Word: indexers
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...Reporting from one area, the twitter feed is hardly a complete service, but its popularity underscores some shortcomings in the official daily reports. Chinese environmental officials don't regularly release PM2.5 data, and it isn't used to calculate the daily air pollution index. Instead the government figures rely on measurements of larger PM10 particles, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. Several cities including Beijing and Shanghai are already measuring PM2.5, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this month, and the government is now considering what standards to set for the finer particles and ozone...
...criticism that they were tweaking pollution data to artificially raise the number of so-called "blue sky" days when emissions fall below official targets. American environmental consultant Steven Q. Andrews accused the government of switching to monitoring stations in lower pollution areas, changing the makeup of the air pollution index to focus on less prevalent pollutants, and reporting a disproportionately large number of days with pollution measurements just below the "blue sky" cutoff. Du Shaozhong, the deputy head of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, denied the allegations. In a recent paper, Andrews reported on similar "blue sky" biases in several...
...better gamed, is still unclear. The city's hot, humid summers and occasional sandstorms mean that air quality can turn bad with surprising speed. Without real-time reporting, the official data are more a matter of historical interest. This afternoon the Ministry of Environmental Protection reported the air pollution index for the 24 hours ending at noon on Friday was 159, or "slightly polluted." That's still pretty bad. But had you gone outside you might have thought things were much worse...
...Heat Index. Get used to sweating. Under a business-as-usual course, by the end of the century, Washington, D.C., could average as many as 90 to 100 days a year above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, up from around 30 to 40 days now. Southern Florida and southern Texas could see more than 160 days a year above 90 degrees Fahrenheit...
...reflected in commodity markets, which sold off broadly on June 15. China is believed to be stockpiling a range of raw materials, notably copper, which has driven prices dramatically higher in recent months. But ubiquitous weakness in global demand is now taking a toll. The Reuters-Jeffries CRB commodity index fell 2.25% during the day. Gold prices dipped slightly, down $11 per ounce, but stocks of precious-metals companies were hammered, declining more than 7% on average...