[From LiveScience.com]
BEIJING (AP)—Stephen Hawking expressed concern about global warming Wednesday even as he charmed and provoked a group of Chinese students.
Before an audience of 500 at a seminar in Beijing, the celebrity cosmologist said, "I like Chinese culture, Chinese food and above all Chinese women. They are beautiful.”
The audience of mostly university students and professors and a smattering of journalists laughed and applauded.
Asked about the environment, Hawking, who suffers from a degenerative disease, uses a wheelchair and speaks through a computerized voice synthesizer, said he was "very worried about global warming.”
He said he was afraid that Earth "might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid.”
The comment is a pointed one for China—which is the second largest emitter of the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming, after the United States. Experts warn that if emissions aren’t reduced the world’s glaciers could melt, threatening cities and triggering droughts and other environmental disasters.
An occasional visitor to China, Hawking was in Beijing to attend a conference on string theory, an area of physics that attempts to explain and model the universe.
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Tags: Environment, war <BR/>