Posted on 01/26/2003 4:21:31 PM PST by neutrino
26 January 2003
Gigantic dust clouds swirling over China are threatening the world's most populous country with the first-ever "ecological meltdown", experts here warn.
The clouds – which stretch for thousands of miles over Asia and have even reached across the Pacific to North America – are rising from a rapidly growing dust bowl in northern China that far outstrips the notorious one in the United States in the 1930s.
It threatens to drive up the price of food and greatly increase starvation worldwide, and could lead to tens of millions of desperate Chinese environmental refugees.
"No country has ever faced a potential ecological catastrophe on the scale of the dust bowl now developing in China," says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington. "Merely grasping its dimensions and consequences poses a serious analytical challenge."
Dust storms have been recorded in China for at least 2,700 years, but they are now increasing alarmingly both in size and in number. The Chinese Meteorological Agency says there were just five major storms in the country in the whole of the 1950s. This rose to 23 in the 1990s. But the first two years of this decade have almost equalled this figure already, with 20.
The storms – which peak in late winter and early spring – can blot out daylight in Beijing and other cities, make it hard for millions of people to breathe and destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of crops. They have closed schools and airports in South Korea and Japan, and caused a Korean car factory to shrink-wrap its vehicles as soon as they come off the production line to stop them being spoiled.
They have even occasionally crossed the Pacific: one in April 2001 covered the west of North America from Canada to Arizona with dust.
The clouds sweep up millions of tons of precious topsoil from Chinese fields and pastures. Gone in a single day, the soil will take centuries to replace. But this is just the most dramatic symptom of the accelerating spread of deserts across the country, which is home to nearly one in every four people on the planet.
Between 1994 and 1999, the country's Environmental Protection Agency reports, the Gobi Desert expanded by 20,240 square miles, to within just 150 miles of Beijing, New, smaller, areas of desert are erupting all over the country. In all, this "desertification" is affecting 40 per cent of the country's land. Partly as a result, harvests – which more than quadrupled between 1950 and 1998 – have fallen sharply, even as China's population and appetite grow.
In Ganzu province alone, some 4,000 villages are facing being submerged by drifting sands, and the Earth Policy Institute believes that throughout the country tens of millions of people may be forced off their land, dwarfing the migrations of the "Okies" from the American dust bowl.
The institute blames "over-cultivation, overgrazing, over-cutting and over-pumping" for the escalating catastrophe. Marginal land is being increasingly pressed into cultivation, but quickly turns to dust under the strain. The country's 290 million sheep and goats strip the vegetation off grazing lands. Cutting down forests removes the trees that bind soil to the ground. And excessive pumping of water from underground acquifers dramatically lowers water tables, drying out the earth.
China is belatedly trying to get to grips with the crisis. It is planting 26 million acres – a tenth of its grain-growing area – with trees. But many die because the soil is already too thin; and, say critics, too many are being planted around Beijing so as to try to "green" the city – and clean the air – before the 2008 Olympics.
As the crisis continues, Mr Brown predicts, the world will soon feel the pinch. So far China has compensated for its falling harvests by eating stocks, but soon it will have to buy massive amounts of grain on world markets. He warns: "Grain prices could double – impoverishing more people in a shorter period of time than any event in history. It would create a world food economy dominated by scarcity rather than by surpluses, as has been the case over most of the last half a century."
What? They have an EPA? And it's run by Communists?
Our countries have so much in common!
Nope. It's due to Global Warming. Good thing we have the Kyoto Protocol to come to the rescue. Oh wait, China is exempted from that. Never mind.
It is planting 26 million acres – a tenth of its grain-growing area – with trees. But many die because the soil is already too thin; and, say critics, too many are being planted around Beijing so as to try to "green" the city – and clean the air – before the 2008 Olympics.
Not to worry. American technology comes to the rescue.
The Chinese government recently agreed to a plan that would place an American company at the forefront of resolving this problem. As I understand it, this company has sole distribution rights for a tree that will not only grow in the most inhospitable conditions, but is also the fastest growing tree in the world. The tree, known as the Megaflora Tree (www.megafloratree.com), was created by US scientists and is now in great demand around the world. It grows to 65 feet in 7 years, though it can be harvested in as little as 18 months for pulp, to be used for biomass fuel or paper products. Even the envirowackos can't complain too loud about cutting this tree down, either, since a new tree will grow back up out of the old stump and reach 45 feet in only 2 years. Since it will grow in the desert and it grows so fast, it is the ideal tree to stop the encroachment of the Gobi Desert. But, I bet it really irks the envirowackos to know that a US company is going to be making money by helping the environment.
This is what interests me...
This is one of the ways we had the Soviets by their shall we say gonads. The soviets couldn't produce enough grain, causing starvation, the relied heavilly on our grain to sustain they're people, looks like we might get a similar hold on China before too long.
But than again, a destablilized China might not be a good thin.
I wanna get me a few.
My Mom lives in a small upstate NYS village that was covered by a canopy of 100 year old Maples when I was a boy.
The old Maples are coming down now and, of course, new ones take 2 or 3 generations to grow to any appreciable size.
I'd love to plant a half-dozen of these babies in Ma's front yard which looks like the prairie now that the old trees have been cut down.
I was in Korea during the spring of 1988 when one of these "yellow clouds" came through. I got very sick--fever, flat on my back, thought I was gonna die.
Yes, and second-hand cigarette smoke..
I'd love to plant a half-dozen of these babies in Ma's front yard which looks like the prairie now that the old trees have been cut down.
That might be rather difficult, since between the Chinese deal and a UN sustainable development project that they are involved in, every seedling that they can produce for the next 20 years is already taken. Nice business though, if you can get in on it. Imagine a business where everything that you can produce for 20 years is already pre-sold.
I'm just wondering what they look like, whether they're pretty or not.
There are a couple of good photos of both a single young tree and a plantation of some somewhat older trees on some of the sub-pages of their web site. One of the plantation shots shows their purple blossoms. I have seen other photos, since I am the person who built the web site for them, but those photos are not available on the net.
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