There's a dust bowl growing in China that's far bigger than
the one that hit the U.S. in the 1930s. It's so big it was being
studied from space?how dust affects global warming was
one of the science projects on board the shuttle Columbia.
China fought hard to have the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing,
but now they're worried that the city will be a desert by the
time the athletes arrive. 40% of China may soon become a
desert and it's affecting other countries as well. Chinese dust
clouds regularly make it all the way across the Pacific to the
U.S. Dust has shut down schools and airports in South Korea
and Japan, and one Korean car factory has started shrink-
wrapping its cars as they come off the assembly line.
"No country has ever faced a potential ecological catastrophe
on the scale of the dust bowl now developing in China," says
Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute. "Merely grasping
its dimensions and consequences poses a serious analytical
challenge."
The cause is the same for China as it was for the U.S. dust
bowl: bad farming techniques and overgrazing. But in China,
there are too many people to feed who have nowhere to
migrate. Soon they're going to have to start importing most
of their food. Brown says, "Grain prices could double?
impoverishing more people in a shorter period of time than
any event in history. It would create a world food economy
dominated by scarcity rather than by surpluses, as has been
the case over most of the last half a century."
The weather is
changing all over the world, and animals and humans will
have to change with it. Don?t listen to the ostriches with
their heads in the (Chinese) sand, who say there?s no such
thing as global warming?learn the
facts.
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