Monday, January 21, 2008
Starting out--china incentives on climate crisis
Today I read an AP story about how rising sea levels are making the clean water challenge for China, which is already immense, even harder. In Shanghai, salt water is leeching into the acquifer. The BBC had this yesterday "China is facing its worst drought in a decade, with water in parts of the Yangtze River at the lowest level in 142 years." Ships are running aground. Clear incentives to tackle global warming if the US leads. It's mostly our carbon out there.
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You cite the lowered level of the river as though it proves global warming - which it does NOT - and then proceed with your point as though your assertion is inarguable.
The origin of the Yangtze River is a glacier near Mount Geladandong. Along the way, its tributaries include scores of other rivers and and many hundreds of lakes (including 4 of China's largest) all of which derive much of their water from glacial melt from the high mountains of the Tibetan Plateau.
Global Warming would more likely cause INCREASED melting of snow and glaciers, thus increasing, paribus ceteris, the volume of water entering the river. Meanwhile, approximately one third of China's population lives in the Yangtze watershed, and they withdraw an enormous amount of the water for industrial and agricultural use. Much of that, indeed, evaporates rather than returning to the river from which it was drawn.
Some studies (such as World Wildlife Fund's "Living Waters" report on Agricultural Water Use and River Basin Conservation) underscore the brutal fact that RICE, a crop that produces only when cultivated in flooded fields, accounts for 90 percent of agricultural water in the South China regions of the Yangtze watershed. This is far out of proportion to other crops' water needs, and disproportionate to its relative nutritional value.
Drought contributes, but you can't point to a short period of drought as proof of Global Warming. That's no more proof of Global Warming than was the Dustbowl of the 1930's, or various droughts occasioned by the vagaries of "El Niño" in the Pacific Ocean.
Finally, it is not at all uncommon for salt water to leach into the aquifer of a coastal city, which after all, has been sucking the fresh water from its underlying strata for centuries, at an accelerating pace. Gravity and the mass of saline ocean waters exert a relentless head of pressure to replace the fresh water that has been removed. This is NOT a result of Global Warming, but of unabating consumption by an expanding population and industrial base.
Your comment reveals that you are either uninterested in hydrological basics or deliberately mis-stating facts to support a pre-conceived political view. Either shows you have no business discussing matters that are clearly beyond your pay grade.
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