Last year warmest in China since 1951 - Xinhua

BEIJING, Feb 20 (Reuters) Last year was the warmest since 1951 in China and since 1986 there have only been two winters where the weather was as cold as usual, the official Xinhua news agency said today.

Xinhua, citing unidentified experts at the national meteorological bureau, said that most parts of the country have recorded an obvious spike in annual temperatures since 1950, the year after Communist China was established.

''What is especially worthy of attention is that in 2006 of 39 monitoring stations in climate sensitive areas like the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, 13 recorded historically high temperatures,'' it quoted an unnamed expert as saying.

The report did not draw a direct link between the findings and climate change, but did say that scientists thought carbon dioxide was the main reason for global warming.

It added that over the last 20 years only in the winter of 2004/2005 were temperatures at their seasonal average.

A UN panel of scientists warned this month that human activity was ''very likely'' behind global warming.

The Chinese government has been slow to wake up the challenge of addressing climate change, but there have been growing signs that Beijing is worried about how global warming could frustrate ambitions for prosperity, stability and influence.

China is galloping to become possibly the world's third-biggest economy by 2008, overtaking Germany and lagging only Japan and the United States.

And it may become the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by 2009, overtaking the United States, the International Energy Agency has forecast.

REUTERS SY KN0938