Air quality:Chinese authorities have started calculating the exact environmental price of economic progress. As the world's fastest growing economy, and home to 1.3 billion people, ecological issues are not top of the political agenda and runaway growth in China is linked to pollution in cities as geographically distant as Los Angeles and Hong Kong.
The world is focusing on air quality in Beijing because China's economic growth is one of the biggest events in the globe's environmental history, and China's rising might well feature in world awareness when the Olympics open in the capital next summer.
For all the justifiable excitement around 2008's summer games, to open the curtains and look out on the Beijing skyline can be an alarming, often depressing, sight, as a yellow haze of pollution dims the view of the city's remarkable new skyscrapers and public buildings, all constructed in time for the Olympics.
Beijing city authorities now say they will include unhealthy "haze" levels in daily weather forecasts to warn people about the Chinese capital's vile pollution. This comes hot on the heels of more depressing news about melting Tibetan ice fields and other grim data.
Typhoons, floods and droughts killed over 2,700 people and inflicted economic losses of more than €20 billion last year, as heat waves across the country marked the warmest year since 1951 in China.
In Beijing there was "good air" on nearly two-thirds of days last year, and the quality of the air felt better than in many years previously - there were fewer days on which parents were forced to keep their children inside. However, this was helped by exceptionally high rainfall and breezes from the desert, and city authorities admit that progress on beating pollution will be more difficult in the 20 months until the Olympics.
Temperatures across China were an average 1.4° warmer than usual in January this year, while the temperature on the plateau was 2.7° higher than normal, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Overall temperatures on the plateau have risen 0.42° each decade since the 1980s, which could affect the volume of water flowing into China's main rivers, including the Yangtze river.
This is all bad news for Beijing, which is wrestling with desertification.
In the capital, air pollution is a toxic mélange of car exhaust fumes, dust from the city's many building sites, emissions from factories and coal-fired power plants and sulphur from coal burnt in houses during the cold winters.
In many ways the smog in the sky is similar to the fumes common in Dublin before the introduction of the ban on burning coal fires in domestic homes in the 1980s, albeit on a bigger scale in a city of some 14 million.
Beijing spent €2 billion fighting pollution last year.