Global warming?

China is slowly coming around:

At a gleaming new research center outside Beijing, about 250 engineers and researchers from the ENN Group are trying to figure out how to make energy use less damaging to the world's climate....

...The private company is part of a growing drive by China to work out a way to check the rapid growth of its massive emissions of greenhouse gases. Seeking to transform an economy heavily dependent upon coal for electric power and industrial production, the government has closed down old cement and coal plants, subsidized row upon row of new wind turbines and taken other measures...


Among members of the U.S. Congress and negotiators preparing for a December climate summit in Copenhagen, China is often considered an obstacle because it has not committed to imposing a ceiling on its emissions of the gases that most scientists blame for climate change. China produces the most carbon emissions in the world, and the output is likely to continue growing for two decades. When President Hu Jintao pledged at the United Nations last month to lower the country's carbon intensity "by a notable margin," that was regarded as a step forward.

Yet, in visible and less visible ways, China has begun to address its emissions problem. The steps are driven in part by the parochial concern that climate change could worsen the flooding that plagues the country's low-lying coastal regions, including Shanghai, and cause water shortages in western areas as glaciers in the Himalayas melt away.

But China has also begun to see energy efficiency and renewable energy as ingredients for the type of modern economy it wants to build, in part because it would make the nation's energy sources more secure...

...Still, China has taken significant steps in the past five years. It removed subsidies for motor fuel, which now costs more than it does in the United States; its fuel-efficiency standard for new urban vehicles is 36.7 miles per gallon, a level the United States will not reach for seven years. It has set high efficiency standards for new coal plants; the United States has none. It has set new energy-efficiency standards for buildings. It has targeted its 1,000 top emitters of greenhouse gases to boost energy efficiency by 20 percent. And it has shut down many older, inefficient industrial boilers and power plants...

...Nonetheless, the government has set ambitious targets for renewable energy, which is supposed to account for 15 percent of the country's fuel mix by 2020, and for tree planting, to boost forest cover to 20 percent of China's land mass by the end of next year. China plans to quadruple its nuclear power; by the end of next year, it may have 18 nuclear energy plants under construction, half of the world's total under construction....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102304075.html

China has a long way to go...but so does the US.

And, IMO, we should lead by example.

Or we can continue to pass the buck to China, and perhaps, over the longer term, let China becoming more of an innovator of cleaner, more efficient energy technologies and reap the benefits worldwide.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by classicman

I'd guess there are some pics just like them somewhere from the U.S.

Can you suggest where I would look to find it? So far I've tried some notorious industrial shitholes: Gary, IN, Newark, NJ, and East Houston to Galveston TX, and there is nothing resembling Ma'anshan.

Another thing I notice in the satellite images is the color of the water. The satellites aren't picking up a true color, I think. But everywhere there's water, and humans, the water becomes discolored with algae and runoff and sewage discharge and stuff.

Eastern China:



Eastern US at the same zoom:



You can find the discoloration if you zoom in (but that's the point, Eastern CN is actually polluting a large section of the Pacific Ocean, while Boston can only manage to pollute the bay):



The worst I can find is Lake Erie, where the color seems to match the eastern CN a bit, around Toledo. Here it is at the same zoom as the Eastern CN:

Originally Posted by Redux

And, IMO, we should lead by example.

We are.

Or we can continue to pass the buck to China, and perhaps, over the longer term, let China becoming more of an innovator of cleaner, more efficient energy technologies and reap the benefits worldwide.

Funny thing about innovation... the Chinese will soon have the safest, most innovative nuclear power facilities in the world.

But the two major players building them are the US company Westinghouse and the French company Areva. Due to regulations the US hasn't built a plant in 30 years, but GE and Westinghouse are still major players.

(The economy for nuclear changed slightly under the B*sh administration when the B*sh DOE offered grants to recover high initial costs to build a nuke plant. They threw money at the problem, and several new plants will be built soon. But that's a temporary and expensive fix.)

[morethanpretty]

UT - try looking for superfund sites. Here is a link from EPA
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/

Originally Posted by Undertoad

We are.


Funny thing about innovation... the Chinese will soon have the safest, most innovative nuclear power facilities in the world.

But the two major players building them are the US company Westinghouse and the French company Areva. Due to regulations the US hasn't built a plant in 30 years, but GE and Westinghouse are still major players.

