Global warming leading to extreme rainfall

London, Sat Feb 02 2013, 13:40 hrs

In the most comprehensive review of changes to extreme rainfall ever undertaken, researchers from the University of Adelaide, evaluated the association between extreme rainfall and atmospheric temperatures at more than 8000 weather gauging stations around the world, the telegraph reported.

"The results are that rainfall extremes are increasing on average globally. They show that there is a 7 percent increase in extreme rainfall intensity for every degree increase in global atmospheric temperature," lead author Dr Seth Westra said.

"Assuming an increase in global average temperature by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, this could mean very substantial increases in rainfall intensity as a result of climate change," he said.

Dr Westra, a Senior Lecturer with the University of Adelaide's School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering and member of the Environment Institute, said trends in rainfall extremes were examined over the period from 1900 to 2009 to determine whether they were becoming more intense or occurring more frequently.
"The results show that rainfall extremes were increasing over this period, and appear to be linked to the increase in global temperature of nearly a degree which also took place over this time.

"If extreme rainfall events continue to intensify, we can expect to see floods occurring more frequently around the world." Dr Westra added.

The strongest increases occurred in the tropical countries, although some level of increase seems to be taking place at the majority of weather gauging stations.

"Most of these tropical countries are very poor and thus not well placed to adapt to the increased risk of flooding, which puts them in a larger threat of devastation," he said.

China's environmental record

What pollution problems affect the major rivers of China? Why?
Why does China refer to Tibet as China's Water Tower Number One?
What happened to the plentiful wildlife of Tibet after Chinese invasion in 1950?
Starting around the 1960s, an experimental agricultural policy to replace traditional barley crops with wheat resulted in complete disaster. What happened?
What experimental policies in agriculture are currently pursued by Chinese authorities within Tibet?
At the eastern slopes of the Tibetan plateau, major deforestation has taken place since 1950. How much? With what impact?
Desertification is becoming a huge problem in northern China. What has happened to the grasslands of these regions? the real cost of china rising
—excerpted from a longer piece by columnist Margaret Wente in the Globe & Mail, Toronto, Nov. 2, 2010. It's tough to be an environmental activist in China. Just ask Dai Qing, a well-known dissident who's currently in Canada on a speaking tour. Her work is banned in China, and she's been thrown in jail.
“The whole world is talking about China rising,” she says.“But at what cost?”
The cost includes environmental devastation on a massive scale. Eighty per cent of the country's rivers and lakes are drying up, she says. Sixty per cent of the water in seven major river systems is unsuitable for human contact. A third of the land is contaminated by acid rain. Two-thirds of the grassland have become desertified, and most of the forest is gone. Forty per cent of the arable land has been degraded by fertilizers and pesticides. Of the world's 20 most polluted cities, 16 are in China. “In practice, the environment is owned by the state officials,” she says. “Land grabs have become the primary means for officials to get rich.”
Ms. Dai, an energetic 69-year-old, seems undaunted by the task of taking on the world's worst polluters. Dai Qing has given up much to fight for her convictions. As the daughter of a war hero, and the adopted daughter of a top Chinese official, she grew up among the political elite. She was a staunch party member until the 1980s, when she became convinced that the massive Three Gorges dam project would be an environmental and human disaster. After her ground-breaking book on the dam was published abroad in 1989, she was thrown in jail for 10 months. Today, her opinion of the project is unchanged, and she points out that even the government is backing away from its claims about the dam's ability to control floods.

Desertification

The current regime has now embarked on an even more ambitious project — a mighty effort to reroute the country's water supply in order to supply the thirsty city of Beijing. Officials compare it to the construction of the Great Wall. Critics call it a monumental folly. “They are robbing the water of the rest of China to supply Beijing,” Ms. Dai told one Western reporter. “And it probably won't work anyway.”

