Report underplays severity of China's greenhouse emissions

A recent Chinese Academy of Sciences study suggest China's greenhouse emissions could double over the next twenty years, reports New Scientist. That's funny, according to a McClatchy report in September, officials in the Chinese government feared emissions would quadruple in just 15 years.

The New Scientist would have you believe that China still trails the US in CO2 output. They cite 2005 numbers when China was cranking out around 5.1 billion tons of CO2 and the US was at 7.2. But as Pound360 readers learned earlier this year, a Netherlands study confirmed China has been beating the US (congratulations, by the way) in CO2 emissions since 2007.

You might think the thick grey clouds over Eastern China in the image below were saturated storm clouds dumping rain across the countryside. But they ain't. You're looking at a massive plume of wood and coal smoke. Each year, 656,000 Chinese (the equivalent of the entire city of Baltimore, MD) die from air pollution by the way…

(Image, captured by a US satellite during a 2004 flyby, courtesy NASA)