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Snowstorms 'not due to climate change'
Tue, Feb 05, 2008 The Straits Times
BEIJING - CHINA'S unusually harsh winter this year is caused by a La Nina weather pattern and not linked directly to climate change, experts say. Chinese meteorologists told a press conference yesterday the wild weather was due to an unusually strong cold front moving in from north-west China and the La Nina effect. The La Nina effect, a periodic cooling of waters in the Pacific Ocean, has also brought unusually heavy snowfall to parts of the western United States. In Australia, the weather bureau has said the La Nina pattern has begun to end years of serious drought in the country and the effects are expected to remain until the middle of this year.

This year, an unusually strong cold front pushed further down south into temperate parts of China which have had little experience in dealing with snow.

Had the cold front been weaker, the meeting point between the warm and cold fronts would have been further up north, as is usually the case. Last year, for instance, heavy snow blanketed areas in the north-east.

'This was a historic event,' Mr Zheng Guoguang, chief of the China Meteorological Administration, said yesterday. 'We did not foresee temperatures dropping so low.'

His agency said the weather was the coldest in 100 years in central Hubei and Hunan provinces, going by the total number of consecutive days of average temperature less than 1 deg C.

Australian climate scientist Penny Whetton, an author of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fourth assessment report, said the Chinese explanation for the storms was valid, adding that the bad weather was not linked to climate change.

'Those conditions are things that occur naturally, and so every few years, few decades, everything just comes together right to produce an extreme event,' said Dr Whetton, who wrote the IPCC chapter Regional Climate Projections. The panel's four reports were released in phases last year.

'My guess is this is a natural event without any particular reason to link it to climate change. The climate change models are not predicting increases in snow events like this,' she said.

She also said China could expect a less stable climate because of global warming, with various regions experiencing drier, wetter and hotter conditions, as well as more intense tropical storms.

'Cold extremes are generally not predicted to become more intense and frequent because we have a warming climate,' she said.

Dr David Jones, head of climate analysis at Australia's National Climate Centre, also said China's snowstorms could not be linked directly to climate change - unlike floods, heatwaves and fires that are a result of rising temperatures and rainfall worldwide.

'Winter is a time of year in the Northern Hemisphere where you often get these extreme events. We have always had them and we will always have them,' he said.

But he added: 'You get more and more surprises as the world changes, because you are moving into a world where the atmosphere and climate just don't behave like they used to.'

REUTERS, ASSOCIATED PRESS