Abstract
Interior lakes, mountain glaciers, precipitation records and official archives of the frequency of flood and drought are used as evidence to support the following hypotheses. It is evident that temperature in China has been increasing during the past 30 years. The 10year average air temperature in the 1980s was generally 0.5–1.0°C higher than in the 1950s. Even accounting for variation, the warming in recent years could be considered as the continuation of the warming process that began at the end of the Little Ice Age. This warming process may have been enhanced by the CO2 greenhouse effect in recent years, but it is difficult to estimate the exact contribution of this effect. Recent research has also provided evidence supporting a trend towards dryness in the cold high mountains and plateau of western China.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Zhang, LS. (1996). Global Warming and the Trend Toward Dryness in the Frigid High Mountains and Plateau of Western China. In: Jones, J.A.A., Liu, C., Woo, MK., Kung, HT. (eds) Regional Hydrological Response to Climate Change. The GeoJournal Library, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5676-9_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5676-9_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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