What a difference a season makes.
With the dry spell thirsting up, Chinese and South East Asian countries and provinces and reducing the rivers to a trickle and killing the rice production, thus causing conflicts amongst the people and the intervention of the Environmental Parliament to convene a Peace Conference for the management of the much dammed and maligned, Mekong river…
Now with this drought and resultant ”state of environmental siege” lifted from China, and it’s neighbors sharing the Mekong; people breathed easier and even welcomed the torrential rains, all up until the Conson typhoon made landfall on this the southwestern part of China.
Now, Yunnan, Sichuan, Hunan, Jiangxi and Anhui provinces have all been hard hit by July’s heavy rains and floods and with the fast travelling typhoon unleashing torrential rains, more climate damage is expected. Winds of up to 130 km/hr and driving rains blot the landscape with people fleeing all over.
Conson storm is adding to the worst floods in China in more than a decade, which have already killed a few hundred people so far just this month. Reminiscent of the English floods this weather changing, from dry to very wet and back, fast alternating weather patterns seem to spell doom for many millions. It actually adds to the desertification process as the dry cracked top soil gets washed away faster and faster, leaving the earth scarred and unable to sustain agriculture with out the precious few top centimeters of earth.
More than 135 million people across China have been hit by this poor weather and more than 2 million have been relocated urgently with another 18 million under watch.
Guangdong province and neighbouring Guangxi region were also hit hard and made their own evacuation plans.
The torrential unseasonal rains across a huge area of southern China have already killed around 400 people this year with many more expected to suffer similarly under the Conson typhoon.
Central China is facing its worst floods since the late 1990′s as rain continues to batter the upper and middle reaches of the Yangtze River.
The current situation along the Yangtze River has reached the danger levels of 1998, and this is definitely a crucial point as the banks haven’t been raised above those levels since the 1998 floods, were considered freak. Something of an oddity and once in a Thousand Years storms.
Yet it seems these once in a Thousand year storms become more and more frequent these days of Atmospheric warming and the resultant storms.
If the heavy rains continue and move to hit the upper reaches of the Yangtze, severe flooding similar to that of 1998 was expected as soon as this week…
Yours,
Pano
PS:
More than 40,000 people died in the Yangtze river floods in 1998, and more than 38 million people were displaced.
How is that for Climate Change Costs?
