Climate expert Richard Muller urges China to use more gas

The most effective way to combat global warming would be for China to switch from burning coal to natural gas, says climate-change expert Richard Muller.

And he urged the United States to share the necessary technology with China in a lecture yesterday at the University of Hong Kong.

"The US is no longer in control; China and the developing world is in control," said the professor from the University of California, Berkeley, who in July announced his "conversion" from being a sceptic to a proponent of the theory that climate change is real and largely caused by man.

The physicist and climate scientist spent three years studying the earth's surface temperature changes over the past 250 years and found it matches greenhouse-gas records. It was something he had never thought he would be doing five years ago.

"Global warming is real and it's dangerous. It's bigger than most people thought, in a sense that humans are contributing to not just most of it, but all of it," Muller said.

According to the China National Coal Association, coal production rose by 3.6 per cent in the first three quarters of the year from the same period last year, to 2.88 billion tonnes. In the same period, the mainland consumed 3.02 billion tonnes of coal.