Search

Around The World

Back to Around The World home

AFP

How to know? China and climate change

Wed Jul 01 09:52PM
There are still a few months to go, but the sparring has already started. In December, the world's governments will get in the ring in Copenhagen to battle it out over a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that regulates global greenhouse gas emissions.

China's role in the negotiations, as the holder of the little-coveted "world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide title", is uncertain.

The early diplomatic jabs have already been thrown. Beijing has insisted that the United States make deeper emission cuts than it is planning. It wants more access to advanced technology, sparking fury among US politicians. It has criticised Japan's emissions proposals as inadequate and suggested importers may have to pay for the pollution in China's factories.

Beijing is reluctant to make its own compulsory cuts, saying the west got rich on the back of coal and oil, why should the rest of the world's development be stunted by climate concerns?

Much of this is pre-Copenhagen posturing. But it also raises the tricky question of how serious China is about dealing with global warming?

There is little doubt that on the wider environmental story, China has a woeful track record. Pollution, both in the air and in the water, is awful in many Chinese cities. Deforestation, although recently halted, has been an environmental disaster over the past 50 years.

As for reducing carbon, the writers about the middle kingdom love to trot out the line "China builds two new coal-fired power stations a week," to show how far the country has to travel. But the reality is much more complex (for example, many of the new power stations are much more efficient than in the United States).

China has mooted a 440 billion dollar additional stimulus package, simply to green-up its energy supplies. It is one of the world's largest maker of wind-turbines and visitors to obscure parts of western China are always surprised to see traditional yurts equipped with small-scale solar generators.

Companies like BYD are pioneering new electric cars and the government has announced plans to make the Pearl River Delta, one of the most polluted parts of the country, into an example of green development.

Journalists often struggle to assess the competing claims. Official statistics are often mistrusted, and the technical details are hard to grasp and explain clearly. Perhaps as a result, specialist blogs on China's environment are becoming more common and arguing over this very issue.

The Internet has become a crucial tool for highlighting the worst polluters.

Many influential environmental bloggers claim the MSM (mainstream media) have fallen down on their job when it comes to the environment. The criticism is that reporters tend to give equal weight to opposing sides of the argument -- they are simply stenographers -- which does not necessarily reflect the consensus among the vast majority of climate scientists that global warming is happening and it is man-made.

While China's move to reduce its carbon emissions is a gargantuan task, the media faces its own challenge to test what is green and what is greenwashing.

In this blog, reporters and editors for global news wire AFP blog about the news they report and the challenges they face covering events from Baghdad to Beijing, the White House to Darfur. Guy Newey reports for AFP from Hong Kong.

Comments11 - 20 of 89

  1. WELL PHIL-ARCADE IS IGNORING ONE BIG FACT THAT 40% OF THE NORTH POLE HAS MELTED IN THE LAST 40 YRS.WHY? THE WORLD IS GETTING WARMER.EVEN IF THEY STOP PRODUCING GREENHOUSE GASES NOW IT WILL TAKE HUNDREDS OF YEARS TO RECTIFY.
    I THINK WE HAVE JUST GOT TO RECONSILE OURSEVES WITH THE FACT THAN 30% TO 50% OF THE WORLDS LAND MASS IS GOING TO BE UNDER WATER IN THE NEXT 100 YEARS ?

    v1969ronni From v1969ronni on Wed Jul 01 10:49PM

    Report abuse

  2. Good call Richard!

    d_gam From d_gam on Wed Jul 01 10:50PM

    Report abuse

  3. v1969ronni......just answer me these two questions...why is greenland called greenland,and if 30 to 50% of the world is going to be under water in the next 100 years,where will the water come from?

    timothy_cronshaw From timothy_cronshaw on Wed Jul 01 11:27PM

    Report abuse

  4. v1969ronni......just answer me these two questions...why is greenland called greenland,and if 30 to 50% of the world is going to be under water in the next 100 years,where will the water come from?

    timothy_cronshaw From timothy_cronshaw on Wed Jul 01 11:30PM

    Report abuse

  5. Reading these comments, it amazes me that some people STILL just don't get it. How many more islands need to be flooded in the Pacific for people to see the rising seas? How much more land needs to be turned to desert? How many more glaciers need to vanish? Urgh.
    Conspiracy my arse, quite frankly. I hope for your sakes that you don't have kids, because my gods, I pity them if you do. They're the ones who'll have to deal with the lack of land, and the mass migrations from Africa - and all those people who say it's a tax swindle, hah! See how much more tax you have to pay when Europe is flooded with immigrants from Africa, fleeing the mass starvation, and bringing all their squabbles with them. I for one would rather pay green taxes.
    Let's just hope that swine flu kicks in and does its job properly, because boy do we need thinning out as a species...

    blacksparklyfaery From blacksparklyfaery on Wed Jul 01 11:36PM

    Report abuse

  6. @tidswell454

    "...nuclear generated electricity. Completely Green. Nil CO2." Uranium doesn't grow on trees, neither do any of the other finite resources required to mine, mill, transport and enrich it. All these processes produce vast amounts of CO2. Not to mention construction of plants, decommissioning of plants and disposal of waste.

