Prolonged bouts of high temperatures in China have challenged power grids and crops, and concerns are mounting of a possible repeat of last year’s drought, the most severe in 60 years.
China is no stranger to dramatic swings in temperatures across the seasons but the swings are getting wider.
On Jan. 22, temperatures in Mohe, a city in northeastern Heilongjiang province, plunged to minus 53C, according to the local weather bureau, smashing China’s previous all-time low of minus 52.3C set in 1969.
Since then, the heaviest rains in a decade have hit central China, ravaging wheat fields in an area known as the country’s granary.
These few sentences really capture the horror of “climate change”, that so many people overlook. Yes “average global temp” might increase by 1 degree celsius, but the really immediately terrifying part is changes to large weather patterns that provide a foundation to gargantuan food production industries.
I live in Western Australia. It’s a large state perhaps 3 times the size of texas, but it’s very arid and mostly desert aside from the south west corner in which there’s a “belt” of land with appropriate conditions for cropping in which 18 million tonnes of grain is grown each year, of which 90% is exported. Suppose this year the state receives 30% less rain, then next year 30% more. Suppose that halves production this year, and washes away some of the dry top soil next year. Hell, we might even receive more rain but just a few hundred kilometers from where it usually is.
Point is, even a mild interruption to established weather patterns is going to have a huge and detrimental impact on human agriculture. It’s terrifying really.