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China becoming gold medalist in CO2 emissions

If you believe global warming's a crock, this blog's worth another good belly laugh. If you suspect that CO2 and other greenhouse gases could be altering the climate, then this there's more evidence that the U.
Written by Harry Fuller, Contributor

If you believe global warming's a crock, this blog's worth another good belly laugh. If you suspect that CO2 and other greenhouse gases could be altering the climate, then this there's more evidence that the U.S. and China are plunging us into a climatic sauna.

A study published in "Ecological Economics" journal says that previous estimates of China's CO2 output have been too low. "While there are some substantial differences between estimates from the set of models that appear to have the best forecasting ability,they agree that the magnitude of the increase is quite large relative to existing forecasts of Chinese CO2 emissions. To put the size of the increase in emissions in sharp perspective, it is several times larger than the decrease in emissions that is embodied in the Kyoto protocol. That is, the disagreement between the models is over how many times larger the increase is likely to be."

The authors of the study did simply accept grand estimates from the Chinese government or monitoring agencies but used estimates of energy use and emissions output at the provincial level. And those numbers add up to a lot more than anybody has been admitting. Of course, a major source of China's CO2 is burning coal for electricity. China is also in the midst of an on-going construction boom. In the U.S. constructionand building operatios accou t for over half the energy used. Right now that figure could be even higher in China where the number of vehicles is still relatively small and very few homes have air conditioners.

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