By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-11-19 07:15

Most Chinese citizens did not get the news yesterday morning as well-to-do families packed their cars with food and drink and drove to the city suburbs on fishing trips. Or for those who could not afford the luxury, they loaded their trucks with livestock or factory products to ship to the urban business centers.

At the same time, on the other side of the world, delegates from more than 130 nations agreed to a guideline on climate change in Valencia, Spain.

Despite the dire warning on global warming from the Nobel-winning IPCC group of climate scientists, the result was regarded by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as one step closer to a breakthrough, or as a stage "to launch negotiations for a comprehensive climate change that all nations can embrace".

The Valencia report will be formally presented to the UN Climate Change Conference, to be attended by environmental ministers from all countries, in Bali, Indonesia next month.

The Bali conference is expected to initiate a two-year process to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol whose first period ends in 2012.

According to the UN panel of scientists, whose latest report is based on their three previous ones, enough carbon dioxide has already built up to imperil islands, coastlines and a fifth to two-thirds of the world's species.

The main cause of the disaster is human burning of fossil fuels, or what keeps all of the world's factories and motor vehicles running everyday - coal and oil. But deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed quickly, the scientists urged, to avert more heat waves, melting glaciers and rising sea levels.

The UN Secretary-General particularly urged the United States and China, two major economies releasing greenhouse emissions, "to play a more constructive role" after the forthcoming Bali conference. "Both countries can lead in their own way," he told the press.

Yet for most Chinese people, who have been enjoying their newly earned wealth and lifestyle in just a decade or so, and for some in just a few months, they may not have any thoughts about how to participate in a campaign to mitigate global warming.

Most of them may still be dreaming about larger cars and houses, and not prepared to cut their families' energy bills. Even less the factory owners with fistfuls of orders from all over the world.

The UN scientists' call for stabilizing global greenhouse emissions by 2015, to be followed by steady decreases, will pose no less important a challenge to the Chinese way of life than the nation's adoption of a market economy and all the changes that have gone along with it since the late 1970s.

However, it is an inevitable task to fulfill before it can earn the world's respect, just like its past revolution and economic reforms, there is no choice, whatever the cost - and nothing would cost China more dearly than the feared submersion of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tianjin, and many other prosperous cities on its coast.

Also, precisely because it has in its recent history undergone such tremendous changes to be the way it is, China can do what it is destined to do with a good sense of direction and strong leadership. After all, it is useless to dodge the challenge.

E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/19/2007 page4)