China is getting more reliant on energy imports despite efforts to switch to a low-carbon economy. This becomes apparent when looking at current data in terms of oil consumption and imports; both increased in the first five months of 2011 as compared to 2010.
In detail, China consumed 10.3% more oil in the first five months of 2011 that it had during the same time period in 2010 and oil imports rose 11.3% in the same time span, pushing China’s dependence on imported oil to 55.2%.
According to the Ministry of Industry and Information (MIIT) China’s oil dependence was only 33% in 2009. China’s economic development has largely relied on energy-intensive industries, and World bank data shows this fact clearly in plain numbers. Between 2006 and 2008, China’s GDP per unit of energy use(Purchasing power parity GDP per kilogram of oil equivalent of energy use) has increased from3.3 (2006) to 3.5 (2007) to 3.6 (2008). To understand how energy intensive China’s economy is one only needs to look at other countries, for example Denmark,where GDP per unit of energy use is 9.9 in 2008. Startling is also what Hong Kong SAR, China, achieves: 19.5 (2006) 19.3 (2007) 20.0 (2008) GDP per unit of energy use.
This data indicates very plainly that an increase of GDP in China is dependent on a lot more (fossil) energy as compared to other national economies. “China is witnessing growing need of crude oil during its development of urbanization and industrialization,” said Tong Xiaoguang, a researcher with Chinese Academy of Engineering. Tong also predicts an further increase of China’s dependence on imported oil, which could reach 60% by 2020 and 65% by 2030.
The problem with this is that a country relying so heavily on imported energy for its growth is vulnerable to oil price fluctuations and shortages. This is part of the reason why China is really pushing for the exploitation of all renewable energy sources within its boundaries. If China wants to reduce its energy insecurity without increasing the national energy mix’ share of coal, it needs to accelerate the development of renewable energy technologies. But this alone will not be enough; China also needs to de-couple economic growth from oil consumption. A shift towards a low-carbon economy consists from several measures, one of them being energy efficiency, especially in the industry. Also a better educated population will aim to work in fields such as services, trade, finances and tourism and thus create value without high energy consumption. At the end of day a share of China’s huge workforce will stay in the industry and there really is no way around a more efficient, more conscious use of imported, fossil energy.
Decoupling economic growth from energy consumption has many benefits, some of them being a less polluted environment and better health prospects as well as the creation of more quality jobs and more (energy) security. It is also an important step towards climate change mitigation.
NASA Mars Rover Arrives at New Site on Martian Surface
08.10.11
West Rim of Endeavour Crater on Mars
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU
West Rim of Endeavour Crater on Mars (False Color)
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU
Arrival at 'Spirit Point' by Mars Rover Opportunity
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU
Small 'Odyssey' Crater on Rim of Huge 'Endeavour' Crater
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU After a journey of almost three years, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reached the Red Planet’s Endeavour crater to study rocks never seen before.
On Aug. 9, the golf cart-sized rover relayed its arrival at a location named Spirit Point on the crater’s rim. Opportunity drove approximately 13 miles (21 kilometers) after climbing out of the Victoria crater.
“NASA is continuing to write remarkable chapters in our nation’s story of exploration with discoveries on Mars and trips to an array of challenging new destinations,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “Opportunity’s findings and data from the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory will play a key role in making possible future human missions to Mars and other places where humans have not yet been.”
Endeavour crater, which is more than 25 times wider than Victoria crater, is 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. At Endeavour, scientists expect to see much older rocks and terrains than those examined by Opportunity during its first seven years on Mars. Endeavour became a tantalizing destination after NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected clay minerals that may have formed in an early warmer and wetter period.
“We're soon going to get the opportunity to sample a rock type the rovers haven't seen yet,” said Matthew Golombek, Mars Exploration Rover science team member, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “Clay minerals form in wet conditions so we may learn about a potentially habitable environment that appears to have been very different from those responsible for the rocks comprising the plains.”
The name Spirit Point informally commemorates Opportunity’s twin rover, which stopped communicating in March 2010. Spirit's mission officially concluded in May.
“Our arrival at this destination is a reminder that these rovers have continued far beyond the original three-month mission,” said John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover project manager at JPL.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched Aug. 12, 2005, is searching for evidence that water persisted on the Martian surface for a long period of time. Other Mars missions have shown water flowed across the surface in the planet's history, but scientists have not determined if water remained long enough to provide a habitat for life.
NASA launched the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity in the summer of 2003. Both completed their three-month prime missions in April 2004 and continued years of extended operations. They made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life.
JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Before (left) and after (right) photos of the Sulzberger Ice Shelf illustrate the calving event associated with the Japan earthquake and resulting tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011. The icebergs have just begun to separate in the left image. Credit: European Space Agency/Envisat
A NASA scientist and her colleagues were able to observe for the first time the power of an earthquake and tsunami to break off large icebergs a hemisphere away.
Kelly Brunt, a cryosphere specialist at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues were able to link the calving of icebergs from the Sulzberger Ice Shelf in Antarctica following the Tohoku Tsunami, which originated with an earthquake off the coast of Japan in March 2011. The finding, detailed in a paper published online today in the Journal of Glaciology, marks the first direct observation of such a connection between tsunamis and icebergs.
The birth of an iceberg can come about in any number of ways. Often, scientists will see the towering, frozen monoliths break into the polar seas and work backwards to figure out the cause.
So when the Tohoku Tsunami was triggered in the Pacific Ocean on March 11 this spring, Brunt and colleagues immediately looked south. All the way south. Using multiple satellite images, Brunt, Emile Okal at Northwestern University and Douglas MacAyeal at University of Chicago were able to observe new icebergs floating off to sea shortly after the sea swell of the tsunami reached Antarctica.
To put the dynamics of this event in perspective: An earthquake off the coast of Japan caused massive waves to explode out from its epicenter. Swells of water swarmed toward an ice shelf in Antarctica, 8,000 miles (13,600 km) away, and about 18 hours after the earthquake occurred, those waves broke off several chunks of ice that together equaled about two times the surface area of Manhattan. According to historical records, this particular piece of ice hadn't budged in at least 46 years before the tsunami came along.
And as all that was happening, scientists were able to watch the Antarctic ice shelves in as close to real-time as satellite imagery allows, and catch a glimpse of a new iceberg floating off into the Ross Sea.
Nearly 50 square miles of ice broke off the Sulzberger Ice Shelf on the coast of Antarctica, resulting from waves generated by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011. Credit: NASA/Goddard
"In the past we've had calving events where we've looked for the source. It's a reverse scenario – we see a calving and we go looking for a source," Brunt said. "We knew right away this was one of the biggest events in recent history – we knew there would be enough swell. And this time we had a source."
Scientists first speculated in the 1970s that repeated flexing of an ice shelf – a floating extension of a glacier or ice sheet that sits on land – by waves could cause icebergs to break off. Scientific papers in more recent years have used models and tide gauge measurements in an attempt to quantify the impact of sea swell on ice shelf fronts.
The swell was likely only about a foot high (30 cm) when it reached the Sulzberger shelf. But the consistency of the waves created enough stress to cause the calving. This particular stretch of floating ice shelf is about 260 feet (80 meters) thick, from its exposed surface to its submerged base.
Thick cloud cover briefly fell away to reveal this first image of icebergs breaking away from the Sulzberger Ice Shelf due to sea swell from the Tohoku Tsunami, which had originated 8,000 miles away about 18 hours earlier. The icebergs can be seen behind a thin layer of clouds just off the ice shelf near the center of the image. Source: MODIS Rapid Response/NASA › View larger › View the same area two days priorWhen the earthquake happened, Okal immediately honed in on the vulnerable faces of the Antarctic continent. Using knowledge of iceberg calving and what a NOAA model showed of the tsunami's projected path across the unobstructed Pacific and Southern oceans, Okal, Brunt and MacAyeal began looking at what is called the Sulzberger Ice Shelf. The Sulzberger shelf faces Sulzberger Bay and New Zealand.
Through a fortuitous break in heavy cloud cover, Brunt spotted what appeared to be a new iceberg in MODerate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data.
"I didn't have strong expectations either way whether we'd be able to see something," Brunt said. "The fastest imagery I could get to was from MODIS Rapid Response, but it was pretty cloudy. So I was more pessimistic that it would be too cloudy and we couldn't see anything. Then, there was literally one image where the clouds cleared, and you could see a calving event."
A closer look with synthetic aperture radar data from the European Space Agency satellite, Envisat, which can penetrate clouds, found images of two moderate-sized icebergs – with more, smaller bergs in their wake. The largest iceberg was about four by six miles in surface area – itself about equal to the surface area of one Manhattan. All the ice surface together about equaled two Manhattans. After looking at historical satellite imagery, the group determined the small outcropping of ice had been there since at least 1965, when it was captured by USGS aerial photography.
