Air pollution in Beijing

To give an example of the air quality problem Beijing faces, here is a view from Klaus's window from one day with fairly ok air, and the other from a dirty day. This is not fog or mist, just so fine dust particles it looks like it could be.

The picture I have is not really that bad I was told, it can get much worse. Not that I really want to experience that, I can already feel the lungs are full of stuff when having walked or biked around the city. Imagine people who live here?
When we went to the mountains, they showed me how the government had planted trees on all the mountains to the North and East of Beijing in an effort to try to minimize the dust migration from the North. This is a huge area, but look at the picture which clearly shows how these trees are planted.
This is to restore the vegetation around the area, which had earlier been used for firewood when things got a little too cold.
A lot of wind from the North, all the way in Mongolia, brings sand from the Gobi desert down South, also known as the Asian Dust. This is not only a problem in Beijing, but huge areas of China, Japan and Korea. The dust is even measurable all the way over the Pacific Ocean in the USA.
The health department monitors the air quality daily, and most days the air is categorized as hazardously, but life goes on here