“The traditional Chinese ethic is gone from this society,” says Ms. Dai. These days, everyone is chasing money. Everyone wants a career as a public official because it's the gateway to becoming rich. “In today's China, with belief in neither traditional values nor the rule of law, money means everything to almost everyone.”
That's grim news for anyone who imagines that China might be persuaded to embrace environmental responsibility any time soon. Even so, Dai Qing hopes that by exposing corruption and abuses of power — and by harnessing the powers of the Internet, no matter how the regime tries to censor it — dedicated activists will gradually be able to engage the broader public. “The only way, I think, is to tell the truth.”

Tibetan plateau began to rise 30 million years ago, says new study

Tibetan plateau began to rise 30 million years ago, says a new study

Phayul[Saturday, August 18, 2012 19:41]

DHARAMSHALA, August 18: The rise of the Tibetan plateau, called the roof of the world, began much earlier than previously understood, a new report has found out.

In a research published online in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers have discovered that the growth of the Tibetan mountains and plateau began as early as 30 million years ago.“Our study suggests that high topography began to develop as early as 30 million years ago, and perhaps was present even earlier," Eric Kirby, associate professor of geoscience at Penn State said in a statement. It was until now believed the high mountains in eastern Tibet developed during the past 10 to 15 million years, as deep crust beneath the central Tibetan Plateau flowed to the plateau margin, thickening the Earth’s crust in this area and causing the area to rise. Using radioactive dating, Kirby and his team found that the uplift began twice as early.The study may help scientists better understand the complicated processes going on beneath the Himalayan Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau.
The Tibetan Plateau, with an average elevation of about 16,000 feet (4,900 meters), lies at the intersection of the most vigorous collision of continental plates on the planet, where the Indian continental plate rams into the Eurasian plate and dives beneath it.
The Indian tectonic plate began its collision with Asia between 55 and 50 million years ago, but “significant topographic relief existed adjacent to the Sichuan Basin prior to the Indo-Asian collision.”
Kirby and associates from around the world took samples from the hanging wall of the Yingxiu-Beichuan fault, the primary fault responsible for the 2008, Wenchuan earthquake, and used a variety of dating methods including the decay rate of uranium and thorium, helium in the minerals apatite and zircon, to tease out the ages of the rocks, which tells when they formed and gives clues to when they lifted.

They also used the fission track dating, an analysis of tracks or trails left by decaying uranium in minerals in apatite and zircon. “These methods allow us to investigate the thermal regime from about 250 degrees Celsius (482 degrees Fahrenheit) to about 60 degrees (140 degrees Fahrenheit),” said Kirby. “The results show that the rocks cooled relatively slowly during the early and mid-Cenozoic — from 30 to 50 million years ago — an indication that topography in the region was undergoing erosion.”


The findings also suggest that this gradual cooling was followed by two episodes of rapid erosion, one began 30 to 25 million years ago, while other dates back to 15 to 10 million years and is continuing even today. "These results challenge the idea that the topographic relief along the margin of the plateau developed entirely in the Late Miocene, 5 to 10 million years ago," Kirby said. "The period of rapid erosion between 25 to 30 million years ago could only be sustained if the mountains were not only present but actively growing at this time."

“We are still a long way from completely understanding when and how high topography in Asia developed in response to India-Asia collision,” Kirby said

Vietnam, US in Cleanup Work

2012-08-09

A chemical defoliant used in the war has sickened thousands, Hanoi says.

China

AFP

A man takes a picture of a dioxin-contaminated lake next to Danang airport, Aug. 9, 2012.More than 35 years after the end of the Vietnam War, Washington and Hanoi launched a joint project Thursday to clean up remnants of the toxic defoliant Agent Orange sprayed over Vietnamese forests by U.S. forces to deprive enemy fighters of cover.
Agent Orange contains the chemical dioxin, which has been linked to cases of cancer and birth defects suffered by Vietnamese civilians exposed to the toxin.Speaking on Thursday at the project launch near the former U.S. air base at Danang, one of three heavily dioxin-contaminated sites in Vietnam, U.S. Ambassador David Shear hailed the project as an “historic milestone” in bilateral relations.“Today’s ceremony marks the start of a project between Vietnam’s Ministry of National Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, to clean up dioxin-contaminated soil and sediment at the airport left from the Vietnam War,” Shear said.
“We have worked together closely over many years in a spirit of mutual respect and cooperation to reach this point,” he said.The former U.S. air base at Danang, where Agent Orange was mixed, stored, and loaded onto planes, has been closed to the public for the past five years, and a contaminated lake at the site has been walled off from area residents so that people no longer swim or fish there.
Birth defects.The Vietnamese government says that up to three million of the country’s people have been exposed to Agent Orange, with at least 150,000 children born with birth defects.

