The Paris Agreement establishes a new mechanism for post-2020 global climate governance, and sets long-term goals for global response to climate change, which will accelerate worldwide low-carbon transformation of economic development pattern, promote the revolutionary reform of energy system, boost a fundamental change in the mode of social production and consumption, and further the civilization of human society from industrial civilization to ecological civilization. The urgency of global low-carbon transition will reshape the competition situation of world’s economy, trade and technology. Taking the construction of ecological civilization as a guide, China explores green and low-carbon development paths, establishes ambitious intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) targets and action plans, advances energy production and consumption revolution, and speeds up the transformation of economic development pattern. These strategies and actions not only confirm to the trend of the world low-carbon transition, but also meet the intrinsic requirements for easing the domestic resources and environment constraints and realizing sustainable development. They are multi-win-win strategies for promotion of economic development and environmental protection and mitigation of carbon emissions. China should take the global long-term emission reduction targets as a guide, and formulate medium and long-term low-carbon development strategy, build the core competitiveness of low-carbon advanced technology and development pattern, and take an in-depth part in global governance so as to reflect the responsibility of China as a great power in constructing human fate unity and addressing global ecological crisis.
From 2011 to 2015, several policies have been taken in China to promote industrial transformation through phase-out of backward production facilities. This paper evaluated effects of the phase-out of backward production facilities on net energy savings during the 12th Five Year Plan (2011-2015), assessed the contributions of different industrial sectors to the net energy savings, and analyzed the regional distribution of the net energy savings in China. The main results showed that the annual net energy savings from 2011 to 2015 were estimated to be 1357.77×104, 1245.70×104, 1067.32×104, 981.42×104, and 483.70×104 tce, respectively. The total cumulative net energy savings were 5135.91×104 tce. The industrial sectors including electricity, cement, pulp & paper, iron-making, coke, steel-making and ferroalloy contributed 90% of the total net energy savings. The regional distribution of net energy savings was concentrated on 3 provinces including Hebei, Shandong, and Shanxi provinces, taking 28% to the total during 2011-2015.
Global warming has been a hot issue during recent decades, while the global warming hiatus since 1998 was detected as documented by many papers, meanwhile the Tibetan Plateau (TP) experiencing a rapid warming process. Based on previous studies, this paper mainly reviews the TP climate change under the global warming in four aspects: temperature, snow cover, precipitation and atmospheric apparent heat source, and points out that the accelerated warming over the TP results in the retreat of snow cover accompanied by the increase of precipitation. Though the TP heat source has been declined in recent decades whether based on observation or reanalysis datasets, it shows large uncertainties.
Based on a historical review of the developing path of the science communication, the current challenges of scientific synthesis, internet communication and the public science literacy were analyzed. Future Earth Plan of International Council for Science (ICSU) pushed out the co-delivery paradigm, which will be benefit for the science communication and accelerate the science knowledge popularization. In order to develop the mechanism of science communication, the paper discussed the new paradigm from the aspects of basic science research, social science popularization, and policy-making support. In the course of science communication, encouraging the stakeholder participation, building the co-delivery paradigm and communication platform were recommended in this paper.
Under the context of new media, as the breakthrough point of environmental problems, haze pollution had quickly became a focus of public, media and government’s attention, all stakeholders exhibited various demands for haze scientific information. The communication content and its form, subject, and path of scientific knowledge dissemination presented a new mechanism: the audience of scientific knowledge dissemination had multiplied, the content and form became diversification, the number of outcomes showed explosive growth, and the update rate continued to accelerate, the communication subject spread popularity, propagation path changed from single to diversity. New media can help to promote public participation in environmental protection, which will also brought challenges for science communication work at the same time. To enhance the ability of environment protection and governance, this paper suggested that the communication channels of new media should be used effectively, the public and popularization of environmental information and scientific knowledge should be strengthened.