    BTW. No global warming and need for 'CO2 free' nuclear. Then 'monies from west to backward economies' and this country 'one big debtors' prison.You contradict yourself, far from elegantly. Sometimes, less is more.

    valediy From valediy on Wed Jul 01 11:43PM

    Report abuse

  7. Iain, Either goes with or and neither goes with nor, they are correct, but you are right in that there is a double negative - the word 'don't' should not have been included in the sentence.

    bullockea From bullockea on Thu Jul 02 12:19AM

    Report abuse

  8. "v1969ronni......just answer me these two questions...why is greenland called greenland,and if 30 to 50% of the world is going to be under water in the next 100 years,where will the water come from?"

    Timothy, why "Greenland" ... A quick search on Blackle (which uses a bit less energy than Google) came up with this: "There i[s] a story about the origin of Greenland's name. The first settler in Greenland, Erik the Red, is reported in old Icelandic sagas to have named the new country Greenland to attract other settlers there. Some historians, anyway, have claimed that due to climatical changes, weather in Greenland in the Middle Ages might have been much warmer than nowadays.
    Ivan Sache, 3 September 2001"

    I'm sure it was warmer all those years ago. The climate DOES naturally get warmer and colder. The point is though that us lot (humanity) are making it warmer right now and we have to try to do something to stop it or we'll all end up underwater / with lots of desert that used to be cropland / with loads of new diseases, or with a combination of all that. So you, me, and the politicians would all be daft to sit and twiddle our thumbs and pretend there's no problem, ok?

    Now, where will the water come from? Well, partly from all the melting glaciers and ice sheets around the world, and ... here's a wee bit of physics for you ... As water warms (with the increasing temperatures of a warmer world) IT EXPANDS! So the oceans will rise, see? It's already happening. Some of the most beautiful Pacific islands are already disappearing beneath the waves. Which is sh*tty, I'm sure you'll agree. That's only the start, of course. There's so much worse to come if we just keep pumping out CO2 and methane and various other gases like there's no tomorrow, and hey, maybe there won't be. For us as a species at any rate.

    rossm_23 From rossm_23 on Thu Jul 02 12:26AM

    Report abuse

  9. rite richard .. i aint got an opinion that lets our head be buryed in the sand im just sayin all this about clymite change is crock .... the world will never stay in 1 state forever .. we cant be like we were .. and we cant predict what will be
    the ice caps melting ... yer they are .. but the reason ??? there is alot of evidence that links this rise to the SUN... yer the 1 thing that no 1 on this planet can do ne thin about ...
    it is scientific fact that thhe sun as it gets older gets bigger .. its a slow process but it happens .. and it is recorded that over the past 50 years the sun has intensified the amout of solar radiation it sends our way ( what do u think the northern lights are )
    but i agree with tidswell454 we the british people have been taken 4 a mug .. we need a gud old revolution .. call 2 arms .. over throw the goverment .. and if need be the monach ... remove the uk from europe and re establish full trade and defence with the commonwealth as a new empire over earth ... we were the greatest empire on the planet now like rome the uk is being shafted from every direction and left in the charge of a scotish idiot

    phill_arcade From phill_arcade on Thu Jul 02 12:58AM

    Report abuse

  10. The melting of polar sea ice has very little effect on sea level other than to minimise the effect of warming by keeping the sea temp rise small. When the sea ice has melted, the sea temp rise will occur at a much faster rate, giving some sea level rise. The big sea level rise will occur from the melting of the land ice, mainly Antarctic, which contains a huge volume of water. This again will hold back sea temperature rise, so even after we have suffered the huge sea level rise from land ice, there is more to come from sea temperature rise.
    The real problem is the human population which has grown like an aggressive cancer on the Earth, and we all know what the treatments for cancer are.
    Only something 'catastrophic' (to the human race) can save us.

    collier791 From collier791 on Thu Jul 02 01:02AM

    Report abuse

Comment on this article

Please sign in to add your comments.

Latest UK news

UK News Headlines »

Add to my Yahoo/RSS

Copyright © 2009 Yahoo! All rights reserved.

Notice: We collect personal information on this site. To learn more about how we use your information, see our: Updated Privacy Policy