Acceleration mode

Between January and July of 2009, Beijing streets were graced with an 1,231 additional cars per day on average, according to the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau. All those new cars add up to an additional 261,000 vehicles -- the vast majority of which are private cars. This is a 9% increase from the same period last year.

This is actually a decrease from the last time we learned of Beijing rapidly expanding: In the first 45 days of 2009 some 1,466 cars were being added to the already crowded streets.

Meanwhile, in what could be seen as a related study, severe air pollution in China’s heavily industrialized east is impeding the formation of rain clouds and contributing to a drought in northern China.

The study, which looked at rainfall and pollution patterns for the past 50 years, concluded that pollution has reduced the number of days of light rain in eastern China by 23 percent. Atmospheric scientist Yun Qian of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory said that the large number of aerosols in China’s polluted skies has led to the formation of rain droplets that are up to 50 percent smaller than rain droplets in clean skies.

The smaller droplets do not as readily form rain clouds, which means that lighter rainfalls valuable to agriculture — ranging from a drizzle to accumulations of .4 inch per day — are occurring less frequently, according to the study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.

This is an area that is largely debated just like the role of aerosols in climate change. Do cities with their attendant fog and pollution and urban heat island effects induce rain or not? However there can be no doubts on the effect of adding so many vehicles to the road per day! How long before peak oil hits the automobile lobby? Meanwhile, it pays to make merry on sales today, right?