With less than two weeks to go until the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Winter Olympics, the Chinese government said it is battling "extremely unfavorable" weather to clear the city's skies of hazardous smog.... A relapse into Beijing's hazier days during the Olympics would be especially embarrassing for a city that went to great lengths to deliver blue skies during the 2008 Summer Games. Then, the cleanup effort required hundreds of factories to be shuttered or relocated. Thousands of home coal-burning boilers were converted to natural gas. Air quality in the city improved by 50 percent over that summer, according to official numbers. The drastic change meant more than just a welcome respite for Beijingers, underscoring the pressing health concerns of pollution. By comparing mortality rates in Beijing that summer to other cities in China, economists estimated that a 10 percent decrease in the particulate matter known as PM_10 prevented about 196,000 premature deaths.
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