Beijingers will be reaching for their handkerchiefs and face masks this spring as dusty weather has been forecast for the city because of too little winter snow. This is according to Shi Hanmin, head of the municipal Environmental Protection Bureau, who gave the gloomy outlook on January 22.

China's grey capital has only seen two snowfalls this winter and the temperature on sanjiu days, a traditional term for the coldest nine days of the year, stood at minus 1.3 degrees Celsius, the warmest for 13 years.

Actually, it is not only Beijing where temperatures are on the rise. China as a whole was hot in 2006-and that's not talking about just the economy. Average temperatures had the mercury up to steamy levels not seen since 1951. With the heat came a steady stream of natural disasters, racking up massive economic losses of 212 billion yuan, next only to 1998, when severe flooding devastated the mainland.

With this disturbing climatic scenario, the release of the country's first-ever National Assessment Report on Climate Change couldn't have come at a better time. On December 26 the Ministry of Science and Technology, the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly published the country's first-ever National Assessment Report on Climate Change. The report, which was compiled over a period of four years, shows the worrying impact global warming has had and how it will affect China in the future.

More heat and disasters

Xu Ying, an expert on climate change with CMA who participated in the writing of the report, told Beijing Review that the rise in average temperature correlates to a more dramatic fluctuation of extreme temperatures from the perspective of statistics. "The accelerated water circulation under a higher temperature will enhance the intensity and frequency of droughts and floods," he said, adding that the direct cause of extreme weather events is also related to global warming.

The report predicts that the average temperature in China will rise 1.3 to 2.1 degrees Celsius by 2020. The resultant high occurrence of heat waves could spur an increase in heart and blood diseases, malaria and dengue fever.

An important conclusion of the report is that the trend of rising temperatures in China will last for the next 100 years, while extreme weather events and natural disasters will occur more frequently as a result of accelerated warming.

The relationship between the rise of temperatures and extreme weather events is a dangerous one.

Severe natural disasters in 2006 took 2,704 lives and over 200 billion yuan in economic losses. The worst of these included Typhoon Saomai, the most destructive typhoon in Zhejiang Province in 100 years, as well as the worst droughts Chongqing Municipality and Sichuan Province have experienced in a century.

Meanwhile, the country's annual average rainfall is projected to increase by 2 to 3 percent by 2020. This increase in precipitation is not expected to protect north China against deepening water shortages and mounting droughts, however, because warming temperatures will lead to greater evaporation, the study says. The report also envisions that continued warming will cause the runoff of rivers in the north to climb and runoff of rivers in the south to drop, which will lead to more frequent flooding and droughts and worsen the instability and regional water supply-and-demand contradiction.

It is not only rivers that are to be debilitated by the global warming. Predictions are that China's coastal sea level will rise by 0.01 meter to 0.16 meter by 2030, which will subject coastal areas to flooding and storms. This comes about because of glaciers in the nation's west melting down by 27.2 percent by 2050, according to the report.

Another imminent hazard posed by global warming to China, identified in the report, is food security. The report warns that both crop distribution and production will be affected by the changes in temperature and precipitation, with the output of major crops such as wheat, rice, and corn falling by up to 37 percent in the second half of the century if no effective measures are taken.

According to China Youth Daily's interview with Lin Erda, one of the senior consultants of the report and a researcher of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), China's population will peak at 1.5 billion around 2030, which requires the extra production of 100 million tons of grain every year; however, the report forecasts the total output of crops will be reduced by 5 to 10 percent by global warming by then, which means China will have a shortfall of 30 million to 50 million tons. "I think many people are overoptimistic about the issue of grain security," Lin said.

Melting glaciers

Yao Tandong, China's leading glaciologist and Director of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is one of a small number of people who have witnessed global warming first hand. For over a decade, Yao has been conducting field research on his specialty of the ice core at the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the highest plateau in the world.

Shocked by evidence of the accelerated melting of glaciers in the region since the early 1990s, Yao recently announced his findings of the last 10 years: the retreating glaciers are accelerating; advancing glaciers are beginning to retreat; and even the ice cap on the world's highest mountain peak has begun thinning.

Nicknamed "the third pole," the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is acknowledged as a barometer for global climate change. Meteorologists believe that changes on the plateau's ice cap and snow volumes will affect monsoon and rain patterns in China, as well as the climate change around East Asia and beyond.

Xu Ying of the CMA said while the global glaciers' retreat since the end of the Little Ice Age (1350-1850) seems normal, the worrisome phenomenon is the accelerated melting since the early 1990s, the warmest decade in human record. "This will subject tens of millions of people worldwide to mounting threats of more droughts, floods and lack of drinking water," she said.

A four-year, 10-million-yuan satellite remote sensing survey on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau by the China Geological Survey Bureau shows that glaciers on the plateau have shrunk by 131.4 square km annually, twice the size of the Beijing downtown area. The survey shows that glaciers on the outskirts of the plateau have already decreased by 10 percent and those in the hinterland have shrunk by 5 percent.

