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Climate change boosts risk of war, hunger, floods: U.N. report

16 Comments
By Hiroshi Hiyama

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Why are these missing from the little map thing?

Lower crop yields in North America, and Australia.

Wildfires in Australia.

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To single out the manufacture of solar PV equipment is disingenuous, since the production of all materials used in industry has unwholesome side effects. Thousands of tons of rare and exotic metals have to go into nuclear reactors and gas turbines, and they all are mined somewhere and refined by processes that may produce toxic products. It's a wash on that score.

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BertieWoosterMar. 31, 2014 - 05:36PM JST China is doing something about it. China is building wind farms and solar power farms on a greater scale than anywhere else.

Nuclear still provides one of the cheapest, safest baseload sources of zero-carbon energy. Why do you think China has close to 30 plants under construction. Problem is that renewable energy like wind and solar require more grid infrastructure not less. In Germany, the government is currently spending $25 billion on new high-voltage transmission lines, and when the sun doesn't shine, which is often the case in Germany, the country relies on the interconnected European grid to import electricity from other countries (like nuclear-powered France). Renewables are far from ready to replace fossil fuels in any country. Germany, in fact, is building new coal plants.

No energy technology is perfectly clean, and solar panel production creates toxic waste. Many imagines solar is clean but the mining of materials used in solar panels is extremely toxic. Majority of European solar panels are manufactured in China, whose environmental and occupational protections may not be up to West standards.

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And it could be said that Japan is contributing more to the problem now that it's main source of power is from gas turbines!

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CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense came to these conclusions about a decade ago. This isn't news.

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The Chairman of the UN's IPCC is a former railwayman, from India. Hardly an expert on climate, as are most of the others comprising this unelected alarmist quango, which is more political than scientific. There has been no "global warming" since 1997, 14 years ago, yet they are still spewing out this bunkum. The computer modelling used by many of the so called scientific "experts" is severely flawed, and did not foresee the current global cooling. This report merely repeats what this alarmist group has been saying for years, but they have left some of the more extreme predictions out, namely: Snow would disappear from the Earth by 2013, more women would turn to prostitution because of climate change, and more people would take up golf in Canada because of it! We can't have that terrible consequence, now, can we? Climate change has been around since the dawn of time, and there is nothing to fear from it. Decarbonising the Earth means the end of civilisation. There is absolutely no need to panic about "rising levels of CO2." The amount produced by human activities is very small compared to what is produced through nature. Enough of this idiotic scare mongering. It is becoming more ridiculous by the day. The IPCC, and its parent, the UN, should be disbanded, then we will have a lot less hot air the world.

-5 ( +0 / -5 )

Soaring carbon emissions will amplify the risk of conflict, hunger, floods and mass migration this century

I'm pretty sure governments going bankrupt and defaulting on their debts will cause a lot more grief, a lot sooner....

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Tjguy,

Anyone else find it interesting that the official word has changed from "global warming" to "climate change"?

Do you find it interesting that the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change had always had that name, from way back in the 80s?

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

" U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the document sounded an alarm that could not be ignored."

I get the feeling that the economist who withdrew from the IPCC was correct about the alarmism. Bear in mind there was a time, though a bit long ago, that Greenland was indeed green, long before the Industrial Age, and when the Earth's population was a fraction of today's.

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

Just don't forget that the U.S. is the world's biggest polluter not China.

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Bertie, perhaps you could've educated yourself just a wee bit more on the subject before posting. For example, did you know that America's carbon dioxide emissions are at their lowest levels for the past 20 years? That's right: emissions are now as low as low as they were in 1992, and only a fraction above the 1990 threshold-limit envisioned in the Kyoto Protocol. And it's precisely BECAUSE of fracking and increased natural gas usage that this change is taking place?

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/science/120817/us-carbon-emissions-drop-20-year-low

Meanwhile, China is "doing something about it," as you say: it's expanding its carbon dioxide emissions at a rapid and increasingly unsustainable scale. So much so, in fact, that it now emits more carbon dioxide than the next TWO leading polluters (the US AND India) COMBINED, if you can believe it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/12/greenhouse-gases-make-hig_n_3066775.html

The last time I checked, the US still outproduced China in terms of wind-power, biomass and geothermal energy as well, while China's push towards solar was largely geared towards exports, not domestic consumption. But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your biases and prejudices, right?! America BAD....

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@ Disillusioned - I wouldn't call the report inflammatory, and even if it is, it's about time someone lit a fire under the deniers and fossil fuel interests that claim it is too expensive to do anything significant. @Bertie - isn't it ironic that China is moving to the leading spot not only in renewables, but with a big move toward "clean coal" with the world's first large-scale demonstration of carbon sequestration. Very expensive and surely to be supplanted by better technology, but at least they are actually doing something about the problems they have caused. An American energy giant is partnering with them, incidentally.

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There is trouble in River City, I say, trouble!

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I'm, global warming is just one part of climate change tjguy. The biggest threat to the world is riding sea levels. I come from Australia and many local councils have started putting together contingency plans to compensate for the rise. Many areas of Tokyo, Chiba, Osaka, Kobe and other parts of Japan will become unlivable after a 50cm sea level increase, but I have not heard anything about contingency plans. This report just seems to be inflammatory and doesn't really address the main issues. Up to one-quarter of the worlds population could be displaced by rising sea levels and up to a quarter of the worlds farmland could disappear along with it. Climate change is real and the next generation has to be prepared for it.

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Anyone else find it interesting that the official word has changed from "global warming" to "climate change"? I mean, who can argue with the idea that the climate changes? Of course it changes. Global warming is so much more accurate, but it is controversial so they changed the term to try and get more believers. What I would like to see is clear evidence that global warming is caused by man. The climate has changed many times in the past before man was even on the scene or before the industrial revolution began. The earth's climate is effected by many different things, some probably still not well understood by us. I'm not jumping on the climate change bandwagon just yet. I'm not against going green whenever possible, but spending trillions of dollars on something that is not well understood? I'm not a fan of that - yet.

-7 ( +5 / -12 )

Well, China certainly leads the world in CO2 emission, but the U.S.A. is a close second.

However, whereas the American "solution" is fracking and screwing up the environment far worse than mere carbon emission, China is doing something about it.

China is building wind farms and solar power farms on a greater scale than anywhere else – while building the complementary industrial capacities for producing wind turbines, solar cells as well as other renewable energy equipment (such as lenses and mirrors for concentrated solar power) on a scale that far exceeds commitments in any other country. China is serious in its pursuit of renewables, because it seems to believe that its future prosperity depends on building the industries that produce power.

< http://www.japanfocus.org/-JohnA-Mathews/4098>

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