The Chinese civilization has existed survived intact far longer than any other in human history, and they have records of that civilization that span 2-3 thousand years BC. They’ve seen more climate change than any other civilization.
The Guardian recently interviewed Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing Climate Center.
Excerpts:
A 2C rise in global temperatures will not necessarily result in the calamity predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), China’s most senior climatologist has told the Guardian.
He had this bit of wisdom to pass along:
“There is no agreed conclusion about how much change is dangerous,” Xiao said. “Whether the climate turns warmer or cooler, there are both positive and negative effects. We are not focusing on what will happen with a one degree or two degree increase, we are looking at what level will be a danger to the environment. In Chinese history, there have been many periods warmer than today.”
He added:
“Climate prediction has only come into operation in recent years. The accuracy of the prediction is very low because the climate is affected by many mechanisms we do not fully understand.”
We would do well to listen.
More important, we should take note of the fact that China laughs in the face of the west when it comes to regulating their own economy through self imposed emissions goals, while the west cuts back its manufacturing capability, China surges forward.
Nixon awakened a sleeping giant. They’ll squish us like a bug economically and in many other areas. For example China just this week broke ground on a fourth space launch complex.
China will likely go to the moon before the US returns there, perhaps as early as 2014. Meanwhile they aren’t worried about anything, whether it be the atmospheric or the political climate.
In looking at this map from the Beijing Climate Center, it is notable how they see things differently.
pwl (20:47:31) : The Chinese being on the moon with a permanent military base will bring new meaning to the term “overlords”. Who needs to invade when you control the purse strings, the technology manufacturing and dominate the military spacial volume from the high ground surrounding the Earth. Easy to defend and easy to attack from, the moon is.
Figure out the energy needed to nudge a modest sized asteroid into an impact trajectory for N. America or Europe. Then figure out the size crater made by the 1000 Megaton impact at the end of the gravity well…
Can you say “Bang for the Yuan?” … I knew you could.
Extra Credit: Figure out the energy at impact of a 10 ton rock launched via rail gun from the moon. Now figure out the cost to send a reply missile. Now figure out the odds you can get a missile to the moon with a rail gun sitting on the moon that can launch a “rock a minute” at your missile…
Yes, it is an old Heinlein story. But he knew his physics:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/moonisharsh.htm
Oh, and I once saw a report of a Japanese study that said, basically, one large “nickel iron” asteroid properly shaped for aerodynamics and de-orbited (i.e. make a shuttle shape out of it and send it at the ocean on a glide path) would provide total global stainless steel demand for one year. They decided not to pursue it at that time since it would collapse the global stainless steel market…
Lets see, China is growing like a weed. China needs resources, especially metals. China doesn’t give a hoot about global stainless steel providers since it doesn’t own that market (yet). … And once you can shape multi-ton bit of steel for reentry and land it, well …
Tom in Florida (09:48:08) :
Sorry, but Singapore is in fact an independent state at the tip of the Malay peninsula and has a population that is more than three-quarters Chinese. More than 50% of the population speaks “Chinese” as a first language: Mandarin 35%, Cantonese almost 6% and Hokkien (a version of the Fujian dialect which is also spoken in Taiwan) at more than 11%. Only 14% of the population there is ethnic Malay.
China has taken on a new definition of “Communism”. To have the looks of “Free Enterprise” but under a communistic system has a lot to be caucious! We have borrow from them a number of times. This is scary becasuse the “Dollar” has little value to them…They loaned Us the money so they can have control of the U.S. for the first time in their history.
What if they call on these loans? Why are they buying so much Gold? It is in order to protect themselves when this country collaspes. I say this because of Our present government has done in its past decisions after the Financial collaspe last fall and since then. Bills that this Country cannot afford and increase in taxes the American People cannot afford neither.
It’s good to see China cannot be fooled by AGW. Check out this article!
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/09/17/17climatewire-climate-bill-drifts-into-a-potomac-fog-96749.html?pagewanted=all
Sounds like us “Realists” will have time to gather more scientific infomation on Climate Change and against this fiasco about CO2.
Maybe, just maybe put this all behind us!
