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The Green Leap Forward
Christina Larson, Washington Monthly
Environmentalism is China’s fastest-growing citizen movement. Beijing isn’t cracking down on these new activists-it’s empowering them.
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… Not only is China’s emerging environmental movement tolerated by the central government; for the most part, it’s encouraged. More than 3,000 groups like Green Camel Bell currently operate in China, constituting the largest and most developed segment of the country’s budding civil society. Some NGO leaders are even consulted by government officials and praised by the state-controlled media.
The kid-glove treatment China’s environmental activists receive is not a sign that Beijing is willing to relinquish political control. The Communist Party’s agile leaders are well aware of the role that civil society groups have played in the fall of other authoritarian systems. Rather, the government is taking a calculated risk. It is opening space for political participation in the hope of preventing what it sees as an even greater threat: that the country’s rapidly deteriorating environment will imperil China’s vibrant economy-and perhaps, one day, the party’s own hold on power.
Like other cities in China, Beijing has a daily weather report and a daily pollution report. On the increasingly crowded freeways, drivers can see only so far ahead; each car leaves a wake in the smog. The dank air creeps inside buildings, into cars, into hotel rooms, leaving you nowhere to escape the distinct smell and the feeling of a weight always on your chest. The sun looks like a flashlight wrapped in cotton gauze, and the sky remains beige no matter the time of day. Most days, the city has no discernible skyline. Most nights, no moonlight or starlight pierces the darkness.
To understand why Chinese officials are genuinely concerned about the country’s growing environmental problems, you must first remember that they live here. Pollution is one by-product of China’s thriving economy that can’t be evaded with influence or cash. One former U.S. Energy Department official told me that his Chinese counterparts rave about the air on visits to Washington, bemoaning Beijing’s bleak skies.
More important, environmental problems now threaten the sustainability of China’s economic expansion. Already the costs of environmental cleanup, property damage, and lost productivity are staggering.
(July/August 2007)
Expert discusses Murray-Darling water shortage
Pip Courtney, ABC
PIP COURTNEY, PRESENTER: The new irrigation season officially kicked off this week, but the news for the many thousands of irrigators in the Murray-Darling basin wasn’t good. As feared by the Prime Minister three months ago, there isn’t any water for them to use. Despite rains that caused floods in two states and gave grain-growers in the east the best autumn break in a decade, the drought isn’t over.
So, what’s going on with the weather? Is there more rain on the horizon, and, if so, will it start falling in the right place any time soon?
I spoke earlier to Professor Roger Stone, director of the Australian Centre for Sustainable Catchments at the University of Southern Queensland. ..
(8 July 2007)
Contributor David Bell writes:
Many in Australian Cities think the drought is over but for many farmers it is not.
Geoengineering the Climate: Weighing the Risks
Dan Armstrong, Mud City Press.
…The long and the short of it is this: Monkeying around with a system as complex as a planet’s climate is just as foolhardy as unrestrained carbon emissions.
Yes, geoengineering research will invariably increase in the years to come with who knows what breakthroughs, and, yes, the Caldeira-Mathews simulation is only one view of the situation, used here for illustrative purposes.
But at best, geoengineering is like the worst of modern medicine; it treats the symptoms not the disease. While it is likely we will hear more and more about geoengineering as the drama of climate change deepens, any supposed quick fix to global warming will come with significant tradeoffs.
Should the warming trend suddenly begin to build on itself like fire, geoengineering with something like sulfate aerosols or space-based solar reflectors may be a stop-gap answer-a move of last resort. This is something.
But in the end, we are already weighing one risk against another: the unknown potentials of global warming versus the economic costs of radically cutting fossil fuel use.
… As impossible as it seems at this late date, we must find the will, particularly in the United States, to cut carbon emissions by no less than 75 percent as soon as possible. If not, we will find ourselves entering into a last-second, planetary-scale experiment that will turn something resembling Grade-B science fiction into reality TV. Unfortunately, short of some, as yet unforeseen, climate management solution, this is precisely the path we are on.
(9 July 2007)
The Great Global Warming Swindle – Scientists Respond
David Jones, Andrew Watkins, Karl Braganza and Michael Coughlan, Australian Bureau of Meteorology
The Great Global Warming Swindle (GGWS) is a controversial documentary on climate change by British television producer Martin Durkin. This documentary argues against conventional scientific understanding of the degree and cause of recent, observed climate change. ..
The Great Global Warming Swindle does not represent the current state of knowledge in climate science. Scepticism in science is a healthy thing, and the presence of orthodox scientific scepticism in climate change is ubiquitous. Many of the hypotheses presented in the Great Global Warming Swindle have been considered and rejected by due scientific process.
This documentary is far from an objective, critical examination of climate science. Instead the Great Global Warming Swindle goes to great lengths to present outdated, incorrect or ambiguous data in such a way as to grossly distort the true understanding of climate change science, and to support a set of extremely controversial views.”
The critique discusses in detail six assertions made by the documentary. ..
(7 July 2007)
The Australian Science Media Centre has a good page compiling links and additional comments from the authors above.