China’s regional low temperature events were studied with multi-model ensembles based on CMIP5 daily minimum temperature data. China’s regional low temperature events were recognized with historical data. Results show that multi-model ensembles undervalue the change tendency of China’s regional low temperature events, but the temporal change with multi-model ensembles shows same weaken tendency as the observation, the result is also more stable than any single model, and the spatial distribution of China’s regional low temperature events is very similar as the observation. Furthermore, China’s regional low temperature events under different GHG emission scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP8.5) were projected. Results show that all indices are decreasing slowly under RCP2.6 scenario. Under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios, all indices have marked drop trends from early stage to late stage, but the drop trends of all indices under RCP8.5 is more sharply than that under RCP4.5. GHG emissions may play an important role on intensity and frequency of China’s regional low temperature events, but have little influence on the spatial distribution.
A rarely seen heavy torrential rain lasting 17 d leading to disastrous floods happened in the Huang-Huai region of eastern China in 1730 summer. The serious meteorological disasters and extreme climatic events happened under a climatic background of a warm phase of the Little Ice Age. In this paper, the synoptic process of rainstorm, flooding situation and the weather characters of 1730 are reproduced by means of historical literature records, and the state charts of areas of heavy rain, overflow, and daily moving of heavy rainy area in this summer are made. The synoptic and climatic aspects of 1730 were extremely similar to those of the “75?8 heavy rain” in Henan province in 1975, both typical severest torrential rainy events associated with typhoon activity and coincidently toke place in the minimum-value phase of the solar activity period, associated with moderate-large volcanic activity and 2 years after ending the strong El Nino event.
According to the observed daily maximum wind speed data of 670 stations over the mainland of China during 1980-2014, tropical cyclone high winds (TCHW) (above the 6th grade, wind speed at least 10.8 m/s) are partitioned by the method of improved Objective Synoptic Analysis Technique (OSAT). After defining tropical cyclone extreme winds (TCEW), changes of TCHW and TCEW over China are studied in this study. Results are as follows. For geographical distribution, annual mean TCHW days and its proportion decrease quickly from the coastline to inland, with proportion values of 30%-70% over Hainan, coastal provinces in South China and Southeast China and southern Jiangsu. Meanwhile, TCEW mainly appear in coastal provinces (except Tianjin and Hebei provinces), especially over coastal areas in East China and South China with proportion values reaching 100% at locations. For seasonal variation, average frequency of TCEW is more than monsoon’s extreme winds from July to September. For the whole China mainland, when wind speed threshold change from the minimum threshold (11.5 m/s) to the 12th grade (wind speed at least 32.7 m/s), the occupation of TCEW increases sharply from 12% to 77%. During 1980-2014, days of TCHW and TCEW both decrease significantly whereas average intensity of TCEW increases, which may be associated with the significant downward trend of influencing TC frequencies for TCEW and the significant upward trend of average intensity of influencing TC for TCEW during TC life and the impacting period.
With the meteorological observation data and reanalysis data set, the interannual variation of the precipitation over Southwest China and the anomalies of the accompanying circulations and diabatic heating were analyzed firstly using statistical methods. It is shown that, when the total of precipitation over Southwest China was more than normal, one dipole of cyclonic and anticyclonic atmospheric circulations along the east-west direction was located in the middle and upper troposphere over south of the Yangtze River and over southwest regions of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau respectively; over Southwest China, the anomalous northerly and southerly wind dominated the upper and lower troposphere respectively, and the anomalous diabatic heating source was lied in the regions where the anomalous ascending motion prevailed; the descending motion anomaly and the anomalous diabatic heating sink almost concurred in the middle troposphere over the southwest of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. When the total of the precipitation over Southwest China was less than normal, the opposite is the case with the aforementioned. Furthermore, the dynamical diagnosis was used to reveal the possible physical process of the precipitation anomaly in Southwest China. That is, the abnormal ascent of one part of the South Branch to the southwest side of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, by affecting the total amount of water vapor transport downstream and then the diabatic heating anomalies in Southwest China, eventually played a role in modulation of the precipitation in Southwest China.
