Disaster-prone China takes heed of global warming

Breaking Earth News: Global Warming/Climate Change
Aug 28, 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - Storms, floods, heat and drought that have killed more than 2,000 people in China this year are a prelude to weather patterns likely to become more extreme due to global warming, the head of the Beijing Climate Centre said.
China was braced for further hardship as rising temperatures worldwide trigger increasingly extreme weather, Dong Wenjie, director-general of the climate centre, said.
"The precise causes of these phenomena aren't easy to determine on their own," Dong told Reuters of meteorological disasters that have caused 160 billion yuan ($20 billion) worth of damage this year.
"But we know the broad background is global warming. That's clear. It's a reminder that global warming will bring about increasingly extreme weather events more often."
A study issued by China's chief climate scientists last year predicted that mean temperatures across China were likely to climb, forcing major changes in rainfall, desertification, river flows and crop production.
Yet even as China approaches the United States as the world's largest producer of the manmade greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, Beijing is set against mandatory ceilings on its emissions, experts said.
"China's preoccupation is economic development and growth," said Paul Harris, of Lingnan University in Hong Kong, who studies climate change policy.
"It seems Chinese policy-makers are beginning to take warnings about global warming on board. But they certainly don't want to sign on to compulsory caps."
Global warming may increase rainfall in China's north, but increased temperatures and evaporation there are likely to offset much or all of that, Lin Erda, a climate expert at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told Reuters.
Without corrective action, nationwide agricultural production was likely to fall between 5 and 10 percent, he said.