The proof that seismic activity can cause Antarctic iceberg calving might shed some light on our knowledge of past events, Okal said.
"In September 1868, Chilean naval officers reported an unseasonal presence of large icebergs in the southernmost Pacific Ocean, and it was later speculated that they may have calved during the great Arica earthquake and tsunami a month earlier," Okal said. "We know now that this is a most probable scenario."
MacAyeal said the event is more proof of the interconnectedness of Earth systems.
"This is an example not only of the way in which events are connected across great ranges of oceanic distance, but also how events in one kind of Earth system, i.e., the plate tectonic system, can connect with another kind of seemingly unrelated event: the calving of icebergs from Antarctica's ice sheet," MacAyeal said.
In what could be one of the more lasting observations from this whole event, the bay in front of the Sulzberger shelf was largely lacking sea ice at the time of the tsunami. Sea ice is thought to help dampen swells that might cause this kind of calving. At the time of the Sumatra tsunami in 2004, the potentially vulnerable Antarctic fronts were buffered by a lot of sea ice, Brunt said, and scientists observed no calving events that they could tie to that tsunami.
"There are theories that sea ice can protect from calving. There was no sea ice in this case," Brunt said. "It’s a big chunk of ice that calved because of an earthquake 13,000 kilometers away. I think it's pretty cool."
The chief threat to the polar bear is the loss of its sea ice habitat due to global warming. As suggested by its specific scientific name (Ursus maritimus), the polar bear is actually a marine mammal that spends far more time at sea than it does on land. It is on the Arctic ice that the polar bear makes its living, which is why global warming is such a serious threat to its well-being.
How are polar bears being impacted by global warming?
Population sizes decreasing
Sea ice platforms moving farther apart and swimming conditions more dangerous
Fewer hunting opportunities and increased scarcity of food
As climate change melts sea ice, the U.S. Geological Survey projects that two thirds of polar bears will disappear by 2050. This dramatic decline in the polar bear is occurring in our lifetime, which is but a miniscule fraction of the time polar bears have roamed the vast Arctic seas.
Rapid Arctic ice melting in 2007:
Caused a record low for the surface area of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, nearly 23 percent below the previous record low in 2005.
Melted an additional area equivalent to the size of Alaska and Texas, combined (compared to average sea ice conditions).
Exceeded the projections of most climate-ice models. Based on the rapid melt, one NASA scientist projected summer ice could be essentially gone as early as 2012.
Population Size Declines
In southern portions of their range, like Hudson Bay, Canada, there is no sea ice during the summer, and the polar bears must live on land until the Bay freezes in the fall, whereupon they can again hunt on the ice. While on land during the summer, these bears eat little or nothing.
In just 20 years the ice-free period in Hudson Bay has increased by an average of 20 days, cutting short polar bears' seal hunting season by nearly three weeks. The ice is freezing later in the fall, but it is the earlier spring ice melt that is especially difficult for the bears. They have a narrower timeframe in which to hunt during the critical season when seal pups are born. As a result, average bear weight has dropped by 15 percent, causing reproduction rates to decline. The Hudson Bay population is down more than 20 percent.
Retreating Sea Ice Platforms
The retreat of ice has implications beyond the obvious habitat loss. Remaining ice is farther from shore, making it less accessible. The larger gap of open water between the ice and land also contributes to rougher wave conditions, making the bears’ swim from shore to sea ice more hazardous.
In 2004, biologists discovered four drowned polar bears in the Beaufort Sea, and suspect the actual number of drowned bears may have been considerably greater. Never before observed, biologists attributed the drowning to a combination of retreating ice and rougher seas.
Exacerbating the problems of the loss of hunting areas, it is expected that the shrinking polar ice cap will also cause a decline in polar bears’ prey -- seals. The reduction in ice platforms near productive areas for the fish that the seals eat affects their nutritional status and reproduction rates.
Polar bears are going hungry for longer periods of time, resulting in cannibalistic behavior. Although it has long been known polar bears will kill for dominance or kill cubs so they can breed with the female, outright predation for food was previously unobserved by biologists.
Polar Bear Status
In 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act primarily because of the decline of its primary habitat: sea ice. The Secretary of Interior listed the polar bear as threatened but restricted the Endangered Species Act's protections and thus the polar bear's future is still very much in jeopardy.
The polar bear is the proverbial "canary in the coal mine" of the serious threat global warming poses to wildlife species around the world, unless we take immediate and significant action to reduce global warming pollution.
