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As dust settles from the recent UN climate-change conference in Indonesia, some observers are looking to China as the looming pivotal factor in the global-warming struggle.

The world’s most populous nation, now also neck-and-neck with the U.S. as its biggest greenhouse polluter, was the subject of a recent news article under the banner “As China goes, so goes global warming.”

The best the Bali delegates could achieve was two more years of talks on setting emission curbs, but with China building new coal-burning plants at the rate of one a week, in what states of peril will the planet be two years hence?

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Relentless human-population growth coupled with rising consumption has outpaced the planet’s ability to cope. An article in BBC’s Green Room says we are now in "overshoot" — our numbers and levels of consumption greater than Earth's capacity to sustain us for the long-term. The writer says we must end world population growth, and then reduce population size in industrialized as well as developing nations.

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China, the world’s most populous nation as well as its biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, is forecast to experience as much as a 10 per cent cut in its annual grain harvest due to global warming.

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A survey of hundreds of businesses in Australia found 86 per cent of executives “overwhelmingly concerned” about global warming, and 77 per cent said companies are most responsible for curbing the threat.

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Controlling population growth is a crucial factor in reducing global warming, a California group says, and America had better get a grip. Americans are already the most voracious consumers and greatest producers of greenhouse gases per capita of any nation on earth, it said, and its population "has been doubling every 40 years and is headed for one billion before the end of this century."