Climate chaos
Jing Xiaolei

FOR half a month, twice each day, she swam across the river to Coral Dam Island to feed her four newborn babies, and then swam back to the bank to seek food for herself.
She was an abandoned female dog, the mother of four puppies, and considered a heroine by local people in Chongqing Municipality, which had suffered excessive rainfall and floods that blocked the road to Coral Dam Island.
The story is a touching one, but far more human tragedies were taking place across China this summer, as many parts of the country were plagued by fierce rainstorms, triggering floods, landslides and mud-rock flows.
Disasters caused by heavy rains killed at least 71 people in central China’s Hubei Province, 42 in the mountainous Chongqing Municipality, 54 in Sichuan, 163 in Yunnan, 40 in Shandong and 38 in the far northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs of China.
Though some parts of China have had too much rain, others had too little this summer, with long droughts, coupled with high temperatures, affecting 9.8 million hectares of crops in China, according to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.
Cheng Dianlong, Deputy Chief of the agency, said Heilongjiang Province, most of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and many regions in south China have received 50 to 90 percent less rain since July than normal.
The drought has left 7.53 million people and 5.08 million head of livestock short of drinking water. It has also affected 44 percent of arable land in Jiangxi Province, 35 percent in Heilongjiang and 33 percent in Hunan.
The drought caused heavy losses to farm production as rice growing in the south and corn and soy production in the north were affected, according to Cheng.
Season of disasters
China’s season of natural weather disasters did not end with the drought: other extreme weather conditions have also tortured the country.
On August 2 and 3, nine people were killed and almost 90,000 affected after windstorms ravaged east China’s Anhui Province. The storms brought down 251 houses and damaged more than 2,000 others.
Five people were crushed to death when a two-story building collapsed after being struck by lightning in Linquan County, according to the provincial disaster relief office. Two other cities in the province each reported a death from lightning strikes. According to China Meteorological Administration (CMA), lightning left 141 people dead in China in July, the highest monthly death toll since records began in 2000.
Song Lianchun, CMA Spokesman and head of the Disaster Forecast and Relief Department, said that this year China had been hit by increasingly frequent and severe lightning. The numbers of hailstorms and cyclones have also been rising.
Between the beginning of the year and June 30 various natural disasters across China had affected around 143 million people and resulted in 545 deaths, 78 missing and a total direct economic loss of 50 billion yuan, according to statistics produced by the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Global warming
“It should be said that one of the reasons for the weather extremes this year has been unusual atmospheric circulation brought about by global warming,” Song told a news conference carried live on the Central Government website on August 1.
“These kinds of extremes will become more frequent, and more obvious. This has already been borne out by the facts,” he said. “I think the impact on our country will definitely be very large.”
Chinese experts also attributed the country’s extreme weather conditions to climate change.
The chief forecaster at CMA, Wang Yongguang, said abnormal weather would continue to plague most parts of China this summer and in the years to come.
Although the effects of global warming have become increasingly obvious in China this year statistics show that it has been a gradual process. The CMA said in early March that the winter season from December 2006 to February 2007 recorded a national average temperature of 2.4 degrees Centigrade below zero, causing China to experience its second warmest winter in 50 years, following the warmest winter in the country between 1998 and 1999, with an average temperature of 2.3 degrees Centigrade below zero.
China is certainly not the only victim of climate change. This summer Europe has been split by climate. Above a line roughly running from the Pyrenees to Bulgaria, three humid months have been punctuated by violent storms and enormous cloudbursts; while to the south there have been a succession of heatwaves, each more intense than the last. There have also been rare brutal snowstorms in South America and terrible floods in Southeast Asia, killing 1,400 and resulting in 20 million homeless.
“An abnormality of atmospheric circulation is the direct cause of these global weather extremes,” said Ren Fumin, a researcher with the Climate Center of CMA. “But in essence, it is the global warming that has resulted in the abnormal weather conditions.”
Joint efforts
Global warming effects have and will always vary for natural reasons. However, human activities are increasing significantly the concentrations of some gases in the atmosphere, such as greenhouse gases (GHG), which tend to warm the earth’s surface.
“Global warming includes two aspects. On one hand, nature has its own course of climate change and on the other hand, human activity plays an important role regarding the warming trend,”
said Gu Wanlong, Director Assistant of the Climate Center of CMA.
The Chinese Government has stepped up its efforts to prevent the natural disasters in a more profound way besides devoting a great deal of human and material resources to help disaster-affected people.
China set up a think tank on climate change this January adding to its efforts to brace for potential extreme weather. The think tank, including 12 members from 11 government agencies and research institutes, is designed to offer advice and devise strategies and regulations to tackle climate change, following the examples of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada which have set up similar think tanks and have put climate change on their lists of national security threats.
On June 4, China issued a national plan to address climate change and a move aimed at demonstrating the country’s determination to reduce GHG emissions.
The National Climate Change Program is the first such plan made by a developing country. In it China pledges to restructure its economy, promote clean technology and improve energy efficiency. The plan also says that regional cooperation on climate change should function as “a helpful complement” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol rather than replacing or weakening them.
“Climate change is a major global issue of common concern to the international community,” the plan states, underlining the importance of international cooperation. China has already been cooperating with its neighbor India on climate change. In December 2006, the two countries agreed to send an expedition to the Himalayas to study the impact that global warming is having on glaciers.
Many experts, some foreigners included, expect China to play an increasingly large role in the fight against global warming.
“Global warming is an area where the United States especially has abdicated what is right for what is expedient. This is an opportunity, perhaps at not even very great cost, for China to assert its moral authority,” said George A. Akerlof, the winner in 2001 of the Nobel Prize for Economics, in a paper he delivered to the China-U.S. Climate Change Forum in Berkeley in May 2006.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)

