World Wide Coal fires

To begin with, I want to say that I am not on the "Global Warming" bandwagon that is so popular these days. We have a great deal of emphasis, being led by Al Gore, who discovered the Internet, on global warming. The Hollywood community is supporting him as well. It is interesting that we never hear anything from the "other side." What are other scientists saying? We are led to believe that all scientists believe in global warming. My rule of thumb is simple: whenever I am told everyone is doing it, I have my doubts.

But recently I came across articles like the one I am about to append to this page which point out that coal fires in India and China are producing more pollution than all the automobiles in the world. Where is Al Gore with his trusty fire hose to put out these fires?

Andries Rosema of the Environmental Analysis and Remote Sensing (EARS) firm in the Netherlands worked with colleagues using satellite and airplane data to analyze the damage uncontrolled fires caused in China. The team found that the fires released up to 360 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — 2 to 3 percent of worldwide production per year from burning fossil fuels, an amount equivalent to that emitted per year from all automobiles and light trucks in the United States. The economic loss of coal from these fires is as high as US$125 million to US$250 million, estimates Zhang Xiangmin of the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) in the Netherlands.

Reports from the World Bank, World Resources Institute, and United Nations Development Program confirm that China’s atmospheric pollution, primarily from coal combustion, is among the highest in the world. Coal gas and particulate matter are responsible for acid rain and human disease in more than 100 Chinese cities and the problems have spilled into other countries including Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan. Lung cancer, bronchitis, stroke, pulmonary heart disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — which accounts for up to 26 percent of all deaths in China — are on the rise. In some cases, such health effects are directly linked to coal emissions from indoor cooking and heating (Geotimes, November 2001).