official State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) website - have not been updated since New Year's Eve. In fact, for the last few days that display seems to have been completely disabled, with the sidebar now blank (or displaying a '404' error message).
Is this, I wonder, anything to do with the adverse publicity garnered overseas by the off-the-scale toxicity we suffered here in Beijing at the end of last year? Oh yes, I think so.
Weather Underground has once more been characterizing our weather as 'Smoke' for much of the first week of the New Year. In China it is still the case that when the powers-that-be haven't got any idea how to fix a problem, their first recourse is to simply stop acknowledging that the problem even exists.
3 comments:
try http://www.zhb.gov.cn/english/air-list.php3
or try this API for Major Chinese Cities
since I don't think the whole web addy will show up in the comments.
you can even chart out the whole year's worth of API horrors via that site.
Ooh, fun! Thank you.
Mind you, you say 'chart'.... have you actually managed to produce a graphical representation of the long-term pollution patterns for Beijing?
As far as I can see, the (very clunky) search function on this site purports to offer you the opportunity to look for results over a period of time, but only actually logs them day-by-day; so, if you search for a month or a quarter or a year, it will just say, "Yes, there are lots of reports for those dates - which one do you want?" Completely f***ing pointless! Chinese websites drive me up the wall sometimes.
I don't think I've ever searched for more than one week's worth at a time. so my searches result in a graph and a chart.
I just tried searching for one year's worth and it breaks down the year into 2-week segments.
not as exciting as seeing the year's worth all at once, but all perhaps less heart-attack inducing shocking too.
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