Vietnam and the United States normalized relations in 1995 following years of war and diplomatic isolation, and now enjoy growing trade ties and share concerns over Chinese assertions of sovereignty over the oil-and-resource-rich South China Sea.

As the U.S. $43 million project begun with Vietnam proceeds over the next four years, “workers will dig up the contaminated soil and sediment [left at Danang] and place it in a stockpile,” Shear said in his speech.

There, the contaminated soil will be subjected to a process using high temperatures to break down the dioxin, Shear said.This will make the soil “safe by Vietnamese and U.S. standards for the many men, women, and children who live and work in this area,” he said, adding, “there’s a lot of expertise present here today to make sure this job gets done right.”
“By the end of September, USAID will have started a new health and disability program to support people with disabilities, regardless of cause, in Danang and other locations,” Shear said.


Reported by Richard Finney.

Tibetan Shot Dead in Protest
2012-08-16


Chinese authorities disperse a mass demonstration against mining operations in Tibet.

AFP

An undated photo by Free Tibet shows Chinese paramilitary police marching on the streets of Ngaba.Chinese security forces shot dead a Tibetan and detained six others on Wednesday as they dispersed a crowd of 1,000 Tibetans protesting against the resumption of mining operations in a county in Tibet, sources said.The Tibetans from Choeten town in the Tibet Autonomous Region's Markham county marched to the mining site to underline their opposition to an upcoming project on environmental grounds but faced the wrath of the police, who used tear gas and live fire to disperse the crowd, the sources said.
A male protester named Nyima was killed by gunfire, said Lobsang Palden, a monk in South India, citing contacts in the region. "He was surrounded by the security forces, and none of the Tibetans could approach him," Palden said. "Many other protesters ran away into the forest to hide and have not returned home."
Six others were detained in the protest staged by "around a thousand people from Markham's Choeten town who went to the mining sites to prevent it [the project]."Opposition Five of those held were identified as Dawa, Atsong, Phuntsog Nyima, Jamyang Wangmo and Kelsang Yudron.A Chinese mining company began to operate in Markham earlier this year but suspended work when Tibetan residents of Choeten, a township of about 11 villages and 3,000 residents, opposed the project, Palden said.
"Yesterday, [the Chinese] came back again, saying that mining would go ahead."
Company employees say they are building an electrical power plant and not extracting resources, "but their work site is on a forested part of the mountain, so the local people don't believe them," Palden said.
"Chinese miners also say that they are working under government orders, and that Tibetans cannot prevent this, but local Tibetans say the work is being done by Chinese private companies collaborating with local authorities." "Tibetans in Markham have long resisted mining operations, which they believe are bad for the environment," he said.Standoffs Mining operations in Tibetan regions have led to frequent standoffs with Tibetans who accuse Chinese firms of disrupting sites of spiritual significance and polluting the environment as they extract local wealth.Last year, China's official media reported that investment in exploration of mineral resources in the Tibet Autonomous Region will be accelerated over a five-year period.Tibet has large proven and potential reserves of vital deposits but little exploration has been done so far, Xinhua news agency reported
Initial studies show that the Tibet Autonomous Region has China's largest chromium and copper reserves, while most of its rich iron, gold, silver, potassium, oil and natural gas reserves remain unexploited, the report said.




Reported by RFA's Tibetan service. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Richard Finney and Parameswaran Ponnudurai.