The World’s Biggest Global Warmer

Within 80 years, 30 million people in China are going to be under sea because of global warming and rising sea levels. We know it is going to happen, so we must look at ways of how to protect the area.

—Dr. Peter Walker, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

Greenhouse gases consist primarily of carbon dioxide, but also include methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and water vapor. They have been the Earth’s friend because they act like a “thermal blanket” to keep Earth at a livable temperature. When the sun’s radiant energy beats down on the planet, the Earth, in turn, wants to radiate this energy back into space. Greenhouse gases help trap some of that energy and, thereby, keep some of the heat in.

This “greenhouse effect” occurs in much the same way you would observe in an actual greenhouse. Without this natural global warming, Earth’s average temperature would be much lower than around 60 degrees Fahrenheit, which is quite hospitable for our species and all the other animal, marine, and plant life that help make up the global food chain.

The problem now, however, is that as greenhouse gases continue to pile up in the atmosphere, the Earth is rapidly heating up to temperatures above that which are safe. Consider that the 10 hottest years on the planet have all occurred in the past 15 years. This rise in the Earth’s temperature is having all sorts of negative economic and ecological effects.

For starters, our polar ice caps are melting. In addition, both the snow cover in the northern hemisphere and floating ice in the Arctic Ocean have visibly decreased. At the same time, these higher temperatures are also melting glaciers around the world that are the sources of much of the world’s drinking water.

As noted earlier, both the Yellow River and Yangtze River in China are fed by glaciers in the Tibetan highlands. These glaciers are now melting much more rapidly than in previous years. Unless global warming is reversed, the most likely scenario over the next several decades is ever-more severe floods in China—followed by an abrupt drying up of the rivers as the glaciers go dry.

In addition to threatening the world’s water supplies, global warming is having a variety of other radical effects—flooding some areas and punishing other areas with land-baking droughts. The result has been increased wildfires and dust storms, more intense and frequent hurricanes in the United States and typhoons in China, and “killer heat waves” in Europe and India.

Although many nations are contributing to the global warming problem, China is both the world’s biggest global warmer and one of its biggest potential victims. China faces a perilous future of coastal flooding, severe water shortages, and declining crop production if global warming continues on its current trend.

You would think that with so much at stake China would be at the front of the pack calling for solutions to global warming. It’s just the opposite. At every turn, China has taken the opportunity to blame developed countries, such as the United States, Japan, and the nations of Europe for the problem, and China does indeed have a point. The United States in particular has lagged abysmally in its efforts to solve the global warming crisis. That said, China continues to stonewall on this issue; and, fearful of being held accountable for its growing role in the problem, China has even gone so far as to attack the U.N. Security Council for even debating the issue of climate change.