China Vs. Earth - The Nation

[hatrack]

The message is clear: Shanghai under water, Tibetan glaciers disappearing, crop yields in precipitous decline, epidemics flaring. These are just some of the dire consequences that Chinese scientists predict for their country this century if current climate change is not addressed. Yet China's leaders pay about as much attention to the issue as does George W. Bush. In fact, a report issued last year by the Climate Action Network-Europe ranks China fifty-fourth out of fifty-six countries for its climate change response, just behind the United States and ahead only of Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

Beijing knows the costs of inaction: A recent major official study on climate change predicts up to a 37 percent decline in China's wheat, rice and corn yields in the second half of the century. Precipitation may decline by as much as 30 percent in three of China's seven major river regions: the Huai, Liao and Hai. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which support the richest agricultural regions of the country and derive much of their water from Tibetan glaciers, will initially experience floods and then drought as the glaciers melt.

Moreover, a one-meter rise in sea level will submerge an area the size of Portugal along China's eastern seaboard--home to more than half the country's population and 60 percent of its economic output. Already climate change-related extreme weather is taking its toll: In 2006 such disasters cost China more than $25 billion in damage. Finally, a study by Shanghai-based researcher Wen Jiahong suggests that the lethal H5N1 virus will spread as climate change shifts the habitats and migratory patterns of birds.

EDIT

China's development strategy suggests that little will change in the foreseeable future. With plans on the books to urbanize half the Chinese population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City residents in China use 250 percent more power than their rural counterparts. And China's love affair with the private car is set to rival that of the United States. A conservative estimate by the Asian Development Bank predicts that the number of cars in China could increase by fifteen times present levels over the next thirty years, more than tripling CO2 emissions. If China's development trajectory continues as planned, its increase in greenhouse gas emissions will likely exceed that of all industrialized countries combined over the next twenty-five years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol sought. In short, it's a nightmarishly bad picture.

EDIT

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/economy