The air over yonder

One of the concerns that a lot of people have been bringing to my attention lately is the air quality in Shanghai. There's an air pollution index used by the Shanghai Environment Monitoring Center where readings of below 50 are considered "excellent," 50-100 are "good," and 100+ is "polluted."

Date	PM10	SO2	NO2
2011-1-6	98	80	47
2011-1-5	99	73	63
2011-1-4	75	59	38
2011-1-3	32	21	24
2011-1-2	61	37	31
2011-1-1	70	58	36
2010-12-31	117	50	27
2010-12-30	115	54	45
2010-12-29	92	52	43
2010-12-28	88	57	57
2010-12-27	85	52	43

According to this chart, over the last week and a half, there's been one day of "excellent," and two days of "polluted." A report from China Daily mentioned that on November 13, 2010, the index hit 370! The highest level reached in the last decade. That's nuts!

Though the bad air quality in Shanghai is something I already knew about, it's disappointing nonetheless. I mean, one of the things I was looking forward to was getting my fair share of exercise walking around the city. In fact, I was having lunch with a friend yesterday when he told me he thought Shanghai was one of the more depressing cities he'd ever been to because he could never see the sky. I've been to Shanghai twice before: once in the winter when it was freezing cold, and once in the summer when it was crazy hot. Funny I remember thinking the high-rise skyscrapers looked stunning against the cloud-spotted blue skies. Of course, that was over four years ago, and we all know how fast things change in China.

Who knows? Maye they'll have those oxygen bars like the ones they have in Las Vegas. According to the United Nations, the terrible air quality is the result of heavy dependence on coal as a source of fuel for both industrial energy and residential heating. Shanghai also has the highest cancer mortality rate in China. Whoopee!