Clear the air today for a brighter future

Lately, I've been enjoying sci-fi drama TV series Terra Nova. The plot involves scientists from the future who discover a rift in space time that allows humans to go 85 million years into the past to try and avoid the awful mess they are destined to make of the world in the future.

In the first episode, denizens of Terra Nova's future Chicago patrol smoky streets, desperately gasping for air as they try to make their way towards clean zones. But if our descendents in 2149 considered that bad, they ought to try living in Beijing in 2011.

Rest assured though, for soon all our problems will be over. We will no longer be forced to travel back in time to avoid a smoggy Armageddon, because Beijing and Tianjin have finally joined forces to monitor the notorious particulate matter 2.5 (PM 2.5, aka the small, dangerous kind) that makes up the gray death cloud hovering above the two cities. Everybody knows that monitoring PM 2.5 will pave the way for bright, blue clean skies forever.