Jan
2
China comes clean on global warming
Filed Under Uncategorized |
In an article reprinted on CommonDreams.org, Agence France Presse reported that China has issued its first official report on climate change, and they aren’t mincing words.
Temperatures in China will rise significantly in coming decades and water shortages will worsen, state media has reported, citing the government’s first national assessment of global climate change.
“Greenhouse gases released due to human activity are leading to ever more serious problems in terms of climate change,” the Ministry of Science and Technology said in a statement.
“Global climate change has an impact on the nation’s ability to develop further,” said the ministry, one of 12 government departments that prepared the report.
I was at thinking of that article the other night while talking to someone at a party who was writing a speech for Jim Hansen, the chief climate scientist at NASA. It was exactly this time last year that Andy Revkin wrote a story for the New York Times about how the Bush Administration was attempting to silence Hansen when he talked about global warming. Hansen had told Revkin that he had been ordered to submit all papers and articles for review and that his supervisors told him that wouldn’t be allowed to give certain media interviews. The fallout from the articles by Revkin and others forced the Administration to change their policy and now Hansen, who is marking his 40th year at NASA in 2007, is allowed to speak freely.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the Chinese government speaks freely and honestly about climate change and their contribution to it, while the self-appointed propaganda ministers here in the US have tried to muzzle aphysicist who simply wants to utter a few scientific facts.
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