The men who run the Beijing Olympic Games organising committee will, for those two key weeks next year when their city is the focus of world attention, undoubtedly have the trains running on time, the stadia not just finished but brilliantly landscaped, the streets swept spotlessly clean, the pickpockets and petty thieves run out of town and everyone in the hospitality industry on their best, most eager-to-please behaviour. Everything within their power to control, they most surely will.

Except the weather and the smog.

For no committee, no matter how organised and brilliantly drilled, can hope to rein in those twin variables – one that belongs in the realm of Mother Nature’s work, the other a man-made problem so profound in China’s industrialised centres that no amount of eleventh-hour “greening” will eradicate.

And the Beijing Games in August 2008 – the one-year countdown ceremony was held in Tiananmen Square yesterday – is threatening to be both humid, hot and smog-ridden. Rain in the capital over the past fortnight has come down in a torrent. And when it’s not raining, the heat and humidity – as the Hockeyroos testified yesterday after beating South Africa in a test event – have been unbearable.

Such is the problem of pollution that International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge admitted yesterday that some events might have to be postponed during the Games if China’s smog levels continued to escalate.

Rogge declared himself happy with the Beijing committee’s preparations, but admitted certain outdoor competitions might need to be moved if choking smog cannot be reduced.

“This is an option,” said Rogge.

“It would not be necessary for all sports … but definitely the endurance sports like the cycling race where you have to compete for six hours, these are examples of competitions that might be postponed or delayed to another day.”

Wang Junyan, the director of Beijing’s Olympic cycling events, responded by claiming that schedules had already been organised and it would be difficult to alter them.

“Rogge’s comment reminds us that we have to work harder to fix environmental problems,” she said.

Neil Mitchell has been hosting his 3AW morning program from the host city this week and has regularly talked of peering into a haze outside the windows where he is broadcasting, as if looking into a fog.

In a parallel, and depressing, development which illustrates the scale of man-made pollutants in China, the Yangtze river dolphin, until recently one of the most endangered species on the planet, has this week been declared officially extinct following an intensive survey of its natural habitat.

According to a report published in the Royal Society Biology Letters journals, the freshwater marine mammal, which could grow to 2.5 metres long and weigh up to a quarter of a tonne, is the first large vertebrate forced to extinction by human activity in 50 years.

In the 1950s, the Yangtze river and neighbouring watercourses had a population of thousands of freshwater dolphins, also known as Baiji, but their numbers have declined dramatically since China industrialised and transformed the Yangtze into what one newspaper described as “a crowded artery of mass shipping, fishing and power generation”.