by Agence France-Presse

BEIJING - One of the world’s top authorities on climate change warned Friday that carbon emissions per person in parts of China were higher than in some developed countries.

Nicholas Stern, the British author of an acclaimed review on climate change, told students in Beijing’s People’s University that 13 Chinese provinces, regions and cities had higher per capita emissions than France. Six also overtook Britain.

“There are many parts of China where emissions intensity and emissions per capita are looking much like some of the richer countries in Europe,” he said in a speech that laid out his predictions on global warming.

Stern warned that if the world continued to emit around the same levels of greenhouse gases every year, there was a 50 percent chance temperatures would rise more than five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) within 100 years.

A rise of “five degrees Celsius has not been seen on this planet for 30 million years—we as humans have been here for only 200,000 years,” he said. “This type of temperature change involves radical dislocation, it involves re-writing where people can live, it would involve[...]

[Published in GreenNews - Read the original article]