Earth System Science: the climate in China
from the Earth System Science Partnership conference - see blog page here.
The news on television at the conference hotel this morning went like this: CNN – all election, all the time. CCTV (China Central Television) – drought in Heibei, and a police crack-down on illegal oil smuggling, complete with the discovery of sand-bag-hidden pipes on the beach leading from ship to shore.
The environmental problems in China, well known internationally and of obvious interest to the local press too, were summarised nicely this morning by co-chair and director of the China Meteorological Administration Qin Dahe (who is, apparently, somewhat famous in China for his adventurous meteorological adventures in the Antarctic and on the Tibetan glaciers).
According to Dahe’s figures, cribbed from two Chinese volumes summarising climate change in China, temperature changes in this country mirror global patterns but have been more pronounced (particularly a rise in temperatures from 1920-1960 that sticks up prominently in China but is a statistical blip on the world map). Ditto sea level rise, which clocks in at 1-2.5 mm /year over the last 50 years, higher than the IPCC global assessment which is, I believe, about 1-2 mm/year.
Temperature increases of 3.9-6 C are expected by 2100. The good news – if you can call rainfall changes that bring floods and droughts good news – is a decrease in dust storms over the past 50 years, from 6 events a year in the 50s down to 3 events per year today.
Meteorological disasters, he told the press, take about 3-6% off China's GDP every year.
In response to such statistics, the Chinese government has announced a goal of reducing energy ‘intensity’ – the energy it takes to produce a unit of GDP – by 20% by 2010. That doesn’t necessarily mean an absolute reduction in CO2 emissions, as Dahe’s co-chair Gordon McBean pointed out to me later. But, he adds, it at least addresses part of the problem. (McBean, a science policy expert at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, had some things to say about Canada’s governmental response to climate change too – more on that later).