China warns of disasters from warming Tibet plateau

BEIJING, Feb 1 (Reuters) Chinese scientists have warned that rising temperatures on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau will melt glaciers, dry up major Chinese rivers and trigger more droughts, sandstorms and desertification, state media reported today.

Temperatures on the plateau had risen 0.42 degrees Celsius (about 1 degree Fahrenheit) each decade since the 1980s, the China Daily said, citing the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, a government think-tank.

''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,'' the paper quoted Xu Xiangde, an academy researcher, as saying.

Once known as ''China's sorrow'' for its catastrophic flooding, the Yellow River, the country's second longest, supplies water to more than 150 million people and irrigates 15 percent of the country's farmland.

The UN Development Programme has warned that melting glaciers, shrinking an average 131.4 square km annually over the last 30 years -- an area twice the size of metropolitan Beijing -- according to the China Geological Survey Bureau, could disappear by 2100.

''Decades of research'' had found that the plateau acted as a barometer for weather conditions in other parts of China and the world, Xu said, with satellite data showing the ''strong movement of clouds'' above the plateau in July 1998 to be linked to China's worst floods in decades in the summer of that year.

Last year's heat waves across the country were also partly attributed to higher than average temperatures on the plateau in the winter of 2005-2006, Xu added.

Typhoons, floods and droughts killed 2,704 people and inflicted economic losses of 212 billion yuan in 2006, the warmest year since 1951, state media reported.

Temperatures on the plateau have also nudged record highs this winter and brought sandstorms two months early, Xinhua news agency said last week.

The report followed a forecast from Beijing's environmental bureau that more severe sandstorms than normal would hit the capital in the spring because of the mild and dry winter.

Reuters SI GC1005