The rising temperatures on the Roof of the World will have a
rippling effect on climate and environmental changes, Chinese
researchers said yesterday.
The data collected from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau by scientists
show that its temperature has risen by up to 0.42 C each decade
since 1980s.
"The rising temperature has made us look for answers to a series
of questions: how will the change affect the climate in the
vicinity, the rest of China, Asia and even the world?", Xu Xiangde,
a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological
Sciences, said.
While Xu was speaking to China Daily, about 500
scientists and officials were huddled together in Paris to iron out
a report on how fast the world was warming, how serious global
warming was and how much were humans to blame for that.
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change report is
expected tomorrow, says AP.
Xu said decades of research on the plateau had found that a
change or move in water vapor or clouds above the plateau would
create an impact, immediate or remote, on weather conditions in
other parts of China, and even the world.
For instance, based on analyses of satellite data, Xu and his
colleagues have traced the cloud clusters that caused the floods in
the summer of 1998 the worst in decades in China back to the strong
movement of clouds above the plateau in July that year.
Researchers have partly attributed the scorching weather to the
temperature on the plateau, which was 2 to 4 C higher in 2005-06
winter, according to a report of the National Meteorological
Center.
Snow cover on the plateau dropped up to 10 percent compared with
other years, it said.
One of the worst results of the rising temperature on the
plateau could be an ultimate change in the volume of water flowing
into the Yangtze, the Yellow and other rivers that originate in the
mountainous region, Xu said.
But meteorological data from the Qinghai-Tibet region were not
sufficient, he said.
China and Japan are cooperating on a four-year meteorological
research project to build new generation observation stations on
and around the plateau to get a forewarning on possible climatic
disasters.
Aside from Japan, China has also worked with the United States,
the Republic of Korea and other countries to better understand
climatic changes on the plateau, said Li Yueqing, director of the
Chengdu Institute of Plateau Meteorology under the China
Meteorological Administration.
Already, researchers at the China Aero Geophysical Survey and
Remote Sensing Center for Land and Resources have found that the
plateau's glaciers have been melting at an average of 131.4 square
kilometers a year over the past three decades.
And they have estimated that rising temperatures would be
largely responsible for the reduction of the glaciers by a third by
2050.
Plus, the rising snow line and shrinking glaciers are likely to
influence temperature changes in the plateau region, Xu said.
Fang Hongbin, an official of the center, said melting glaciers
would increase the flow of water in rivers and lakes in a short
term, but in the long run, downstream rivers would gradually dry
up, and there would be more droughts, desertification and
sandstorms.
(China Daily February 1, 2007)
