Be afraid of the weather, be very, very afraid.
From:
http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=9567
Early spring heatwave brings fear of global warming to China
Source: Copyright 2002, Agence France Presse Date: April 1, 2002
Record spring temperatures in northern China have set-off alarm bells among meteorologists who fear global warming could prompt a series of natural disasters, state press reported Monday.
Northern China witnessed unseasonally warm weather in Beijing, Tianjin and Shenyang on Sunday, with the mercury rising to a record high of 28.7 degrees Celsius (83.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Beijing.
Temperatures were expected to remain unusually warm for the rest of the week as the nation's weathermen announced the arrival of summer weeks in advance. According to Guo Hu, assistant head of China's Central Meteorological Observatory, fears of global warming have also been a prompted by unusually high temperatures throughout the winter.
Temperatures in Beijing this January were an average of two degrees Celsius (3.64 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, Guo was quoted by the Beijing Morning Post as saying Monday.
In February, temperatures were on average a massive five degrees Celsius above normal, while in March the mercury rose three degrees Celsius higher than average, he said.
Experts are concerned that higher temperatures brought on by global warming could bring drought to northern China while simultaneously causing disastrous floods in the country's south.
Such predictions were first made in the early and mid-1990s, when scientists were still debating whether global warming was due to human activities, like burning fossil fuels, or was part of a natural trend that periodically effects the earth's weather.
However, for Chinese meteorologists, 16 years of increasingly warmer winters was enough to convince them the relationship to human activity is undeniable, Zhao Zhenguo of the State Meteorological Center told the People's Daily last week.
'As far as China is concerned, warm winters began to occur in 1986 and since then our country has witnessed 16 years of warm winters,' he said.
China has witnessed especially damaging floods five times since 1991, mainly in the southern and central regions around, and south of the Yangtze River basin, with economic losses and deaths growing successively as the intensity of the flooding increased.
More than 1,200 people died in flooding along the Huai and Yangtze Rivers in 1991, while 4,150 were killed when worse floods ravaged the Yangtze River basin in 1998.
Meanwhile, northern China was struck by three years of drought between 1992 to 1997 and then again from 1999 to the present.
The ongoing drought in northern China was fueling desertification and threatening human and animal life with water shortages, Zhai Panmao, another researcher at the State Meteorological Center told the People's Daily.
