The cover story of the latest edition of SEED, which arrived in my physical mailbox today, explores the green technological revolution under way in China. According to Shanghai correspondent Mara Hvistendahl, "an environmental consciousness is building" there. I sure hope she's right, because the latest news, too late to be included in the SEED feature, is that China will...
...exceed the United States as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases as early as the end of this year -- not 2010, as energy experts had previously forecast. (Nature 446, 954-955)
London's Independent, not too surprisingly, was among the first papers to ring the alarm bells, calling the news "a seismic shift for the world."
Just last year, most observers who study this sort of thing had the US pumping out nearly twice as much carbon as China. Looks like they were wrong. Or were they? Most media reports, including the Indy, so far haven't mentioned that there's still a good of deal of uncertainty associated with China's actual emissions level. The first sign that conventional thinking wasn't up to the task of providing accurate data came more than two years ago, in a letter to Nature, "Increase in tropospheric nitrogen dioxide over China observed from space," which found
a highly significant increase of about 50 per cent--with an accelerating trend in annual growth rate--over the industrial areas of China, more than recent bottom-up inventories suggest. (Nature 437, 129-132)
As today's story in Nature notes, "with a new coal power plant being built there roughly every four days, China's emissions are undoubtedly soaring." But by how much? Nature's David Cyranoski writes:
Indeed, experts say the uncertainty is so great that it is difficult to know how China's carbon emissions compare with those of the United States. Gregg Marland, an environmental scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, says that crucial figures needed to estimate China's energy consumption are often missing. Changes in remaining stocks of coal go unreported, for example, or, for a single year, a figure will inexplicably drop to zero. Marland says that, as a result, any estimates of China's emissions could be off by 15-20%.
He adds that the considerable amount of carbon dioxide produced in making cement, if included in the figures, could also tip the balance. China produces 45% of the world's cement. "China could be exceeding the United States right now," Marland says.
All the more reason why we can't afford to wait for all the data on what we're doing to the Earth before we address the problem. Uncertainty does not, and never has, preclude action.
Whatever the numbers, they're not good. Consider the scope of the challenge now facing us, as reported by Michael McCarthy and Clifford Coonan of the Indy.
[Fatih Birol, the International Energy Agency's chief economist] emphasised the scale of the problem yesterday by pointing out that in the next eight years alone, the Chinese would install, as new, as much energy generating plant as currently exists today in all of the 25 countries of the expanded European Union- a total of 800 gigawatts.
Ninety per cent of this would be coal-fired, that is, producing the most C02, and most of this, he said, would last for 50 to 60 years - "you can't shut down a power station after five or 10 years as that would be economic suicide". He said: "If we can't influence China and India in their coming energy business decisions, we will be locked in, and we will have to live with the consequences for half a century or more."
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