China and India account for 10 percent and 3 percent, respectively, of the man-made greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere, compared with 75 percent for the developed world(according to data compiled by the World Resources Institute).
India and China will suffer more from global warming than Western Europe.
They are in line to suffer disproportionately because of how climate change is affecting different geographic regions.
More of China and India will broil than Western Europe will, according to the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
As patterns of rainfall shift to more deluges as well as more droughts due to the when-it-rains-ti pours phenomenon that global warming causes, both countries will also suffer more floods.
China’s south and west are already experiencing a sevenfold increase in deluges compared with the 1950s.
China and India will need to increase irrigation more than the world average of 1 to 3 percent by the 2020s- up to 15 percent in China and 5 percent in India.
The availability of fresh water will decrease.
The Himalayas have been warming three times as fast as the world average, with the result that their glaciers are shrinking more rapidly than anywhere else.
Water availability for hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians is projected to fall 20 to 40 percent in this century.
Projects the IPCC, Asian rice production will fall 10 percent for every 2-degree rise in growing-season minimum temperature.
Geo-engineering – focus on removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it underground (CCS, carbon capture and storage)
Aim: To change the climate by artificial means, either sucking the existing carbon out of the air or cooling the air with solar reflectors.
Clean-coal plants will only reduce future emissions, which does not address the root of the problem.
Carbon has scary durability. It will hang in the air for a thousand years, continuing to warm the planet no matter how drastically future emissions are cut.
Perhaps most important is the growing consensus tha tthe gas we’ve already emitted will go on warming the earth for centuries. The landmark 2007 report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that by the end of the century, temperatures could rise by between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius.
The very idea of engineering climate change spooks people. Ifscience can’t reliably predict the weather, how can it reliably engineer the global climate?
Themost eloquent argument for geo-engineering as a Plan B is the failure of Plan A - emissions cuts. The Kyoto agreement calls for a 5.2 percent reduction of emissions elow 1990s levels by 2012. Of the 40 countries that signed the agreement in 2001, 21 have seen carbon emissions increase since then. That includes Japan, which hosted the talks. Although Britain, Germany and France have managed to make reductions, none is currently on track to meet its Kyoto target. And Kyoto didn’t include China or the United States, the world’s No.1 and 2 carbon emitters.
Each year roughly 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide are released by the world’s industries and autos. If converted to liquid form, it would take less four years to fill an underground space with the volume of Lake Geneva.
There is a 1.8 percent yearly rise in emissions.
Assuming the cost of removing carbon eventually falls to $50 a ton(it now costs $200 per ton), the bill for removing only the current year’s emissions would reach $150 billion.
The most devastating side effect could be political. Success in lowering temperatures - or evne the knowledge that scientists had the means to do so - might decrease the political will to make costly emissions cuts.
Electric Cars
Beijing knows that promoting electric vehicles could be a way to stem the country’s rising dependence on foreign oil and clear its polluted air.
Wolfgang Bernhart, a consultant with Roland Berger estimates that electrics and plug-ins could account for more than half the auto market in China by 2020.
The Chinese State Council announced in January 2009 that it would spend $1.6 billion over the next three years to develop alternative fuels.
Belu - Social Enterprise
The British company’s bottled water was the world’s first to become carbon-neutral, in 2006. Its bottles, made from corn, can be composted into soil. Belu’s profits, meanewhile, are poured into projects that deliver clean water to parts of the world that lack access to it.
Energy
Nuclear Power
The costs of producing the coal that generates approximately half of America’s electricity include the hundreds of miners who have suffered debilitating illnesses and premature death from ailments acquired toiling underground.
The number of Americans killed by accidents in 55 years of generating electricity by nuclear power is 0.
Today, 20 percent of American’s electricity, and 69 percent of its carbon-free generation of electricity, is from nuclear plants. But is has been 30 years since America began construction on a new nuclear reactor.
France get 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power; China is starting construction of a new reactor every three months.
Chernobyl was a disaster because Russians built the reactor in a way no one builds today - without a containment vessel.
Today, 10 percent of America’s lightbulbs are lit with electricity generated by nuclear material recycled from old Soviet weapons stocks.
Wind Energy
America is squandering money on wind power, which provides 1.3 percent of the nation’s electricity.
The American Bird Conservancy estimates that the existing 25,000 turbines kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds a year.
Solar power produces less than a tenth of a percent of America’s electricity.
Five percent of America’s electricity powers computers.
