Opening ceremonies tomorrow, August 8. This is the view as of 10am, August 7 in the Guomao area of Beijing.

Says James Fallows:

I suspect that a lot of this actually is “mist,” very high humidity, etc.

That is, it can’t be that much more polluted than it was 36 hours ago, when things looked much better, as shown below.

Mainly completing the chronicle, for the record.

[From The Atlantic]

8 am, July 27, 2008, looking south, twelve days until the opening ceremonies, one week into the big shutdown of factories in nearby provinces and traffic in Beijing.

[From
James Fallows

Australia’s 470 men’s crew, Nathan Wilmot and Malcolm Page, negotiate their way through green algae on the Beijing Olympic Games sailing course at Qingdao, during training on June 24.

Rising sea temperatures have been blamed for the growth of the algae, which has begun to blight the Oympic sailing course just 44 days out from the start of the games.
[ABC News ]

Beijing-based Atlantic writer James Fallows took this view from his office window at 10am today [June 19] which is just 50 days before the start of the 2008 Olympic Games.

[From
The Atlantic ]

A flotilla of plastic ducks is heading for Britain’s beaches, according to an American oceanographer.

For the past 15 years Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking nearly 30,000 plastic bath toys that were released into the Pacific Ocean when a container was washed off a cargo ship.

A flotilla of plastic ducks is heading for Britain’s beaches, according to an American oceanographer.

For the past 15 years Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking nearly 30,000 plastic bath toys that were released into the Pacific Ocean when a container was washed off a cargo ship.

Some of the ducks, known as Friendly Floatees, are expected to reach Britain after a journey of nearly 17,000 miles, having crossed the Arctic Ocean frozen into pack ice, bobbed the length of Greenland and been carried down the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Mr Ebbesmeyer, who is based in Seattle, said yesterday that those that had not been trapped in circulating currents in the North Pacific, crushed by icebergs or blown ashore in Japan are bobbing across the Atlantic on the Gulf Stream.

Any beachcomber who finds one of the ducks will be able to claim a $100 (£50)reward from the toys’ American distributor, First Years Inc.

The Washington Monthly article continues:

The package was the product of nearly a year’s worth of work  led by Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security (previously head  of the White House Office of Homeland Security), and Christine Todd Whitman,  administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Both had been governors  of northeastern states (Ridge of Pennsylvania and Whitman of New Jersey) with a  large number of chemical plants, and this only increased their concern about  leaving such facilities unprotected. EPA staff felt such fears even more  acutely: agency data showed that at least 700 sites across the country could  potentially kill or injure 100,000 or more people if attacked.

Then, guess who entered the room? Read on.

It’s all part of the effort curb global warming.

Future additions to Boston’s skyline are going to be friendly to the environment. They’ll be green buildings.

Boston will be the first city to require private developers of larger buildings to meet a series of environmental standards.

Marc Breslow of the Climate Action Network thinks this is a great step in the fight against global warming

Data reported by China’s regional governments indicates a national goal to reduce China’s two main pollutants by two percent in 2006 has been reached, but calculations by the top environment watchdog show they actually grew two percent, Xinhua news agency said, quoting an environment official.

“The figures on pollution control reported by local governments dropped remarkably this year, while the real environmental situation continues to deteriorate,” said the unnamed official with the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA).

According to Rolling Stone, America’s top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history.

Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year.

That’s a number worth considering.

A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person.

The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

continued …

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat.

Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan.

The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums.

So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do — even if it came marginally close to that standard — it would lose money.

So, many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems

The BBC reports that pollution-laden clouds may be partly to blame for India’s dwindling rice harvests, according to research.

A US team found brown clouds, which cloak much of South Asia, have a negative impact on rice output by reducing sunlight and rainfall.

They discovered elevated levels of greenhouse gases also reduced yields.

The study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, came a day after researchers said new crops adapted to a warmer climate are needed.

Since the 1980s, India has faced ever-declining harvests of its staple food, raising concerns that shortages could occur.

To investigate the cause, researchers looked at the impact of the “brown clouds” or “Asian haze” which cover the region.

South Asia has one of the most widespread atmospheric brown clouds on the planet.