Environment Forum

Is China getting serious about tracking emissions?

At a major global climate summit in Copenhagen this week, China slammed rich nations for having weak and unambitious goals to cut carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, back at home, China’s main government group charged with monitoring greenhouse gases struck a new contract with Picarro, a California-based company that makes gas analyzers. The deal will double the number of Picarro analyzers that the Chinese Meteorological Administration uses.

We wanted to know if readers think this is a sign that China —- the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, followed by the United States — is getting serious about tracking its carbon emissions.

(Photo: Buildings are seen in a heavy haze in Beijing’s central business district Photo credit: REUTERS/Jason Lee)

American Museum of Natural History Exhibit on Climate Change

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City is running a new exhibit on Climate Change. Prior to seeing the exhibit I had read one of the few reviews of it in the New York Times, which was very harsh and essentially described it as a version of ‘apocalypse now.’ Without having seen the exhibit, the review made me shake my head in disappointment that the Museum may have really overdone it and perhaps blown it.

However I just spent 3 hours going through the exhibit carefully and want to report that the NY Times review is incredibly misleading and even arrogant. It’s the kind of review I would have expected from the conservative Weekly Standard. The exhibit does not at all make one ” … feel like an agnostic attending church and listening to sermons about damnation …”

Instead, it was a vast compilation of basic science information and very well presented, with plenty of caveats. Although I know the subject matter intimately, I came away feeling anew the vastness of the “CO2 problem” which literally will impact every corner of the planet, from the depths of the oceans, to the top of the stratosphere to every living thing on Earth. On top of this of course are all the socio-economic and technological issues.

Contrary to the NY Times review, there was nothing wrong with showing historical CO2 concentrations, using a room-long red neon light — rising from “… a level below a child’s knees and end[ing] … far over an adult’s head.”

Indeed the CO2 data looks far more alarming when you compare it with the last few 100,000 years of data from ice core data (as Al Gore did and the exhibit does as well elsewhere). Then it looks to an atmospheric scientist like we have literally whacked the atmosphere with a greenhouse gas sledgehammer: