I think this is just criminal. It seems like the Chinese government jsut dont care for any of natures most amazing places. They destroyed the Yangzee valley to make a resevoir, and now theyre going to make one of the most inacessable places on earth accessable, and get even more tourists on a mountain thats practically crowded already.
Never knew they were going to take the olympic torch up the mountain though, I wonder how they will manage that.
I'm just studying climate change at the moment and it really makes me sick that a nation like China should be in the same UNFCCC classification as a nation such as e.g. Mali or even India.
Ye gods - they will be building a railway or ski lift to the top next.
Bloody Victorians the lot of them!
Being serious though, they are building the equivalent of two coal fired power stations a week, not one, AND they use old coal burning technology, not modern "clean burn."
Makes you wonder if our puny efforts at tackling environmental change is actually going to make a blind bit of difference doesn't it!
We deplore their handling of the "Tibetan" question. We condemn them for being the world's major pollutants, and yet we condone them in other ways.
We could take the Olympics away from them, as if they should ever have had them in the first place. We could prevent European companies from relocating there. We could insist on not purchasing anything with Chinese connections, but we don't.
Instead we give credence to a regime laughing behind our backs. We give support to their disregard of human rights in some half assed belief that we can "persuade" them to change their ways.
Tienanmen square should have illustrated the futility of that notion.
China should be isolated internationally until they realise that they will NOT be allowed to carry on regardless of the damage they are causing to the planet.
In the meantime, why not carry on paying lip service to the global warming debate!
Instead we give credence to a regime laughing behind our backs. We give support to their disregard of human rights in some half assed belief that we can "persuade" them to change their ways.
I really don't want to see a war with China. Although I'm sure it is coming :(
The planet is warming up, there's no doubt about that, but the planet has been warming up and cooling down for millions of years.
CO2 amounts to a ridiculously small percentage of the earth's atmosphere. There have been mini ice ages and warming of the earth's average temperature since time began. It's nothing new.
The global warming, "we're all going to die" myth has been raging for years, and is now such a multi-billion, trillion, dollar industry, that to turn round and say, "well, maybe Mankind has sod all to do with it" would mean a serious economic collapse of large multi-national industries, pandering to the fears of you and me.
Personally, I don't think ANYTHING we do is going to make even one iota of difference to stop the worlds warming up. In 200 hundred years they will be laughing at us.
On the bright side, hillwalkers and mountaineers can look forward to some fantastic winter conditions ;)
I don't want a war either, and a war wouldn't be necessary.
All we would need to do is isolate China on an international basis.
The US for example manages to do this with Cuba on their doorstep and North Korea due to the threat to their vested interests in South Korea.
I really think the reason that "we" (the west) don't with China is down to the fact that we are selfishly exploiting their cheap (slave) labour.
I have to say too that I think the West's obsession with Global Warming has more to do with taxation that saving the planet,
If Governments were really serious about it, then they would simply not allow the likes of the "third world" to carry on with MASSIVE contributions to a "perceived" threat, they would do all in their power to assist them to reduce it!
I have to say, I am with Oot to a certain extent, I am unconvinced that we are going to stop the "natural" cycle of the Earth, as has happened since way before the human race became way too big for it's boots.
Nature will compensate, it always does.
I believe that a global scale war is inevitable too. I think nature has made us naturally aggressive to keep our numbers in check, and every so often a large conflict occurs to reduce our numbers. It is the same with diseases that keep mutating that we cannot cure and world catastrophes.
Nature maybe compensating for the increase in the human population of the world.
We think we are so clever, but we are just part of nature and we are all so insignificant in the great scheme of things.
Anyway, off to the bowels of the earth, caving.
You lot could have a nuclear war today, and I won't know a thing about it!