(The economy for nuclear changed slightly under the B*sh administration when the B*sh DOE offered grants to recover high initial costs to build a nuke plant. They threw money at the problem, and several new plants will be built soon. But that's a temporary and expensive fix.)

We are?

Then why arent our auto emissions standards as tough as China's? or our regulations for new coal-fired power plants?

I'm not suggesting that China is doing a better job than the US. Rather, than China is beginning to act in a reasonable manner and that it is a convenient political cop out when some of those opposed to a comprehensive, yet reasonable, US emission control regulatory program take the position that the US should not act because China is the major polluter.

I also think nuclear power should be in the mix but not at the expense of developing cleaner and renewable energy resources. And it should also regulated more than the Bush admin proposed.

BTW, it was a Bush OMB study in 2003 that found that the benefits of environmental (and other) regulations were 5 to 7 times greater than costs.:

OMB reviewed 107 major Federal rulemakings finalized over the previous ten years (October 1, 1992 to September 30, 2002). The estimated total annual quantified benefits of these rules range from $146 billion to $230 billion, while the estimated total annual quantified costs range from $36 billion to $42 billion. The majority of the quantified benefits are attributable to a handful of clean-air rules issued by EPA pursuant to the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. (Chapter I)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/infore..._final_rpt.pdf

But of course, the Bush EPA, DOE......ignored this OMB study in pursuit of a policy of voluntary industry self-regulation.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

But the two major players building them are the US company Westinghouse and the French company Areva.

The people that ran Westinghouse decided the real money was in broadcasting/entertainment, so they merged Group W with CBS, then merged with Viacom.
But first they sold the appliance line to White, the Steam Turbine and Generator Divisions to Siemens AG, and the Nuclear Division to Toshiba Corporation.

But yes it's here, an American product, using American developed technology. It's just greedy American management was more interested in chasing the glamor and bucks.

[TheMercenary]

As long as China can get us to spend billions of dollars to make changes in our system while they don't have to do anything other than continue to build a new coal fired plant a week with no control they are good to go and we are screwed. They take the long view.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by morethanpretty

UT - try looking for superfund sites. Here is a link from EPA

Remarkably uninteresting when it comes to looking at industrial stuff. I looked for the sites nearest me to start. One is a very old landfill that was re-lined and capped in the eighties. The other was a professor at a nearby college who had too much radium in his desk drawer.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Back in colonial days they drank beer because the water wasn't safe. Before WWII the smoke in Pittsburgh blotted out the Sun, but probably the worst harm has been invisible for the most part, the hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds cooked up since the mid-20th century.

Remember China has compressed the industrial revolution, chemical revolution, and electronic revolution, into a few decades, and all the possible pollution from each, was dumped on them in a short time. They're learning quickly how devastating it is, and I suspect they will have to act soon.

[xoxoxoBruce]

China smog, rfn.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Meanwhile, from NOAA Very wet and notably cool.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Bad link.

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

As long as China can get us to spend billions of dollars to make changes in our system while they don't have to do anything other than continue to build a new coal fired plant a week with no control they are good to go and we are screwed. They take the long view.

Yeah, the long view toward both ecological and economic catastrophe. They propably look at it as a way of population control. Those little green men aren't from outer space - they're mutants from China.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Found the problem. Site keeps inserting some redundant stuff right at the start. This one should actually work.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?repor...ted=Get+Report

[Undertoad]

Major, major global warming news today.

A group of Russian hackers broke into systems at a Climate Research lab in East Anglia. Today they released 162 megs of data, code, and emails. One of the lab directors has said the documents are genuine.

So far only the emails have been documented by people getting into it all, and they seem to indicate that the environmental scientists there have engaged in quite a bit of FRAUD.

= manipulated evidence;
= had doubts about warming;
= suppressed evidence;
= expressed violent fantasies about GW skeptic scientists;
= attempted to disguise the Medieval Warm Period by framing it out in time;
= discussed how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process

Does this mean warming is not happening? I still think it is, based on the measurements other than instrumental. If we go back to this chart from Wikipedia, I think it's the black line that's suspect, that's the instrumental line, which comes from that data:



The other measurements show warming too, just not as wickedly ramped up.

[TheMercenary]

I wouldn't be surprised by any of that.