China is certainly in the process of transforming itself and there is a lot to like and admire about the Chinese as well as things that should cause us in the West grave concern, but it would be a mistake to conclude that their development will necessarily repeat or mirror ours. At the risk of being lumped in with Paul Ehrlich, let’s look at the demographics.
The industrialization of the U.S. occurred when it was a much younger country. The imminent collapse of Social Security because of our aging population and comparatively fewer workers paying into the fund has been a concern for nearly a generation now. The Chinese are rapidly approaching a similar demographic difficulty: The US has 20% of its population under the age 15. For China, that figure is 19.8%, India: 31%, Russia: 14.8%, Mexico: 29.1%, Nigeria 41.5%. The Median Age in the U.S. is 36.7 and the life expectancy 78.1 The figures for China are 36.7 and 73.4, respectively, while India has 25.3 and 69.9, Russia 38.4 and 66.03, Mexico 26.3 and 76.6 and Nigeria 19 and 47.
A fertility rate of 2.1 (i.e. an average of 2.1 children for every female) is generally considered the “replacement rate” or zero population growth rate. In the U.S. that figure is 2.05 (we continue to have population growth because of immigration) and Russia is even worse, with a fertility rate of 1.41. The figure for China is 1.79 while India is 2.72. Mexico has a fertility rate of 2.34 and Nigeria 4.91 (that’s right, an average of almost five children per female!).
There are offsets, however. The U.S. has only .6% of its population engaged in agriculture, while the Chinese have 40%. India has 60% of its population in farming. If China can mechanize its agriculture to release a large percentage of those farmers for industrial work during this generation, they may well make it to the moon. The middle of this century will belong to the Indians. If the West buys into Copenhagen, Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa will be doomed. I’m not saying demography is destiny, but it would not be smart to ignore it either….
The figures cited above are from the CIA’s World Fact Book…. A nifty reference:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
Annette Huang (22:24:40) : The written language is what has unified China over centuries. Characters can be learned with application and since most Chinese can do it in a small part of a lifetime, I’m not sure why you think it should take anyone 2.
IIRC there are 9 dominant dialects of Chinese, but all use the same character set. This allows mutual written intelligibility.
FWIW, while in Japan using “just enough tourist Japanese” to get fed and to the hotel, I leaned 3 or 4 “Chinese” characters simply by observation. (One looks like a couple of doors like for an old west saloon. Guess what that means…) Yes, there are about 10,000+ of them. But the typical westerner has about a 3,000 word vocabulary and you can be happy with 1000. And in a pinch, a few hundred can work for a ‘tourist’… They are relatively well thought out pictograms and have a systematic nested character. (i.e. you can take the character for land or farm and add the one for person to make a compound).
Why was I learning Chinese characters in Japan? Because Japan uses them as one of their FOUR writing methods… Chinese by meaning, Chinese by sound value, Syllabic, Roman. Romaji is only used for foreign words, by convention, but… (if you see OL in the middle of a bunch of Japanese it means Office Lady – the woman who handles typical secretarial and office chores. Talk about a hard language to learn to read…)
Romaji is self explanatory.
Syllabic comes in a couple of different forms. From the wiki:
There are three kana scripts: modern cursive hiragana (ひらがな), modern angular katakana (カタカナ), and the old syllabic use of kanji known as man’yōgana that was ancestral to both.
And Kana
Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji (Japanese: 漢字)
The Kana can mean what the picture shows or can stand for the sound value of the symbol. You get to figure out which.
By comparison, leaning what a Kana means in the original Chinese is easy…
(If both gate doors are closed, it means one thing, if one is open… Yes, it can be that easy).
Chinas “most senior” meteorologist looks young for his age.
rob uk (03:11:52) :
Richard (03:28:15) :
A subdued Flanagan? Maybe he put his money where his mouth is and shorted home heating oil futures….
Robert E. Phelan (10:10:02) : “Sorry, but Singapore is in fact an independent state at the tip of the Malay peninsula and has a population that is more than three-quarters Chinese. More than 50% of the population speaks “Chinese” as a first language: Mandarin 35%, Cantonese almost 6% and Hokkien (a version of the Fujian dialect which is also spoken in Taiwan) at more than 11%. Only 14% of the population there is ethnic Malay.”
