Climate Change Cities of the World
Top Cities of the World. Climate concerns
The number one Issue that is or should be the greatest concern to all nations on earth- the Issue of climate change.
As a citizen of Australia most Aussies are now aware that we have signed onto the Kyoto Protocol. Now that Barack Obama is President America had done the same.
In addition the Government has commissioned and developed a green paper into the topic on climate change. The paper is to examine the number of options it can consider implementing. At the same time take into account other factors such as what the consequences would be for change to the current energy generation systems and to the economy in general.
What we do know about Australia is that is a very dry country and it seems to be getting worse. At the moment the main river the Murray-Darling River system is running dry. It has been running dry for many years and often the mouth of the river in South Australia has dried up. Worst still the Murray Darling supplies the majority of Farmer in Australia who export foodstuffs to the rest of the world as well as Australia. The farmers are doing it tough and have had to cope with droughts & floods for decades. It has gory worse though over the last twenty years and any sleight increase in temperature will only create more hardship. Already many farming families have left the land for the big cities...
The run up to the Beijing Olympic Games provides a timely example of the current situation regarding pollution. At the moment and usually Beijing is enveloped in air pollution as a result of its recent massive growth in industry and as such the emissions that they have been pumping-out into the Beijing atmosphere have made it intolerable for the Olympics to take place. As a consequence the Government in China has put into effect drastic measures including shutting down industries and car transportation in an effort to try and reduce the concentration of dangerous gases in the atmosphere so that athletes can take part safely in the games. Last week, it forced more than a million cars off the streets, halted construction in and around the city, and temporarily closed hundreds of factories in surrounding provinces. The test of these measures is still a couple of weeks away and the world will watch with interest.
World Bank
According to calculations by the World Bank, environmental pollution leads to the deaths of 750,000 people in China each year. An estimated 700 million Chinese no longer have access to clean drinking water. Three-quarters of the country's lakes and half of its ground water are considered contaminated. Sixty major rivers are on the verge of running dry, and the country's rivers are being hopelessly polluted by industry and the growing volume of household refuse that comes with rising prosperity.
*The Yangtze alone, on its path from Tibet to the East China Sea, carries 30 billion tons of sewage. Sixteen Chinese cities are among the top 20 of the worlds most polluted. Beijing air contains six times as much particulate pollution as the air in New York. The country relies on coal for 70 percent of its energy requirements. In 2006, China burned 2.4 billion tons, or about 40 percent of global coal production. Its factories and power plans are pitifully inefficient.
The Beijing leadership itself has calculated that Chinese industry uses seven times as much energy to produce its goods as do comparable factories in Japan. The fact that Beijing recognizes such problems but seems powerless to solve them makes it seem as if China's party and government is no longer in control of the spirits that Deng Xiaoping invoked 30 years ago, in 1978, when the government first issued its edict of personal enrichment.
*From De Spiegel online.
Similarly in our cities carbon emissions and quality of life issues including a rise in temperatures due to the phenomenon called Global warming are causing authorities and concerned citizens to take heed and look at a wide range of ways to halt or slow the effects of global warming. Some of these include reducing car use, going for smaller cars, public transport use. Generating Energy in a sustainable way using solar panels on buildings that sort of thing...
What we do know is that global warming now is considered by all the leading environmental experts around the world that other than aids and starvation which are somewhat related climate change is the number one threat to civilization as whole as we know it unless we take urgent action to rectify our lifestyles and reduce drastically carbon emissions...
