Ulhas Joglekar wrote:
Reuters.com
China says its slowing rate of desertification
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-05-29T082257Z_01_PEK133263_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-CHINA-DESERT.xml
Mon May 29, 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - China, with desert covering one third of its landmass,
is slowing the rate at which desertification is eating up arable and other
land but the problem remains serious, a government official said on Monday.
At the end of the last century, areas affected by desertification in China
were expanding at an annual rate of 10,400 square km (4,015 sq mile), said
Zhu Lieke, deputy head of the State Forestry Administration.
This had now slowed to about 3,000 square km a year, he told a news
conference.
.
Considering the rate of industrialization taking place in China, I would
say that this rate of slowing of an ongoing environmental proccess is...
improbable, but I'll bet the Chinese government can come up with
authoritative scientific personalities that will shill for it. I'll also
say that the the U.S. government will do nothing to upset anyones belief
in those figures if it want's to keep all this:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&dbname=cp108&sid=cp1082qZ1Q&refer=&r_n=sr344.108&item=&sel=TOC_771542&;
...and more, much more, on the front burner of the globalized (but not
sanitized) world economy.
Leigh
"Its values are not US values. But if we are going to do things like
send Marines into Iran to force Iranian women to wear bikinis at the
beach, we are going to have a very busy century and Arlington Cemetery
is going to run out of room. --Juan Cole, Professor of History,
University of Michigan