Thanks for the correction. Once again, WUWT proves a great source for information.
Kevin (20:52:55) :
They’ve seen more climate change than any other civilization.
While I normally agree wholeheartedly with your premises, this one is quite faulty. You are clearly implying that chinese people have more knowledge on the subject of climate change, since they’ve been around for thousands of years. Have they been able to predict future climates in those thousands of years? Clearly, their history of famines suggests that they couldn’t.
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That’s telling em! What would the Chinese know about climate change? They merely invented the thermometer. And we all know that centuries of taking daily tempuratures is just weather.
Tom in Florida (11:15:14) :
Thank you. I may sometimes come across as curmudgeonly, but I don’t really mean to be. The East was my stomping ground for 14 years and I get a little passionate about it. When I was dragged back from Taiwan, kicking and screaming the whole way, people would remark: “All that time in Taiwan? Goodness! Can you speak Japanese? and did you hear the results of the World Series?…” Talk about making grown men cry….
Tom, Singapore in Malaysia? Oh dear.
Navigator (10:57:28) :
Chinas “most senior” meteorologist looks young for his age.
Asians age gracefully.
Western educated people will still be the brains behind innovation for a long time no matter how much economic growth China and India see. All this hyperbole about Chiba becoming the world power fails to take note we are becoming one open world with no need for a super power, only centers of education and innovation. It’s nice to talk about learning Mandarin too but forget about it being a new lingua franca. English is here to stay as the world’s language of commerce, though as usual it will always be a changing language and borrow extensively from other languages and new English dialects will spring up in many places as it does in India already.
“China will squash us like a bug economically.”
Correct!
I wonder why our government–of BOTH parties–wants to throw us under the Chinese bus.
Oh yeah, money.
Phil’s Dad (20:56:34) : said
Native Americans – 20,000 years
REPLY: Good point, but do they have any written records of what weather and climate were like? – Anthony
**
What about the Romans? Intermittent records from 780Bc from the western empire then good climate references from the Byzantine empire from 380AD to 1453AD.(the fall of Constatinople)
We also have records of the irrigation systems used when there was severe droughts. This from their records from around 755AD
“Some 2,000 kilometers to the southeast, a well-informed observer at Constantinople recorded that great and extremely bitter cold settled on the Byzantine Empire and the lands to the north, west (confirming the Chronicon Moissiacense’s statement concerning Illyricum and Thrace), and east. The north coast of the Black Sea froze solid 100 Byzantine miles out from shore (157.4 km). The ice was reported to be 30 Byzantine “cubits” deep, and people and animals could walk on it as on dry land.
Drawing on the same written source, another contemporary, the patriarch of Constantinople, Nicephorus I, emphasized that it particularly affected the “hyperborean and northerly regions,” as well as the many great rivers that lay north of the Black Sea. Twenty cubits of snow accumulated on top of the ice, making it very difficult to discern where land stopped and sea began, and the Black Sea became unnavigable. In February the ice began to break up and
flow into the Bosporus, entirely blocking it.
Theophanes’ account recalls how, as a child, the author (or his source’s author) went out on the ice with thirty other children and played on it and that some of his pets and other animals died. It was possible to walk all over the Bosporus around Constantinople and even cross to Asia on the ice.
One huge iceberg crushed the wharf at the Acropolis, close to the tip of Constantinople’s peninsula, and another extremely large one hit the city wall, shaking it and the houses on the other side, before breaking into three large pieces; it was higher than the city walls. The terrified Constantinopolitans wondered what it could possibly portend.”
At 66 ppb, the spike in the GISP2 sulfate deposit on Greenland dated 767 is
the highest recorded for the eighth century (see Fig. 5) and shows that this terrible winter in Europe and western Asia was connected with a volcanic aerosol that left marked traces on Greenland.
http://www.medievalacademy.org/pdf/Volcanoes.pdf
tonyb
Regarding the contribution from various cultures to human progress, I remind you of the enormous contribution from Irish monks. It is well documented that Irish monks preserved much of the collective knowledge from Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire. See “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” Cahill, Thomas (Doubleday, 1995).