For all of you dismissing the problem of Glabal Warming I suggest you watch The Inconvinient Truth film. Its very interesting and you cant argue with it. I know science can easily be manipulated, and that is why oil companied and the like are paying some scientists very well to select only certain aspects of their work to publish and to chuck away the evidence that suggest GW is for real. And the more people they convince that GW is a hoax to the less public interes there is and the more business they will continue to get. What is in it for all these people working so hard towards combating global warming? Do you think they jsut want to make it hard for businesses and people?
Yikes, there are lots of half-truths flying around in this thread! Firstly, Oot, while it's true that the Earth does naturally warm and cool this really isn't something that anyone except scientists (and perhaps the odd historian) need to think about. A little bit of knowledge is dangerous in the media and public eye. The 'global warming' we are concerned about is human-induced changes additional to the Earth's natural cycle, and the effects are not just about a few degrees temperature change e.g. changing acidity of the oceans is one of many effects of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
And while I'm on my soapbox...we need to be very careful about comparing emissions from different countries. China has a huge population, so even though they may emit more CO2 than the US or UK, the average person in China still accounts for only a quarter of the amount that people in the US do, or about a third for people in most of Europe. We really aren't in a good position to criticise China's emissions (though we may not agree with may other policies etc).
Hmm, that all sounds like i'm preaching, but I'm as guilty as anyone in the UK. I just don't like people complaining or advertising the 'nothing we can do will make a difference' point of view without all the evidence. Stepping off my soapbox now...
If you watch "An Inconvenient Truth" you should balance that by watching Channel 4's counterpoint, "The Great Global Warming Swindle."
Personally, having read from a variety of sources, I have been persuaded that mankind's influence over climate change is vanishingly small. My change of viewpoint only came relatively recently, when I decided to read up on the subject for myself rather than just absorbing the stuff in the media by osmosis.
The edit was to add this:
Don't get me wrong, I still believe that saving energy is a good thing (and certainly can't do any harm). I believe that more pressing dangers to our environment exist, and should take precedence, such as tropical deforestation, "mountain top removal" mining in the Appalachians, destructive damming and so on.
What is in it for all these people working so hard towards combating global warming?
Leading on from what Brianetta is saying, the above question is a little naive!
Western democracies are scared witless of upsetting the "middle classes" (who inevitably put them into power and keep them there) by taxing them properly on an "equitable" basis, so instead add to the plethora of hidden and stealth taxation that has plagued us over recent years.
What a political tool that is then, scare people with predictions of doom and gloom and then state that the only way to avert the "inevitable" situation is to make them pay for it through indirect taxation/penalties. Invariably, the "middle classes" end up paying MORE in taxation, but hey, it is for the good of mankind isn't it.
Add to that the fact that western democracies are supposed to be providing public alternatives to private transport, but have, and still are MASSIVELY under investing in public transport, so come up with penalising people who have no alternative but to use private transport, again under the "noble" cause of saving the planet.
Any Government attempting to con people that they are "seriously" tackling environmental change when in fact they are looking for "clever" short term monetary raising to stay in power, can also be selective in whose opinion they quote in support of these deceptions, if that is what they are.
The scientific opinion is vary divided, and as Brianetta has suggested, not in simple Yes/No terms. All that we can ask is that we are given a balanced view, not propaganda from EITHER side of the divide.
To blindly follow the dictat of a discredited Government who lied to get us into an illegal war is simply folly.
Whilst it is very laudible discussing Global Climate Change et al here I think that people are straying wildy off the topic.
The point of the article is about tourism and the fact that the Chinese govt is happy to busload tourists into the Tibettan Economic Zone - previously the independant country of Tibet.
The point is that China is systematically destroying Tibettan culture by the introduction of ethnic Chinese into the area, and has in the past been guilty of horrendous human rights abuses in the country.
It continues to hold a child in captivity in China - The Pachen Lama along with many monks, nuns and other political prisoners, guilty only of being Tibettan and wanting their own country.
The rest of the world has shamelessly sat back and allowed over 50 years of torture and destruction simply because the rest of the world has no financial interests in the region - short of as someone above has already pointed out, benefiting from the cheap (slave) labour in China.
