Chinese experts also attributed the country's extreme weather conditions to climate change.

The chief forecaster at CMA, Wang Yongguang, said abnormal weather would continue to plague most parts of China this summer and in the years to come.

Although the effects of global warming have become increasingly obvious in China this year statistics show that it has been a gradual process. The CMA said in early March that the winter season from December 2006 to February 2007 recorded a national average temperature of 2.4 degrees Centigrade below zero, causing China to experience its second warmest winter in 50 years, following the warmest winter in the country between 1998 and 1999, with an average temperature of 2.3 degrees Centigrade below zero.

China is certainly not the only victim of climate change. This summer Europe has been split by climate. Above a line roughly running from the Pyrenees to Bulgaria, three humid months have been punctuated by violent storms and enormous cloudbursts; while to the south there have been a succession of heatwaves, each more intense than the last. There have also been rare brutal snowstorms in South America and terrible floods in Southeast Asia, killing 1,400 and resulting in 20 million homeless.

"An abnormality of atmospheric circulation is the direct cause of these global weather extremes," said Ren Fumin, a researcher with the Climate Center of CMA. "But in essence, it is the global warming that has resulted in the abnormal weather conditions."

Joint efforts

Global warming effects have and will always vary for natural reasons. However, human activities are increasing significantly the concentrations of some gases in the atmosphere, such as greenhouse gases (GHG), which tend to warm the earth's surface.

"Global warming includes two aspects. On one hand, nature has its own course of climate change and on the other hand, human activity plays an important role regarding the warming trend," said Gu Wanlong, Director Assistant of the Climate Center of CMA.

The Chinese Government has stepped up its efforts to prevent the natural disasters in a more profound way besides devoting a great deal of human and material resources to help disaster-affected people.

China set up a think tank on climate change this January adding to its efforts to brace for potential extreme weather. The think tank, including 12 members from 11 government agencies and research institutes, is designed to offer advice and devise strategies and regulations to tackle climate change, following the examples of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada which have set up similar think tanks and have put climate change on their lists of national security threats.

On June 4, China issued a national plan to address climate change and a move aimed at demonstrating the country's determination to reduce GHG emissions.

The National Climate Change Program is the first such plan made by a developing country. In it China pledges to restructure its economy, promote clean technology and improve energy efficiency.

The plan also says that regional cooperation on climate change should function as "a helpful complement" to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol rather than replacing or weakening them.

"Climate change is a major global issue of common concern to the international community," the plan states, underlining the importance of international cooperation.

China has already been cooperating with its neighbor India on climate change. In December 2006, the two countries agreed to send an expedition to the Himalayas to study the impact that global warming is having on glaciers.

Many experts, some foreigners included, expect China to play an increasingly large role in the fight against global warming.

"Global warming is an area where the United States especially has abdicated what is right for what is expedient. This is an opportunity, perhaps at not even very great cost, for China to assert its moral authority," said George A. Akerlof, the winner in 2001 of the Nobel Prize for Economics, in a paper he delivered to the China-U.S. Climate Change Forum in Berkeley in May 2006.

Extreme weather events: - Anhui Province: The highest rainfall since 1954 hit Huaihe River in July, resulting in a flood and drainage area covering 115 square km - Chongqing Municipality: On July 17, rainfall in Shapingba hit 266.6 mm, the highest in 115 years of meteorological records - Shandong Province: A cloudburst in Jinan City on July 18 resulted in 151 mm of rainfall in one hour, the highest since records began there in 1958 - Yunnan Province: Mud-rock flows and landslides resulting from rainstorms caused an economic loss of 900 million yuan - Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region: Rainfall from July 16 to 20 in western Xinjiang caused floods, resulting a death toll of 30 in four days - South China: Temperatures above 35 degrees Centigrade lasted 15 to 21 days in most parts of south China, and 32 days in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, the longest period of excessive temperatures in the city since records began there in 1880 - Northeast China: In July Heilongjiang Province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region suffered their second lowest level of rainfall in meteorological records Source: China Meteorological Administration