What is less well known is the Irish contribution to oceanography and the discovery of North America. St Brendan the Navigator, an Irish monk, has been chronicled to have sailed from Ireland to Newfoundland early in the 6th Century in lateen rigged leather currach. See: “Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis” and the somewhat incredulous references in Wikipedia per “Brendan Navigator.” For example, I surmise that the sea monsters Brendan encountered were whales. Sadly the Wikipedia authors suffer from chronic lack of imagination.
To this day many Scandinavians deny that St Brendan, after discovering North America, sailed to Dane Land and shared his navigation discoveries with Vikings. This led an extended migration of Viking explorers who rowed their boats to Ireland in order to take sailing lessons from St Brendan and his followers.
Brendan’s voyage was replicated by Tim Severin, renowned historian, explorer and writer in 1978 in a leather currach. A documentary of the expedition was filmed and distributed commercially. The background music for this film was a symphonic suite, “Brendan’s Voyage,” composed by Sean Davey.
The contribution of Irish monks cannot be ignored. Without them the advancement of science and discoveries would have been delayed for the centuries it would take to reinvent them.
My wife is Chinese and her pragmatic view of the world and all things is reflected in the statements by Xiao Ziniu. When one removes the emotional element from alarmism there is little left in the breadbasket. The Green foray by left wing politicians across the globe was always fraught with peril. The value of carbon offsets is indicative of the esteem in which green politics is held today. Copenhagen looks increasingly like a looming reality check for alarmists and those who would profit from the climate change hoax.
Navigator (10:57:28) :
Chinas “most senior” meteorologist looks young for his age
They drink tea instead of milk…perhaps he is a 70 years old “youngster”.
Thanks a lot Anthony for these refreshing maps of temperatures and anomalies, we were in need of a different source. From now on we´ll visit:
http://bcc.cma.gov.cn/en/
Anonymous (12:28:48) :
“China will squash us like a bug economically.”
Correct!
I wonder why our government–of BOTH parties–wants to throw us under the Chinese bus.
Oh yeah, money.”
Sorry to butt in, but that makes me laugh. Hard. So hard in fact, that I laughed my soda out through my nose (and I wasn’t even drinking any). To be fair, though, I can only laugh at half of what you wrote (which refelects the general views in the world today, so its not like I’m laughing at YOU specifically).
Yes, governments will do absolutely anything for the monetary systems they create and manage. Til the very end, they will push them into the mania phase, where they finally collapse, exhausted and broken. But no, China isn’t going to squash anyone except for China, the same the U.S., Japan, Russia, Germany, England, Spain…
Take your pick of empires that were destined to rule the world and make everyone else speak their language, but humans have this unbeatable (and most ANNOYING) tendency to run their empires into the ground while creating and sustaining delusions in all along the way, be they of great fear or great praise. But if history is any guide, we’re doing it much faster than our ancient ancestors did. Empires used to rise and fall over centuries, but in more recent times it happens in decades. In some parts of the world, powershift take place over a matter of years.
Anyway…
http://mises.org/story/3573
Sure, China has lots of tall buildings and lots of pretty lights, fed by lots of pretty hydrocarbons but they can’t populate them enough to turn more farmers into factory workers so that they can burn even more pretty hydrocarbons. Sure, they’re buying resources like mad, but no small amount of it is for speculative purposes. This should sound familiar if it does, but that is what the great depression was all about: Bubble-mania. It should also sound familiar because time and again centrally planned “economies” fail. Nothing has changed in this regard. Even if everyone in the world were praising and bowing to China (and presumably not able to even add two and two, since only China has any intelligence, so the hyperbole goes), the outcomes of those two principles never change. Only the name of overly feared/respected empire changes, folks.
And their gold and silver story isn’t as grand as many commentators make it out to be. Between mining and buying the stuff over the past 30 years, they haven’t even 10% of the world’s gold of some 160,000 tonnes. And over some 80 years of aggresive buying of silver between the late 19th century and the mid 20th… well, however much silver they have is anyone’s guess but most of the silver tonneage mined in human history was not done during that time, nor was much of it done by China. And neither metal can work on its own. Silver is a dual metal, industrial and monetary, and gold has a great tendency to hoard (not save, but hoard, as in disappear from circulation unless a commodity with a greaty declining marginal utility entices it out of hoarding mode). They would need both to ween themselves off of paper and credit, and they don’t have enough of either.