The diplicity of the leading politicians over the last 50 years has been galling. Whilst waging wars, economic sanctions and whatever against agressors in other cases where they have had a vested interest - particularly Iraq - they have done nothing when they SHOULD have done the right thing in countries and regions such as Tibet and Dafur.
The point of this news article, whilst it does raise issues of global warming and environmental destruction is far deeper and serious.
It is all about China destroying the native culture and imposing its own culture on a region that does not want or need it.
Whatever the issues are with China, be it politics or polution, we as Western Countries are complicit in their participations and choose either to ignore them and even condone them!
Allowing them the showpiece of the Olympics is enough proof of that!
China will do what it wants, whether we like it or not. The USA (ergo UK) can't afford to boycott China because they make almost everything! Our consumer economies would come to a grinding halt if we no longer had Chinese manufacturing to prop it up.
On the subject of Tibet in general, I could rant for a long while. The railway that now runs to Lhasa, opened in July 2006, was China's way of ensuring that Tibetan culture was doomed to the history books. A road to Everest is just another chapter...
But every empire has its atrocities and cultural bulldozing to account for. For some reason, China's treatment of Tibet is widely publicised, whereas the slaughter of an estimated 30 000 Lamaist Buddhists in Mongolia under the former communist regime is rarely given a mention.
But in the end I suspect that China will be its own undoing. Communism in the former USSR crumbled not because of some incredible American success but under the weight of its own failings. For now China is going full-steam ahead, but I don't personally see it lasting very much longer in its current form. I once debated Tian'anmen Square with a very highly educated Chinese friend and it was clear that, though he knew of the event, it had been presented to him as a necessary act by a state under attack (seen that anywhere else recently ???). The Great Firewall of China may be impressive, but so is the human will to find out the truth.
2) Off-topic, I fully support a move towards energy efficiency, improved environmental conservation responsibility and sustainable living. (I’m a veggie cyclist for goodness sake!) But I remain undecided on the exact extent result of human meddling on the climate. Given that the weather is a classic example of a chaotic system and that forecasts beyond 5-days into the future are widely considered unreliable, I doubt the credibility of many environmental models and their predictions.
Working on spacecraft, we are obliged to model in 3-D the thermal behaviour of small man-made objects in free space. Even knowing the material properties of everything we used, and having a very accurate 3-D model of the spacecraft, sun direction etc. We are still unable to accurately predict the thermal behaviour of all components... and there aren't even any free fluids to complicate the equations. So we have to bake the whole satellite in a huge vacuum chamber to find out what really happens.
My point is this - if engineers can't even fully model a car-sized object that they built in a vacuum environment, I don’t put too much faith in a 50-year climate prediction, even if Al Gore says I should. All it takes is one or two major volcanoes to put human meddling into perspective.
For example, Mount Pinatubo threw 15 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere in a single eruption (1991) . The exact same figure (15 Tg) is quoted as the total sulphur dioxide emissions of Europe in one year (2004).
So before we pretend to have all the answers to climate change, don’t forget that 30 years ago very eminent scientists were warning that we were on the brink of the next Ice Age. They might be right. So might Al Gore’s sources. But it seems that intelligent debate has been shouted out on this one, and I have nothing to do with oil companies!
Off topic: I find it amazing that now that politicians and the mass media have suddenly decided to make lots of noise about global warming, something concerned scientists have been studying and talking about for years, people think it's some sort of scam. The politicians may use it as a scam but that doesn't mean it isn't happening. The science is convincing. I've read a great deal on this. I really would prefer it not to be happening - much easier to oppose wind farms and power lines and justify flying if it wasn't - but there is overwhelming scientific evidence.
Intelligent debate had not been shouted out on this. The number of scientists saying it's not happening is tiny.
This is a good site for scientific findings and debate as opposed to media speculation: Real Climate