Pakistan — Drama surrounding the broken arrow
Mahmud A. Sipra

THERE is a storm gathering around Pakistan’s President Musharaf , now a mere two weeks away from presidential elections and ten days away from the declared date of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s return from exile. Adopting a Chamberlain after Munich stance at a press conference in London the other day, Mr Sharif announced that the avowed intention of returning is to topple President Musharaf and to send the army back to the barracks. Circumspection still not being one of his strong suits. In Chamberlain’s case however, his statement and stance led to World War II.
One can’t fault Mr Sharif for his stated position though. It is his position. Except for one minor detail. The army is no where to be seen on the streets and cities in Pakistan. It is conspicuous by its absence. On the rare occasion it has been ordered out has been during times of a national calamity to spear head relief efforts and on one occasion to quell a law and order situation that posed a clear danger to public life. This oversight in Mr Sharif”s errors and omissions policy could be attributed to his spin handlers. But given the sensational nature of the pronouncement, it naturally received the desired front page treatment and featured prominently on the “Breaking News” ticker.
At the other end of this political triad is Ms Benazir Bhutto, the other former prime minister. Ms Bhutto is somewhat less equivocal of the imminent “arrangement” reportedly being put into place between the general and herself — to facilitate her return to contest the elections under her party’s election symbol. The Arrow. An “arrangement” debunked by all the president’s men. Her statements, although tempered with cautious optimism, carry the unmistakable stamp of a spin surgeon at work. Nonetheless, it makes for some enduring footage and sound bites.
The myriad political forces that seem to have found the bit between the teeth in Pakistan in recent months have put the country on a head on collision course with the quasi military–civilian administration of General Musharaf . Nowhere is this more evident then in the judicial activism of it’s till recent pliant legal hierarchy. This new phenomena has provided impetus to an already charged and strident political climate , helped in no less measure by an embryonic but free and raucous press.
The plethora of private television channels now operating in the country vie with each other nightly to put on air political pundits, spin doctors and doomsday prophets to pontificate and articulate their views. The tone and tenor of such comments and views is almost always anti Musharaf and somewhat pejorative in nature . Predictably, political activity is at an all time high with three of the country’s high profile politicians still living in different forms of luxurious exile in various world capitals. All three publicly express the desire to return to Pakistan to take part in the general elections scheduled to be held later this year but with certain provisos. The sum of their expectations are that General Musharaf guarantees them the following; that all cases of corruption, sedition, hijacking, terrorism, abuse of office et al, against them be dropped and/or dismissed; two, it gets better. That General Musharaf exercise his discretionary powers as president to amend the constitution to allow at least two of the leaders a third term; and third, this is where it starts getting complicated — that General Musharaf shed his army uniform before he stands for re-election as president.
In a nation of 160 million people — which is celebrating its sixtieth year of Independence — one would think that perhaps the country would have produced a few more good men and women as leaders. This is not to say that either Ms Bhutto or Mr Sharif do not possess the political acumen or the political skills needed for the jobs they seek. Mr Sharif – a businessman turned politician has skillfully manoeuvred his way to the forefront with his brand of confrontational politics. But despite all his experience he somehow failed to read the small print that says army chiefs may come and go but the army is unlikely to become subservient to any political mandarin.
