Relationships between energy consumption and climate change in China

Energy consumption has an inevitable connection with economic level and climate. Based on selected data covering annual total energy consumption and its composition and that of all kinds of energy in 1953–1999, the annual residential energy consumption and the coal and electricity consumption in 1980–1999 in China, the acreage of crops under cultivation suffered from drought and flood annually and gross domestic product (GDP) in 1953–1999 in the whole country, and mean daily temperature data from 29 provincial meteorological stations in the whole country from 1970 to 1999, this paper divides energy consumption into socio-economic energy consumption and climatic energy consumption in the way of multinomial. It also goes further into the relations and their changes between the climate energy consumption and climate factor and between the socio-economic energy consumption and the economic level in China with the method of statistical analysis. At present, there are obvious transitions in the changing relationships of the energy consumption to economy and climate, which comprises the transition of economic system from resource-intensive industry to technology-intensive industry and the transition of climatic driving factors of the energy consumption from driven by the disasters of drought and flood to driven by temperature.