Beijing's Smog Approaching The Surreal - Visibility 10 Meters On 11/25 [View All]

Sports News, BEIJING - "Thick smog blanketed Beijing on Thursday, triggering flight delays and traffic snarls and spotlighting the city's uphill battle to curb pollution before it hosts the 2008 Olympic Games.

The smog limited visibility to 10 metres in some places, causing the closure of five highways for parts of the day on Wednesday and the delay of hundreds of flights. Flight boards at Beijing's Capital Airport showed delays and cancellations continuing on Thursday. "The humidity and cold air leads to this fog, but it is also partly from the pollution problem," said Gan Ning, a climate change expert at the China office of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

China is the world's largest source of soot and sulphur dioxide emissions from coal, which fuels three-quarters of the country's power plants.

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Beijing targeted 227 clear sky days for 2004, but was still 18 days short of the goal at the start of December, the official Xinhua news agency said. The city's air quality on Wednesday was rated just below the hazardous level, figures on Xinhua from the China Environmental Monitoring Centre showed."

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