For much of the last two months, Beijing has been mired in a swampy humidity - a humidity that makes it deeply unpleasant to have to spend more than a few minutes outside; a humidity that even the most powerful air-conditioning struggles to dispel inside (and powerful air-conditioning tends to be too noisy to allow me a good night's sleep); a humidity that renders life utterly wretched.
Our summer is usually made insufferable by this phenomenon through most of July and August, but it's rarely much of a problem before the tail-end of June. This year, we've been regularly assailed by it since late April or early May.
As you might expect, I mainly blame the trees. Beijing had a huge number of trees anyway, but I'm pretty sure that even more have been planted in the last few months as part of "greening" initiatives prior to the Olympics. If the total number of trees is not much increased, the amount of foliage certainly is: most of the tired old trees in my neighbourhood have been replaced with younger, more vigorously leafy specimens. The little park outside my window has been entirely replanted, and the leafiness is now so dense that I can no longer see the little square in the middle where the old ladies practise their t'ai chi every morning (although they haven't been doing that anyway for quite some time, since the park has been closed to the public while these renovations are under way).
I've asked this question before. Would anyone like to hazard an answer? How much water does a tree release into the air every day via transpiration? I believe it's quite a lot. Multiply that by, oh, I'd guess at least 500,000. (Really, the number of trees in Beijing is unbelievable. It may well run into millions.)
And then, of course, you have the vastly increased watering. Spraying of the roads by water lorries used to be only a once-in-a-while event, mostly on the more major roads only, and only when there had been a particularly long, hot, dry spell of weather, or in areas where major construction had left a lot of sand on the ground..... Lately, it seems to have become a nightly event, everywhere.
And the amount of water being sprayed on to trees, parks, and roadside flowerbeds is just staggering. Ordinarily, when the weather turns hot, the trees start to fade and wilt, the grass turns brown and thins out, every patch of open ground becomes hard-baked and turns to dust. It is only to be expected. Beijing is not a well-watered city. It has no major waterway of its own. It is, in fact, on the edge of a desert. It perversely tries to make itself as verdant as its envied cousin, Shanghai (which lies near the coast, on a well-watered floodplain, straddling a massive river - and has a huge annual rainfall); but, most of the time, it accepts that it can only achieve a kind of pale greeny-beige rather than Shanghai's lush green.
But not in the Olympic summer. These are Green Olympics, damn it! It doesn't matter if the rest of China suffers a catastrophic drought as a consequence; Beijing will remain extravagantly watered until the Games are over. China's image-obsessed bureaucrats have apparently failed to comprehend that, in this context, 'Green' is a philosophy rather than merely a colour. The over-watering of Beijing - at the expense of the rest of the country - is, I suggest, severely un-Green; indeed, it could well prove to be a massive environmental disaster, both for Beijing and the rest of China.
It seems no-one has given a thought as to how this will affect Beijing's climate. If this smothering humidity continues through August, performance in the Olympic outdoor events is going to be severely impaired. Don't expect any new world records. Do expect a lot of retirements in the Marathon.
Maybe the city authorities will cut back on this watering a bit while the Games are actually on. Maybe. We can but hope. The city's hundreds of building sites will all be shut down for the month (as will all the factories for miles around; and there will be draconian restrictions on road traffic, too), so hopefully the amount of air pollution will be much lower. Over the last 6 or 8 months, days of damp air have meant that it is unpleasant, downright dangerous to set foot outside because the water molecules trap all the airborne pollutants near the ground, creating a toxic smog that can reduce visibility to less than half a mile. (I wonder also if there might not be a mutually reinforcing cycle here: does particulate pollution trap water vapour near the ground??)
There is also talk of employing a new policy on cloud-seeding. The shooting of silver iodide crystals into the sky is rampant in Beijing: almost all of our rainfall is artificially produced in this way (it produces a characteristic yellow-green tinge to a rainy sky; a lurid, piss-coloured western horizon is our early warning that a big shower is on the way). This too would appear to have been stepped up of late (although perhaps there have just been an unusually large number of clouds drifting our way in the past few months; I get the impression that the cloud-seeders pretty much shoot down everything they possibly can at any time of year), since we have had a huge number of rainy days this year - most unusual for May and June. This hasn't been helping the humidity problem either. However, come August, they're supposed to be moving the silver iodide batteries (some rockets, some anti-aircraft guns) further west, with the idea that they can make the rain fall before it reaches Beijing - ensuring clear skies during the Olympics, and also, allegedly (I am sceptical about this) washing any pollution out of the sky. We shall see.
If it's not the freakishly high recent rainfall, or the prodigious watering of the city's greenery, or the profuse transpiration of all the new trees....... well, perhaps it's just the greatly increased amount of standing water in the city. For the past few years, most of the city's canals, moats, lakes, and ponds have been kept at a low level - or completely emptied for long periods - to allow for pre-Olympic refurbishments (I'm not sure, but I guess there might be some completely new outdoor water features that have been built as well; there are certainly a few new parks under development). Now - for the first time, I think, in the 6 years I've been here - they're all FULL. I really hope this isn't the major contributor to our massively increased humidity problem; if it is, our troubles are likely to endure beyond this year. I'm hoping that it's mainly the additional rainfall and the additional watering (and the newly-planted trees and shrubs - which will soon wither and become less moisture-effusive as Beijing returns to its natural BEIGE next year).
If THIS is going to be our regular annual climate from now on...... well, I'm afraid it may be time to go and live somewhere else.
Beware, Chinese leaders - fictional supervillains always seek to alter the weather; and it always ends badly for them.
No comments:
Post a Comment