Researchers said the melting of the glaciers has brought abundant water to the rivers, lakes and wetlands on the plateau and its surrounding areas in the short term. A study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2004 indicated that the annual runoff of rivers in China's northwest, whose headstreams are supplied by the region's melting glaciers, had increased by 5.5 percent over the last 10 years.

"But as the glacier shrinkage accelerates, the plateau's total water storage will decrease rapidly," said Fang Hongbin, a remote sensing experts, told Xinhua News Agency.

Experts point out that since the plateau supplies the headstreams of many of the major rivers in East, Southeast and South Asia, the decrease of water storage in the region will have a significant impact on the economic and social development of China as well as neighboring countries.

Lin of the CAAS, who had conducted several field surveys to Tibet, told China Youth Daily that the accelerated melting of glaciers has caused the rise of water levels of local lakes, submerging pastures. But he said such a scenario will not be sustainable, as the withdrawal of glaciers will eventually lead to the shrinkage of these lakes. He said government leaders from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have been worried about the latest findings in the acceleration of glaciers' melting in Xinjiang, whose economic pillar of oasis farming and cattle-raising relies keenly on a steady water supply from glaciers.

Yao of the CAS warned that, "The full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau region will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe." He referred to the long-term aftermaths of glaciers' shrinkage, including the draining of rivers, arid climate and worsening desertification in China.

"The melting of glaciers will lead to the exposure of microbes that have been buried under the ice cap for tens of thousands of years and the spread of microbes will pose potential dangers to human health," said Xu of the CMA.

More efforts needed from government

As the world's second largest emitter of carbon dioxide after the United States, China is gradually losing its edge of low per-capita emission against industrial countries, because of its backward and energy-consuming industrial equipment. CMA Director Qin Dahe predicted in 2004 that China was likely to become the world's largest emitter of CO2 by 2025 if no preventive measures were taken.

China has found itself under a growing obligation to cut its mounting emissions of greenhouse gases, driven by the country's roaring economic growth.

Li Xueyong, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology, told media at the release of the National Assessment Report on Climate Change, "The report will serve as the country's scientific and technical reference in policy making and international cooperation and shows China's attention to the global issue and its resolve to work together with the international community."

Li also said his ministry has listed "the monitoring and countermeasures of global climate change" as a national key project and China will increase the investment in research and development of energy-saving technologies, renewable-resource technologies, nuclear power technologies, clean coal technologies, and carbon dioxide capture and storage.

Besides summarizing China's scientific research on climate change and shedding light on future scientific studies, the report's other two objectives include providing decision-making references in drafting the nation's long-term economic and social development strategies and scientific evidence for China's participation in international joint efforts to curb climate change.

China has joined over 50 international treaties on environmental protection, including the milestone United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol. In order to fulfill China's international commitments to reducing the emission of greenhouse gases, the government has formulated a series of measures to deal with climate change, including policies of enhancing energy efficiency, saving energy, developing renewable resources and increasing plantation of trees.

In China's economic and social development plan for the five years between 2006 and 2010, the government has set goals of reducing energy consumption per 10,000 yuan of gross domestic product by 20 percent, major pollutant emission by 10 percent and enhancing forestry coverage to 20 percent.

The report has put forward a new goal of realizing a zero growth or minus growth of carbon emission from the middle of this century. Toward this goal, the report also promulgates an outline of China's efforts to relieve climate changes: while guaranteeing the social and economic development goals of building a well-off society in 2020 and realizing industrialization and modernization by the middle of the 21st century, China is about to initiate a transformation of economic growth and social consumption models, develop and popularize energy-saving techniques, enhance energy usage efficiency, develop renewable resources, nuclear power, coal usage with low-carbon emission and hydrogen power technologies. China will continue to streamline its energy mix, protect its ecological environment and develop a low-carbon emission economy to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases.

Forecast for 2007 While unsure about British scientists' prediction that 2007 will be a record hot year, Chinese meteorologists forecast that 2007 is another bad year for China. Dong Wenjie, Director of the National Climate Center, announced last December in Beijing that agricultural production in 2007 will be negatively affected by natural disasters more than in a normal year. This year will see a relatively larger number of extreme weather events, with south China prone to floods and the north prone to droughts during the flood season. The British Government's weather forecasting division projects that the world is likely to experience its warmest recorded year in 2007 because of the effects of El Niño-a warming of the eastern Pacific's equatorial waters that occurs every two to seven years-and an increase of greenhouse gases from human activities. In a statement posted on its website on January 4, England-based Met Office forecasts that there is a 60 percent chance that this year will be hotter than 1998, the current warmest year. During an interview with China Youth Daily, Ren Guoyu, a climate change expert with CMA, said it is hard to tell the credibility of this prediction. He thinks that for temperatures of 2007 to beat the current record, two conditions must be met: First, El Niño, which started in the middle of 2006, must be strong enough; second, there is no major volcano eruption.