“Roof of the World” Testifies Early Global Warming

[YankeyMCC]

(snip)
As greenhouse gas emissions erupt with the rising consumption of fossil fuels, the world’s highest plateau keeps sending alerts to the planet. This year, Tibet saw its third warm winter in the last seven years, with an average temperature of minus 3 degrees Celsius, up 1.4 degrees from the historical average of minus 4.4 degrees Celsius. A maximum rise of 9 degrees was reported in Nagqu in northern Tibet—the highest recorded since 1965, according to the regional meteorological bureau. And the temperature in the regional capital of Lhasa rose by 6 degrees this winter season.

With the lowest population density in China, at barely two persons per square kilometer, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is one of the areas least influenced by the Industrial Revolution that has drastically changed the world in the last two centuries. Yet this doesn’t mean the “roof of the world” is immune to the disastrous aftermath of industrialization, even though the region itself remains industrially underdeveloped.
(snip)

(snip)
According to China’s National Assessment Report on Climate Change published last December—the first document of its type—the country’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions remained low until the 1980s, when China’s economic takeoff began to put industry on a fast-growth track. In 1950, China, with a then-population of more than 400 million, emitted 21 million tons of CO2, less than 0.1 percent of the world’s total. This was only one tenth of the United States’ emissions at the beginning of the 20th century, when there was hardly any industry in China. It took another three decades before China’s carbon emissions slowly crawled up to 40 million tons.
(snip)

(snip)
It is obvious that the industrially underdeveloped Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has unfortunately, and unjustly, fallen prey to global industrial expansion that eventually affected global climate change, according to Wang. The fact that the temperature on the plateau began to climb in the 1970s indicates that Tibet is a sensitive region “vulnerable to excessive greenhouse gases.”
(snip)

(snip)
recent G8 summit failed to persuade the United States, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which has withheld its support to the Kyoto Protocol, to agree with binding targets to cut carbon emissions. The world’s richest country worries, according to critics, that binding targets may bankrupt its economy and undermine its competitiveness. It believes that fulfilling the goals of the Protocol means that industrialized countries will have to foot the bill for solving a problem to which newly industrializing nations like China and India are increasingly contributing.

But the climate change record on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau testifies to the impact of early industrialization, and the melting glaciers there remind the world that industrialized countries, which accumulated great wealth through industrialization at the cost of global ecology, are morally obliged to pay for what they have done.

And what is needed is not just to pay for the past, but also for the future of the whole human race. Climate change is by no means a challenge that threatens only a single country or region. In an era when the world is both politically and economically globalized, one country’s cold will sooner or later result in a domino-like global cough.
(snip)


http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5163