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A blanket of gases that makes up the Earth’s atmosphere causes global warming. This gaseous layer traps enough heat to keep the globe warm and allow life, as we know it, to exist. However, human activity over the last century has increased this greenhouse effect and led to global warming – an undesirable increase in temperature in some places on Earth, including China.
In 2007, the 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that the evidence of a global warming trend is "unequivocal," and that human activity is the driving force behind global warming. Evidence of global warming is alarming: China’s average temperature has risen by as much as 1.1 degrees Celsius in the past 50 years. The World Meteorological Association states that 1998 to 2007 was the warmest 10 years globally.
The symptoms of global warming are all too apparent in China. Glaciers covering China’s Qinghai-Tibet plateau are shrinking by 7 percent a year due to global warming. The Qinghai-Tibet plateau covers a million square miles -- about a quarter of China’s land surface -- at an average altitude of 13,000 feet above sea level, and account for 47 percent of China's total glacier coverage.
Greenpeace has made two expeditions to the Himalayas in the past year in order to document evidence of the retreat of the glaciers in the Himalaya region, due to global warming.
The glaciers at the Himalayas are the fastest receding glaciers in the world, largely due to global warming. The IPCC recently reported that within 30 years, 80 per cent of the Himalayan glaciers would disappear, if global warming continues at its current rate. This spells disaster for China and neighboring regions, as the glaciers are literally their water towers, feeding the major rivers of Asia. Global warming directly contributes to China’s water deficiency, as it is threatening the source of China’s Yangtze River and Yellow River, the source of life for hundreds of millions of people living along its tributaries.
Greenpeace made two expeditions to Qomolangma in China to document the receding Rongbu Glacier. April 2007, we took a photograph of the glacier to compare with the one taken in 1968, and we can see that the glacier has markedly diminished in size. Global warming is making its indelible mark in China. In a few more years, what will the glacier look like? How will China quench the thirst of its billions of people if global warming continues?
Even if all greenhouse gas emissions were stopped today, the effects from past emissions will persist for many centuries. Greenhouse gases have a long lifespan in the atmosphere, which means that every day the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases, it becomes harder and harder for us to reign in global warming. For now, though, China still has the ability to choose its future.