So there ain’t no way China is not going to deflate. They’re a centrally planned “economy” based entirely in the “capitalism” of credit and debt creation. Even if they were to triple their holdings of gold and silver by tomorrow (in the literal sense), their population is too big to allow that increase a significant impact on their paper dependence. The population needs to spread out, with the government maintaining a non-expanding border (world domination kills all empires, for reasons I can’t get into here).
I know that I said earlier in another post that we can never be certain of anything, and I stand by that because what I meant was that we don’t know when people will learn their lesson, and stop relying on “capitalism” and bubble mania. Until then, things are quite predictable: People will continue to create and believe delusions until reality shows them otherwise.
See these from the link given above:
El Nino ANALOG prediction model:
http://ncc.cma.gov.cn/Monitoring/Bulletin/200908/prediction/ana_ssa.gif
Sea temperatures and anomalies:
http://ncc.cma.gov.cn/Monitoring/Bulletin/200908/monitoringc/msst.gif
Major weather events:
http://ncc.cma.gov.cn/Monitoring/Bulletin/200908/monitoringc/mglobaleventse.gif
OT:
The death struggle of the ongoing El Nino:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/ninosep19.gif
Notice the far right of the Pacific, how the warmer waters are gone.
The SOI is positive, which should weaken the El Nino.
“He had this bit of wisdom to pass along:”
So a Chinese government scientist offers “wisdom” while Western government scientists are immersed in lies and corruption? It seems there’s a double-standard operating here, coupled with a marked lack of scepticism and critical thinking.
Keep in mind that the Chinese government has a major stake in playing down the possible effects of climate change, and that its chief climate scientist will be adhering to the government line. This should induce some scepticism over the reason for this scientist’s claims.
For the sake of clarity: I am not arguing that Xiao Ziniu’s views are wrong because his government has a stake in playing down the possible effects of climate change.
I am pointing out that WUWT’s scepticism tends to go one way, and that the views of the likes of Xiao are more readily accepted than statements that are more pro-AGW.
But if Western climate scientists are to be distrusted due to their links with government, the same should apply – and perhaps even more so – to scientists from countries less committed to free speech.
In regard to some comments made in this forum concerning China, I believe China’s threat to the West, like that of Japan thirty years ago, is being overrated. China is still a nation with massive poverty, social injustice, and official corruption. Unless the Chinese somehow turn these endemic, man-made plagues of the Chinese history around, the nation—to employ a phrase from the China’s most famous politician, Mao—will be a paper tiger that eventually deflates from within.
The true task of China is not as much to do in catching up with the West as in overcoming the three historic specters of the long Chinese history–poverty, injustice, and corruption. When the Chinese has achieved that task, there will be nothing to fear of them, for they will have gained the moral credibility worthy to lead the world.
The fear and concern being expressed about China, however, is not completely spurious, for if the Chinese were to fail in their historic task yet muscle their way into the leadership position in the world through raw economic and military power, then the world would reflect their failure, as it would be poorer, more unjust, corrupt, and dangerous place. What needs to be watched more carefully is the development of China’s social ethics espoused by its government more than its material prowess.
Brendan H (18:29:03) :
“So a Chinese government scientist offers “wisdom” while Western government scientists are immersed in lies and corruption?”
He (Xiao) clearly said that shifts in climate and temperature bring good and bad effects, either way. No honest or competent scientist would argue otherwise, nor have they this whole time. They object to the alarmism and all the measures that may very well be a waste of time and valuable resources, which some in fact have already proven to be wasteful spending and even negatively impacting quality of life and/or the environment in the implementing of them. And given that a very large body evidence from the past, along with the present, shows that we’re not likely in the midst of catastrohpic climate change (just change as usual), it is perfectly acceptable to show support for China’s assessment, as stated by Xiao Ziniu.
But I wouldn’t say Western government scientists are immersed in lies and corruption. There’s two words there, and one of them, in a certain context, is at odds with the right to speak freely; politics is not always synonymous with government, but is usually in support of ideology, rather than gaining understanding and shaping policy through healthy, open debate.