Ms Bhutto on the other hand is a western educated and erudite politician in the Talleyrand mould. She still leads the largest political party in the country and is seen by many in Pakistan as the one who could return “by arrangement”. Without such an “arrangement” she too, on her return would face numerous charges and as the constitution stands – be debarred from the prime minister’s job. Her initiating the entente with General Musharaf has already set off a howl of protests from her detractors and rattled her own party’s quiver. At least one powerful party loyalist has gone public with his displeasure. She is expected to ride out any intra-party rumblings not only because she remains the undisputed leader of her party but just as importantly because of her undeniable sense of history. Pakistan has moved on since she was last prime minister. Indeed, so has the world. In this post 9/11 era, it is simplistic to state that the troubles that Pakistan is beset by today are because of its army. If the truth be known it is in spite of it. It is that sense of history that Ms Bhutto should be relying on to move forward in her détente with General Musharaf. The precedents are there for her to judge. All it requires on her part is that “vision thing.” Hubris, however, it seems restrains both Mr Sharif and Ms Bhutto from even thinking aloud of putting forward a suitable candidate from their respective parties for the post of prime minister — a la India’s Sonia Ghandi.
Given the unpredictability of the political scenario, one is tempted to indulge in a thought exercise. Imagine for a moment that General Musharaf in a complete about turn nominates someone else for the presidency while opting to stay on at Army House. The Prime Ministers post could then by default fall into the lap of the likes of Maulana Fazlur Rahman — who for all his public posturing is waiting in the wings- or some other consensus candidate. Now that would surely put the cat amongst the pigeons.
There is some truth in the saying that an accomplished politician knows when to fold and when to play. It is also what separates a good politician from a bad one. That is what makes it a truism. The rules of engagement then put forceful emphasis on the caveat that President Musharaf — despite all his inestimable qualities as a leader— is not a politician. He is a serving general. And like another general in another time, he too finds himself standing on the banks of the Rubicon. “Oh! The sound of a distant drum!”

— Khaleej Times

 

When an Army General starts speaking in specific terms
Sir Cyril Townsend

GEN. Sir Richard Dannatt, who took over as the chief of the general staff in August 2006, has turned out to be the most outspoken head of the 100,000-strong British Army that I can remember in my lifetime. Not for a moment does anybody believe that he enjoys the publicity, or still less that he seeks to become a celebrity. He is convinced his beloved army, which he joined in 1969, is facing a grave crisis. It is fighting battles in two different countries and yet its budget is, in real terms, at a level of that for the army in the 1930s. His troops and their kit are looking frayed at the edges. His troops feel undervalued by the Labour government. What is so damaging for government ministers is that they know the general not only claims to be speaking up for his army “constituency” but is genuinely reflecting military thinking, and the public, which has been against the government’s policy on Iraq for years, will side with the general.
I am inclined to be cautious over generals speaking out in public — at one time England, under Oliver Cromwell, was ruled by major generals — but I believe Gen. Dannatt is broadly correct on the issues he is raising and with a hopelessly miscast Secretary of Defense Des Browne, the army is putting forward a powerful case for better treatment. Having been a soldier myself for 12 years I appreciate I do not start from an entirely neutral position! The circumstances surrounding his most recent speech are certainly curious. He addressed a conference of senior British and overseas officers on future land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall back in June. The media was not permitted to attend and his speech remained secret. But following a formal request under the comparatively new Freedom of Information Act it was put in the public domain. The fact that the Ministry of Defense wanted his comments kept secret only added to their public interest. Gen. Dannatt ordered his officers to make preparations for “a generation of conflict” and declared.

—Arab News