It’s essential to determine the areal precipitation thresholds of rainstorm-flood disaster, flood inundation scope and water depth for rainstorm-induced mountain flood disaster risk zoning. A case was performed for Pihe River Valley, which lies in Anhui province. Relationship between hydrological elements and rainstorm during typical flood process was analyzed in order to explore the relationship between rainstorm and floods by using statistical methods and hydrological model. With water level records of historical floods, the areal precipitation thresholds of rainstorm-flood disaster were obtained further. The flood inundation simulations were carried out by using the FloodArea model. Furthermore, the maps of rainstorm-induced mountain flood disaster risk assessment and zoning were estimated based on different recurrence periods by overlapping the information of disaster-bearing body. The inundation induced by Soudelor, which was the most serious typhoon in recent years, was simulated dynamically. The inundation risk assessment and zoning were proved to be reasonable by contrasting the simulated results with the actual disaster investigative records about the flooding scope and maximum water depth. The results show that the operational procedure of the rainstorm and flood disaster loss evaluation based on rainstorm and flood inundation model has a clear physical basis, the FloodArea model could be employed in the risk evaluation and early-warning of rainstorm and flood disasters.
Climate engineering technologies can be viewed as substitutes as traditional abatement measures and includes 2 categories: solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal. These engineering technologies vary with abatement measures in spatial effects, time effects, costs, and uncertainties & risks characteristics. Climate engineering measures change the previous international climate regime and create some new governance issues, such as new “free driving” versus previous “free riding” issue, new regional and intergenerational equalities issues. The research on climate engineering has significant scientific, policy and diplomatic implications.
The 21st Conference of Party (COP21) held in Paris at the end of 2015 has opened a new era for the joint response dealing with climate change globally, and built up a new mode of global climate governance, that is, “all Parties submit INDC-global stocktake-enhance efforts of actions-all Parties resubmit INDC-finally achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention”. With 160 INDC copies (covering 188 Parties) that the UNFCCC secretariat has currently received as research objects, this study classifies the mitigation targets of all Parties, and focuses on the systematic analysis of the financial demands, mitigation cost and priority investment fields for developing countries. The results are as follows: among 160 INDC copies, 122 copies clearly include the financial content; 64 copies propose specific amounts of financial demands for the implementation of INDC; 31 copies pre-estimate domestic amounts and financial demands for greenhouse gas mitigation by 2030, based on which they have calculated that the average mitigation cost for developing countries by 2030 will have reached up to 22.3 US$/t CO2; 28 Parties reclassify the financial demands for mitigation and adaptation areas, and reach the conclusion that the overall financial demand ratio for mitigation and adaptation is 1.4. The current mitigation commitments of the Parties from developed countries should be used as benchmark, then by 2030 the total amount of financial demands for developing countries in response to climate change would have reached up to US$ 474 billion.
At the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in December of 2015, Parties to the UN Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reached a historic agreement (Paris Agreement) to combat climate change and to accelerate and intensify the actions and investments needed for a sustainable low carbon future. Given these, an initiative named “4‰ initiative: soils for food security and climate” was proposed by French Ministry of Agriculture, and this initiative had been launched officially at the COP21 and signed up by some global organizations. China has the high CO2 emissions but low soil carbon pool; moreover, there are large uncertainties to estimate the carbon sequestration potential. These factors induce the difficulty of target determination. Therefore, China should defer joining this initiative. The straw pyrolysis carbonization technology may be generalized to improve carbon sequestration, fertilizer use efficiency and greenhouse gas mitigation through the waste management project under national ecological civilization construction in China. This paper also suggests that China puts forward the biomass treatment centered energy-fertilizer-carbon sequestration project to raise the discourse power in the field of climate change.
