China: Rich `culprits’ on Climate Change
WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?
NPR-Negotiations on a new treaty to fight global warming will fail if rich nations are not treated as “culprits” and developing countries as “victims,” China’s top climate envoy said.
The whole world must take action to confront climate change, but developed countries have a “historical responsibility” to do much more because their unrestrained emissions in the past century are responsible for global warming, said Ambassador Yu Qingtai.
“The United States and the developed states as a whole are the countries that created the problem, caused the problem of climate change in the first place. In my view, that’s what a culprit means,” he said in an interview this week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly debate on climate change.
The United States and China are the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
Washington has argued it should not have to cut its emissions to a level that would hurt the U.S. economy while countries like China and India are not required to make similar cuts.
Yu disputed that view, calling China “a victim” of climate change and stressing that its economy only started to grow in the last 25 years.
“It’s not logical to ask China … to cap its emissions or reduce its emissions in the same manner as a developed country is supposed to do,” he said.
Hmmm? Well, if global cooling is starting as some believe, then maybe these types of demands will die down.
We can’t tell if it has yet or not, and some don’t expect it until 2012 but, the change in solar activity is leading some to believe we may have peaked in global warming.
If they are right, and we start cooling, then we are in deeper trouble than that caused by warming. In warming, we have seen more crop growing areas appear in northern countries. In a cooling trend we not only lose those but could lose many that have been around for a hundred years.
quote:
The 1815 eruption of Tambora caused the “Year without a Summer.” Daily minimum temperatures were abnormally low in the northern hemisphere from late spring to early autumn. Famine was widespread because of crop failures.
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People have no idea of what a cooling trend could cause in the way of problems for the world.