Global warming is contributing to an unusually harsh typhoon season in China that started around a month early and has left thousands dead or missing, government officials and experts said.
"The natural disasters caused by typhoons in our country have been many this year," the head of the China Meteorological Administration, Qin Dahe, said in recent comments on his organization's Web site.
"Against the backdrop of global warming, more and more strong and unusual climatic and atmospheric events are taking place," he said.
PHOTO: AP
"The strength of typhoons are increasing, the destructiveness of typhoons that have made landfall is greater and the scope in which they are travelling is farther than normal," he said.
The vice minister of the Ministry of Water Resources, E. Jingping, also spoke last week about the unusual ferocity, frequency and earliness of typhoons in China this year.
He said the typhoon season in China normally starts around July 27, but this year the first typhoon hit the southern province of Guangdong on May 18.
"This is the earliest typhoon to hit Guangdong since 1949," he said in a speech.
Natural disasters in China this year have killed 1,699 people and left 415 missing, the nation's Red Cross Society said last week.
More than 1,300 of those died in weather-related incidents from May to the end of last month, the government reported earlier.
Those reports came before the arrival on last Thursday of Saomai, the eighth typhoon of the season and the strongest to hit China in 50 years.
Saomai killed at least 214 people, mostly in the two eastern coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian, according to figures released yesterday.
The president of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown said that the weather in China over the past few months was reflective of the worldwide extent of the problem of global warming.
"The emerging consensus in the scientific community is that higher temperatures bring more frequent and more destructive storms," Brown said.
"Our seasons seem to be beginning earlier and ending later," he said.
According to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the earth's average temperature has risen by 0.8?C since 1970, he said.
But this is only the beginning of what the UN's International Panel on Climate Change believes will be a rise in temperature for this century of 1.4?C to 5.8?C.
"Just imagine what typhoons and hurricanes might be like in the future," Brown said.
Simply put, the storms are caused when warmer oceanic and atmospheric currents interact with cooler currents in tropic and sub-tropical regions, experts say.
Many of the cooler oceanic currents stem from the melting of the polar ice caps that is occurring due to rising global temperatures, said Edwin Lau, who monitors global warming at Friends of the Earth in Hong Kong.
"The hurricanes and typhoons are due to hot air rising... and the hotter the air, the spinning of the hurricanes is faster, picking up more water," Lau said.
Meanwhile, as some areas of China are hit by more typhoons and the resulting floods, other areas are suffering from intense drought, which experts say is another by-product of global warming.
In a landmark report in the mid-1990s, the UN panel on climate change predicted that global warming would leave southern China drenched with more rains, while the north and west of the country would suffer worsening droughts.
In Sichuan Province, directly to the west of where much of the devastation from the typhoons has occurred, nearly seven million people are currently inurgent need of drinking water due to a severe drought, state press said on Friday.
In the southwestern city of Chongqing, the drought is beginning to threaten the water supply for about 17 million people, according to another state press report.
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
DIALOGUE: US president-elect Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform confirmed that he had spoken with Xi, saying ‘the call was a very good one’ for the US and China US president-elect Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) discussed Taiwan, trade, fentanyl and TikTok in a phone call on Friday, just days before Trump heads back to the White House with vows to impose tariffs and other measures on the US’ biggest rival. Despite that, Xi congratulated Trump on his second term and pushed for improved ties, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The call came the same day that the US Supreme Court backed a law banning TikTok unless it is sold by its China-based parent company. “We both attach great importance to interaction, hope for
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
CYBERSCAM: Anne, an interior decorator with mental health problems, spent a year and a half believing she was communicating with Brad Pitt and lost US$855,259 A French woman who revealed on TV how she had lost her life savings to scammers posing as Brad Pitt has faced a wave of online harassment and mockery, leading the interview to be withdrawn on Tuesday. The woman, named as Anne, told the Seven to Eight program on the TF1 channel how she had believed she was in a romantic relationship with the Hollywood star, leading her to divorce her husband and transfer 830,000 euros (US$855,259). The scammers used fake social media and WhatsApp accounts, as well as artificial intelligence image-creating technology to send Anne selfies and other messages
RSS