Feb 20, 2007, 11:43 GMT
Beijing - Climate change is heating up China faster than the rest of the world, and extreme weather such as heavy rainfalls, typhoons, drought and desertification is on the rise, the China Meteorological Administration said.
The agency's report, carried Tuesday on the official Xinhua News Agency, said China's surface temperature had risen 0.22 degrees every 10 years for the past 50 years, which was higher than the increases seen globally and in the Northern Hemisphere as a whole.
It also predicted that temperatures would rise at a faster rate in the future. In comparison to average temperatures recorded from 1961 to 1990, China's average temperatures would increase 1.3 to 2.1 degrees by 2020, 1.5 to 2.8 degrees by 2030, 2.3 to 3.3 degrees by 2050 and 3.9 to 6 degrees by 2100, it forecast.
The report warned that the rising heat would cause the glaciers in north-western China to shrink 27 per cent by 2050. Precipitation countrywide would increase by 2 to 3 per cent by 2020, by 5 to 7 per cent by 2050 and by 11 to 17 per cent by 2100, it added.
Typhoons would become larger and more powerful, the weather agency said, and the chances that eastern China would experience extreme rainfall would be four to six times higher in the next four to five years in comparison with the 1980s and '90s.
Sea levels would also rise by 12 to 50 centimetres by 2050, it predicted.
The weather agency said that while some areas of China could suffer under heavy rainfall and storms, arid areas would grow and more land would turn to desert and increase the country's sandstorms.
The warmer trend seemed to be showing itself during the Chinese New Year, which began Sunday. This year's Lunar New Year's festival, which is being celebrated this week, is the warmest since record-keeping began. Temperatures generally at this time of year lie around the freezing point, but the weather in Beijing Tuesday was at a springlike 15 degrees.
Since 1987, China has experienced 19 warm winters, and normal cold weather returned only in 2004 and 2005.
China is not only heavily impacted by global warming but is also helping to cause it. The most populous country in the world is the world's largest coal consumer and was predicted to overtake the United States in 2009 as the globe's largest producer of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, which causes global warming.
Unlike the United States, China has ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. China, however, is exempt from its limits as a developing country.
It has set its own goal to reduce its energy consumption per unit of its gross domestic product by 20 per cent by 2010. However, China has failed to meet similar ambitious targets by wide margins in the past.
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WillSep 23rd, 2008 - 21:17:41
China is very close to the ocean and is very crowded. If the average temperature increases, hyperthermia will become more common.
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