Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

Just yesterday, June 11, we read on the great New York Times (login required, by the way...) that the one and only big monster that's causing great havoc in the environment is - hard to guess, uh? - China:

Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.

[...]

China released about 22.5 million tons of sulfur in 2004, more than twice the amount released in the United States

Ah, naughty Chinese! How can you dare to emit these many Greenhouse Gases - surpassing even the reductions that Kyoto Protocol seeks! (ok, the U.S. didn't sign it, but this is a detail)

Luckily enough, for those who seek, there's always enough information to put data and analysis in the right context. Reading the EIA International Emissions Data we discover a few interesting things (the latest data arrive at 2003, this June an update should come out):

• in 2003 the U.S. carbon dioxide emissions were 5,802.08 million metric tons
  
• in the same year China emissions were 3,540.97 (60% of U.S.'s), while India's ones were 1,024.83 (17%)
  
• the per capita emissions, always in 2003, were 19.95 metric tons in the U.S., 2.72 in China (13% of the average U.S. citizen) and 0.96 (0.04%) in India
  
• this means that if every Chinese had to emit the same amount of carbon dioxide of his American pal China would have a total of about 26,000 million metric tons in 2003 (five times U.S. emissions)
  
• these numbers were consistent in the 2 decades before: the yearly average per capita emissions in the period 1980-2003 were 20.02 in the U.S., 2.05 in China and 0.74 in India
  

What do we learn from these numbers and from the New York Times article?

- Mathew was right, it's much easier to see the speck out of your friend's eye that the plank in yours
- it is worse when also your friend has a plank in his eye
- in any case, since we are talking about things in body parts, I'd start worrying about the carbon dioxide in my lungs - more than the specks or planks in somebody else's eye.