What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading.

As Ross Garnaut correctly said, “the rate of convergence is the main equity-lever [in C&C].”

Wan Gang said the precise timing of the level would depend on China’s economic growth, rate of urbanization, and level of scientific development.

“There are some uncertainties here, so it is difficult to say whether it will be in the beginning, the end, or the middle, but I can say for sure it will be within that range (of 2030-2040),” he told the Guardian.

China, the world’s largest carbon gas polluter, has promised to make gains in energy efficiency, but has yet to announce a peak date for emissions.”

The US is no longer number one emitter of carbon dioxide, having been overtaken by China in these latest figures. But when did it happen?

Avoiding climate catastrophe will probably require going to near-zero net emissions of greenhouse gases this century. That is the conclusion of a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req’d) co-authored by one of my favorite climate scientists, Ken Caldeira, whose papers always merit attention. Here is the abstract:

Current international climate mitigation efforts aim to stabilize levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, human-induced climate warming will continue for many centuries, even after atmospheric CO2 levels are stabilized. In this paper, we assess the CO2 emissions requirements for global temperature stabilization within the next several centuries, using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity. We show first that a single pulse of carbon released into the atmosphere increases globally averaged surface temperature by an amount that remains approximately constant for several centuries, even in the absence of additional emissions. We then show that to hold climate constant at a given global temperature requires near-zero future carbon emissions. Our results suggest that future anthropogenic emissions would need to be eliminated in order to stabilize global-mean temperatures. As a consequence, any future anthropogenic emissions will commit the climate system to warming that is essentially irreversible on centennial timescales.

Political acceptability is certainly a big problem. That said, contraction and convergence has some hope of (a) solving the problem (b) being feasible and (c) seeming fair.