– Someone once commented that few people will just lie down and starve quietly.China’s ability to feed itself is near an edge and it shows no signs of reigning in the population’s dreams of western style affluence. Its water tables are falling and temperatures are rising. When the food does run short, it will uncork its vast coffers of trade-surplus money and wade into the international food markets to buy food to stave off social instability at home and this, in turn, will drive food prices beyond the reach of many in marginal nations and global stability will be well on its way down the slippery slope.
– China is a coming global train wreck, powering into the dead-end alley of more growth and more consumption with the pedal to the metal and this report is merely a small note someone tossed off the train as it passed.
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BEIJING (AFP) Temperatures in China will rise significantly in coming decades and water shortages will worsen, state media has reported, citing the government’s first national assessment of global climate change.
Greenhouse gases released due to human activity are leading to ever more serious problems in terms of climate change,” the Ministry of Science and Technology said in a statement.
Global climate change has an impact on the nation’s ability to develop further,” said the ministry, one of 12 government departments that prepared the report.
In just over a decade, global warming will start to be felt in the world’s most populous country, and it will get warmer yet over the next two or three generations.
Compared with 2000, the average temperatures will increase by between 1.3 and 2.1 degrees Celsius by 2020, the China News Service reported, citing the assessment.
By the middle of the century, the annual average temperature in China will rise by as much as 3.3 degrees Celsius (more than five degrees Fahrenheit), and by 2100 it could soar by as much as six degrees Celsius, according to the news service.
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