When I drove to the office on Monday morning the whole city was covered in a brown blanket of smog, the sun could hardly get through. I tweeted about it saying “The Shanghai Expo is over and immediately the air pollution is worse than any day during the past 6 months”. Shanghaiist even made it the tweet of the day (thanks Elaine Chow), so I decided to dive a bit deeper into this and see if I could find some data to back up my observation.
A Twitter reply by @bpoasia helped me out, and I now have the data that show that the pollution indeed shot up to unhealthy levels right after the Expo closed its gates. I made a screen shot, check out the original data here: http://datacenter.mep.gov.cn/TestRunQian/air_dairy_en.jsp (change the city and dates manually or if that does not work in the URL).
Will we see the blue skies days again in the near future? I seriously doubt it, this was the clearest summer I had in the past decade here. For this reason I might really start missing the Expo…
Hi Marc, what is the reason for this? that all the construction started again or do have they used special techniques to get the sky clearer just like Beijing Olympics?
Maybe this has something to do with the increased air pollution:
http://www.chinacartimes.com/2010/11/08/diesel-shortages-across-chinese-cities-thanks-to-government-policies/
There’s no show like show business and that’s all the expo sadly was..a charade of showboating..
The theme of Urban Sustainability was indeed a noble one. For 6 months we got to see what the City could be like, if the Environment and peoples health truly out-rated the insatiable thirst for Economic growth and hard cash.
I was about to start track running again and was looking forward to it. This is a disgrace. This is their idea of Sustainable development? What hypocrisy!!
I find this really sad. I hope that the people in positions of authority can put measures in place to deal with this type of pollution as soon as possible.