China’s Heat Wave
When Matthew Bossons set out with his wife and daughter for a camping trip, he expected to find mountain streams, cooler temperatures and favorite swimming holes west of Chengdu in southwestern China. Bossons is a Shanghai-based journalist and managing editor of RADII, an on-line publication examining trends from Chinese youth culture.
As he reported in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Bossons found “ravaged landscapes, paralyzed cities and populations pushed to extremes” resulting from China’s historic summer heat wave and drought over two months, affecting over 60% of China’s 1.4 billion people.
Chengdu is the capital of the southwestern China province of Sichuan, with a city population of 21 million. It lies less than 40 miles east of the foothills of the Himalaya mountains. When Bossons and his family reached their vacation area, they found the “raging mountain rivers … were no more,” reduced to a trickle. The deep swimming holes “picked out on the internet barely had enough water to reach [his] knees.” The campfire they hoped to gather around at night was banned “to limit wildfire risks in the bone-dry landscape.”
They turned back east, driving toward Chengdu. Where there had been verdant farmland, there were withered cornfields. Bumper-to-bumper traffic was flowing in the opposite direction, carrying people fleeing to higher, cooler ground. “With hydropower output crippled, the authorities had imposed power-saving blackouts that closed businesses and rendered air-conditioners useless…. The city of Chengdu had become practically unlivable”
Sichuan province is located along the upper Yangtze River, the longest river in China and the source of drinking water for more than 400 million people. Reservoirs across Sichuan produce nearly 80% of the province’s electricity. Historically low water levels in the Yangtze have reduced shipping and forced companies to suspend operations.
Throughout China the heatwave and drought have dried lakes and rivers, caused forest fires, damaged crops and livestock, and disrupted electrical service. Inoperable elevators left residents using ropes and buckets to hoist groceries to their upper-floor apartments; some residents drove six miles to charge their cell phones.
China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. China also leads the world in renewable energy capacity growth, now accounting for 35-40% of the world’s installed solar and wind energy capacity. The crippling of hydropower production due to the effects of climate change has reopened deliberation over coal-powered energy generation. “To ease the energy crunch, Sichuan is firing up its coal power plants, raising concerns among environmentalists about the potential increase in greenhouse gas emissions.”
As emitter of 27% of global carbon dioxide, how China proceeds is critical to the rest of the world. But beyond that, China’s experience is destined to be repeated elsewhere as a result of global warming. Heatwaves, fires, and floods have featured in 2022 across the globe. China 2022 is a message.