Will China save the planet or destroy it?

THOUGH HE LAY dying of brain cancer, Tu Changwang had one last thing to say. The respected Chinese meteorologist had noticed that the climate was warming. So in 1961 he warned in the , a Communist Party mouthpiece, that this might alter the conditions that sustain life. Yet he saw the warming as part of a cycle in solar activity that would probably go into reverse at some point. Tu did not suspect that the burning of fossil fuels was pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and causing the climate to change. In that issue of the , a few pages before his paper, there was a photo of grinning coalminers. China was rushing to industrialise with the aim of catching up economically with the West.