DK GreenRoots

China correspondent Stephen McDonell

The Chinese Government has described the view that climate change is not man-made as a marginal and "extreme" outlook.

According to Xie Zhenhua, a deputy director at China's powerful National Development and Reform Commission, climate change is a fact based on long-term observation in many countries.

At the annual session of China's National People's Congress, he said that those who advocate that climate change is not man-made are holding an extreme and marginal view.

He said that the majority of the world's scientists believed that climate change has been caused by burning fossil fuels.

He and other officials said that more work needed to be done to ensure that scientific data on climate change was watertight, but the world had no choice but to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.

Mr Xie said climate change is not only something that ordinary Chinese people can feel and experience every day, but that it may soon have a huge impact on China's food security and even its economic stability.

They also stated that there is some differing of opinion on what is causing this, however that sensible policy is to recognize and begin to take steps to mitigate the risk.

"There are still two different viewpoints in the scientific field," said Xie Zhenhua, citing human activities and the scientifically scoffed-at sunspot theory.

Xie does not dispute that the climate is changing, however, and said Wednesday that the consequences of this change are alarming enough that countries should cut emissions anyway.

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Not only do the Chinese recognize the dire predicted consequences in a warming Earth, they are putting their money where their mouth is.

This past September, I wrote an article which pointed to scientific research that showed a possible correlation between melting Glacial Ice and Tectonic activity - specifically in reference to the back to back Earthquakes and Tsunamis that occurred 1 day apart in Sumatra and in Samoa.

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In this weekly series we have been discussing the benefits of a vegetarian diet including: better health, animal rights , frugal living, food safety , world food crisis and the huge contribution of meat production to global warming.

Who could resist this message from Rep. Dennis Kucinich?

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Climate change will do more than make life on Earth a bit warmer. Even a 5th-grader can tell you that. The problem with people like James Inhofe is that they are not smarter than 5th-graders.

If things don't change (for the better) quickly, we are looking at major die-off of the world's trees. If the trees go, we are not far behind.

From the ultra-liberal hippies at NASA:

Underlying Cause of Massive Pinyon Pine Die-Off Revealed
October 10, 2005

The high heat that accompanied the recent drought was the underlying cause of death for millions of pinyon pines throughout the Southwest, according to new research.

The resulting landscape change will affect the ecosystem for decades. Hotter temperatures coupled with drought are the type of event predicted by global climate change models. The new finding suggests big, fast changes in ecosystems may result from global climate change.

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Scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center have published a study, Evidence for a recent increase in forest growth, suggesting that climate change can quite literally be measured by treehuggers. Like the average American citizen, American trees look to have had increasingly bulging middles in recent decades. Having spent their careers quite literally hugging trees, SERC scientists Geoffrey Parker and Sean McMahon have written a study documenting

evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change.

For over 20 years, Parker has gone into a set of forests in the mid-Atlantic, tape measure in hand, and giving them a hug to measure their size. Parker's own hugging has been extended with a robust group of volunteers conducting regular measurements of specified trees. (The boy scout to the right, while in a SERC forest, isn't engaged in actual measurements for the study.) Some 250,000 hugs later, he has quite a database in hand.

The results of analyzing hugs surprised these researchers. Based on the data from these 100,000s of hugs, Parker's and McMahon's analysis documents

that the forest is packing on weight at a much faster rate than expected. ... on average, the forest is growing an additional 2 tons per acre annually. That is the equivalent of a tree with a diameter of 2 feet sprouting up over a year.

In this weekly series we have been discussing the benefits of a vegetarian diet including: better health, frugal living,animal rights,global food crisis, food safety and the direct connection between meat production and climate change.

Arctic ice melt could cost $24tln by 2050: report

Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $US2.4 trillion ($2.8 billion) to $US24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday.

Okay, so we know that despite troubles in Detroit and Toyotaland the automobile is still king in the US of A. But sometimes it takes some raw numbers to bring home just how much the entire country's infrastructure is stacked against non-driving traffic participants.

The Alliance for Biking and Walking just released the 2010 Benchmarking Report on bicycling and walking in the U.S. The 192 page report collected and analyzed data from all fifty states and the 51 largest U.S. cities.

From bicycle and pedestrian staffing levels to bike racks on buses, this report is a tour de force of numbers, data and statistics concerning the millions of trips taken every day by foot or bike. The bottom line though is this: While 9.6% of all trips nationwide are people powered, a mere 1.2% of federal transportation funding is spent on bicycling and walking.

The North Carolina Coastal Resource Commission just finished the first study of sea level rise in the United States.

The most significant part of the study was what the report said about what the market has decided about sea level rise.

...even if the public and governments drag their feet on reacting to a changing coast, others aren't waiting to adapt.

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In this weekly series we have been discussing the benefits of a vegetarian diet including: better health, animal rights, frugal living, food safety, and the direct connection between livestock production and global warming.