Global warming may help alleviate China’s drought and flooding problems as monsoons move north, scientists say
Water-starved northern China could benefit as the thermal equator moves northward, bringing seasonal Asian rains upcountry, team finds
Global warming will benefit China by increasing rainfall in its dry northern regions while reducing flooding in the hotter southern areas, according to a new study by scientists in the country.
The research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said that if the phenomenon continues, the planet’s thermal equator will move northward and push the rain belt associated with the monsoons in East Asia from the southern to northern part of the country.
The thermal equator is made up of a set of locations encircling the planet that have the highest mean annual temperatures at each longitude.
If such climatic change were to occur in China, bamboo forests would reappear along the banks of the Yellow River, which runs from Qinghai province in the far west and empties into the Bohai Sea in Shandong province on the eastern coast, pundits predict.
Moreover, rice paddies would likely expand to the Great Wall, which runs along the dry northern part of China, and Beijing, which faces chronic water shortages, would no longer need to channel water from the south.
In their recent paper published in the influential research journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, a team of scientists led by Professor Yang Shiling