Schizophenic air

While my sister-in-law and her son were here visiting us, we had the most wonderful weather: 10 days of sunny, clear, blue sky; the stuff most people take for granted in Canada, in Israel or in most places. 10 amazing Beijing Blue Sky Days! So unusual indeed it was deemed a "Golden Week"!
However, the minute Nurit and Liam boarded that plane to go back home, the pollution fog slowly started to cover Beijing again. For the last 4 or 5 days, in the evening, I could only see a floating and blinking light in front of our building, across the avenue. The view of the building itself, onto which the sign sits atop, was swallowed by the thick layer of pollution. During the day, looking out from our windows would be as if looking out of an airplane window into a white cloud, except unconsciously, it does not quite feel (or smell) as glamorous.
Saturday, upon waking up, Noam asked us "where is the sun?". Later in the day, he excitingly told us, pointing at the sun (dimly glowing through the fog): "Look, the moon is up!"
Sunday morning, it was really bad.

This picture was taken at 8AM. I did not use any filters, it was taken by my little powershot Canon. 
In fact, the 10-10-10 was one of the most horrible day we ever had. It was so bad that at 3PM, car needed to use the fog lights to go around the city.  It was so thick and dark and heavy that there were no escape. In vain, with our new-to-us car, we drove out of the city in hope of some fresher air. 60 km out of the city center, the air was still opaque and thick. 500 m up on the hills, and we were not sure if the fog we were walking in was cleaner or not... (although it felt as if the air was getting a little yellower in color as we were driving down the hills).
The whole trip was not really "picturesque", we could not see anything. We drove past Tiananmen square - this is not my photo, but it did look almost like this.

Photograph by Oded Balilty/AP Photo - December 27, 2007 
That same day was also the last of 4 days of talks in Tianjin, of the UN Climate Change Summit. I am a little dubious of the validity of such summit held here in China, as China is always opposed to make concessions on its CO2 emissions levels. However, Sunday's air quality maybe has helped the international counterparts understand better the meaning of "bad air quality"...
On Sunday, the air quality was so bad that the China Daily (our expat' local propaganda) even labelled it as "worst" and listed the city as most polluted of 47 cities monitored nationwide. Indeed, levels of pollution are monitored daily by the Chinese government. They are also measured by the American Embassy and distributed on Twitter here. This certainly to ensure the distribution of "real data" (read non-altered). The device used by the Americans is only able to measure up to 500 ppm of particles in the air, and in several past occasions, the levels to be measured were beyond the machine's capacity.  For clarifications, in most countries, at levels of 150 or 200ppm, there are some warnings for at-risks citizens, and most people would stay home.
The interesting thing about such measures of pollution is the lack of uniform labeling, from one country to another. In other words, when the China National Environmental Monitoring Center rated Sunday's air quality as "poor" (one level away from "Hazardous"), most other countries would have simply rated it as "hazardous". A local magazine even hinted that "hazardous" air quality would apparently requires something akin to nuclear fallout!
Already in 2005, Beijing was qualified as the air pollution capital of the world... You can check here at this photo essay prepared by the Time Magazine, just before the Olympics. It give a broad overview of some of the issues related to the problem of air pollution in Beijing. (Plus the pictures are beautiful.)
Of course we can discuss here on the sources and the improvements seen since the Olympics (and there has been), but as a mom of two young kids, I am concerned on the impacts this kind of environment can have on their health.