How To Help Polar Bears
Global warming is the cause behind the disappearing sea ice, the primary stressor threatening polar bears. It is critical that we act now to curb greenhouse gas emissions and find alternatives to fossil fuels if we are going to save polar bears and avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
A boy walks barefoot in the wastewater discharge of a fabric dyeing factory in Guangdong Province, China
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Martin Hojsik, leader of the Toxics Water Pollution Project at Greenpeace International, writes on the concealed costs of pollution - on people, planet and profits.
Toxic pollution is often unseen. But many of the hazardous chemicals that are discharged into our rivers can stay there for years to come and accumulate inside living organisms. Some can cause cancer while others disrupt hormone systems. Yet they are still used and released polluting the rivers and lakes around us.
Yesterday my team released the Hidden Consequences report to highlight this problem. You should check it out by flicking through this new digital magazine, but I also I want to give you the big picture and explain why all of this is so important.
Strazske is a small town in the east of Slovakia. Not a famous spot on the tourist maps, yet well known among experts in toxic pollution. While the production of now globally banned toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) stopped in a local chemical factory more than 25 years ago, the region and its rivers and lakes are still one of the most polluted in the world because of these hazardous chemicals. The clean-up will be costly and the factory is now bankrupt.
Switzerland has a dirty secret too. Toxic waste from the dump sites of chemical industries is slowly leaking into the groundwater and Swiss industries are facing a very costly clean-up - but the groundwater is already contaminated.
In the Dutch Rhine Delta the clean-up is being paid for by the taxpayers; the pollution has multiple sources from industries upstream.
All these cases show the economic price that the Global North is paying for such a lax approach to hazardous chemicals. But, the real costs in health and environmental impacts have not been taken into account.
Asia and other countries in the Global South are now heading for similar problems. Rampant industrialisation without care for the environment is starting to show its price. Rivers like the Yangtze in China, the Marilao in the Philippines, the Chao Phraya in Thailand or the Neva in Russia are examples of rivers under threat. These rivers may be sources of drinking water to millions, yet are treated as sewers for toxic waste from the industries. As this trend continues the price for people and planet can be huge: companies will suffer not only from future clean up costs, but also from damaged reputations, as consumers become more cautious about how their products were made.
There is a chance to change the course and learn from past mistakes however. The price that the Global North is paying now does not have to be paid by the Global South - but only if urgent action is taken. Governments need to start working towards zero discharge of hazardous chemicals - identifying the worst chemicals and simply getting rid of them. But companies linked with these problems must have the corporate and social responsibility to act now - rather than wait for governments.
We need big companies to seize the opportunity now to become leading examples of toxic free production - so that we all can have rivers to swim in safely and still catch fish
In Hong Kong, our exhibit helped bring the message to the street where passers-by took a moment to put their demands for Detox in writing.
Now, nearly 50,000 people have signed our petition telling Nike and Adidas to play by the rules and keep toxic chemicals out of China’s rivers.
We even have a clear leader, as Puma – the world's third-largest sportswear brand – publicly committed to the elimination of all releases of hazardous chemicals from its entire product lifecycle.
However, while both Nike and Adidas have responded, they risk losing the race to create a toxic-free future if they can't convert their bold claims of leadership into concrete commitments and credible actions.
for me, deforestation is that, the green trees being cut down, and the earth being hurt.
usually the forestland then use for.......
-farms， planting for vegetables, cereals etc.
and also a huge amount of sugar cane, substitute the fuel.
-ranches feeding a lot of cow, lamb, pig...etc. for people scary consumption,
-urbanization
overpopulation is one of these causes
and too, a major cause: MONEY. $$
people cut down trees because of money,
because of profit,
because of wealthy,
and because of living.
for instance, Malaysia, it's under a uncontrollable deforestation now, and even worse
in the future.
Our valuable nature, valuable rain forest have been hurt, and also damaged.
rampant logging of rain forest in Malaysia, especially East Malaysia (Sabah&Sarawak), leads Malaysia to one of the largest exporter of tropical woods. Malaysia also plant oil palm.......for money, too!
I wonder this is a compliment which I should be proud of my country, or a shameful issue to my country,
"Man belong to nature but nature doesn't belong to man"
I do really feel sorry to environment.
Most of us know that we SHOULDN'T act like this
but,
as a ordinary human being
we actually not sure, don't know,
what to do? and how to do?
do we have enough POWER to save the earth?
save the forest?
No....No....
answer is NOT.
what can we do?
only try our best to save energy, reduce wastes, etc...
