Global warming in China? The $3 billion snowstorm

Wild winter weather across China crippled energy and transport, and caused roughly 3 billion US dollars of economic loss," according to today's China Daily.  For the past two weeks, snowstorms have pounded central, eastern and southern China "causing deaths, structural collapses, power blackouts, highway closures and crop destruction."  Hunan Province and western Guizhou Province have been hardest hit, but the storm's impact was broad and severe; 220,000 were evacuated in Jiangxi province where 13 have died in snow-related accidents.

Toronto was embarrassed several years ago when it needed to call on Canadian army troops to help overwhelmed local snowfighters.  China has mobilized 158,000 Peoples Liberation Army troops </a>(about the number the U.S. has in Iraq), and supplemented those with more than 992,000 police and 303,000 "paramilitary" personnel.  In Nanjing, capital of eastern Jiangsu Province, where the accumulated snow reached about 13 inches, the provincial government reports mobilizing a quarter million volunteers to shovel snow.

Yet roadways are reported uncleared.  Seven of the eight highways connecting Guangdong and Hunan provinces have been cut off.  At least 25 bus passengers were killed when a bus ran off a road "coverered with a thick layer of ice and the temperature about minus two degrees Celsius."  About 11,000 vehicles were piled up on the highways in eastern Anhui Province, where half of the state and provincial highways were crippled by the snow. <em>China Daily</em> reports that "more than 8,000 traffic police were dispatched to keep order on the 40-kilometer congested section in Anhui - nearly one policeman for every stranded car! Vegetable prices in cities have more than doubled.

Perhaps the storm clouds will have a silver lining and stimulate improved winter maintenance on Chinese roadways, opening a vast new market in highway deicing salt.