Nation seeing faster rise in temperatures

Risks linked to extreme weather events are increasing as the global climate gets warmer, according to the latest China Blue Book on Climate Change.

Last year, the global average temperature was 1.2 C higher than the average between 1850 and 1900, ranking among the three hottest years since meteorological records began to be kept, it said.

The book, released on Wednesday, has been published annually by the China Meteorological Administration since 2011.

"Extreme weather events including torrential rains, scorching temperatures and typhoons have occurred more frequently as climatic risks are rising," said Chao Qingchen, deputy director of the National Climate Center and the book's associate editor.

"China, which is vulnerable to climate change, has experienced a faster temperature rise than the global average. The rise caused more rain and hot days than previously in the country."

From 1951 to 2020, the annual average temperature in China rose by 0.26 C per decade, a rate higher than the global average.

"Among the 10 hottest years since 1901 in China, nine of them have been concentrated in the period since 2000," she said.

Extremely high temperatures have increased since the mid-1990s, while extreme cold weather has decreased since the 1960s.

In response to the warmer climate, the country's precipitation showed an upward trend with an average increase of 5.1 millimeters per decade between 1961 and last year, the book said.

During the period, the eastern part of the Yangtze River, the central and northern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region saw particularly significant increases in precipitation.

Taking complex data into consideration, the book calculated that climate-led risks in China during the past three decades increased by 58 percent over the previous three decades.

Chao said that the rising density of greenhouse gases globally is driving climate change.

Data from the 2019 China Greenhouse Gas Bulletin said that global carbon dioxide concentrations in the air reached 411.4 parts per million.

That's the highest since China began to record the data in the 1990s, and much higher than the 280 ppm recorded during the preindustrial period, the administration said.

The carbon dioxide levels were measured at the China Global Atmosphere Watch Baseline Observatory on Mount Waliguan in Qinghai province.

Its data has proved to be close to the average levels measured in the northern hemisphere at mid-latitudes.

The ministries of natural resources and water resources and the Chinese Academy of Sciences provided a large amount of observational data for the blue book, Chao said.