It's too early to state categorically that China is experiencing another "warm winter" this year, but the world's fourth largest economy is definitely suffering the impact of global warming, a senior meteorological official said on Tuesday. 

Qin Dahe, director of the China Meteorological Administration, told a press conference in Beijing that global warming had made extreme weather -- such as high temperatures, drought and hurricanes -- more common in China.

Beijing temperatures reached 10.8 degrees Celsius on Sunday, the first day of spring according to China's traditional lunar calendar, and surged to 16 on Monday, the highest temperature at this time of year for the past 167 years.

Yulan Magnolia trees on Chang'an Avenue in downtown Beijing -- which normally blossom in late March -- are already in bud.

High temperatures in Beijing this winter are "obviously" related to global warming but the final verdict on the city's "warm winter" will only be given at the end of February, Qin said.

Beijing has had 20 "warm winters"-- where average December to February temperatures are at least 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than the average-- in a row since 1986.

This year, signs of a warm winter have not been limited to Beijing. In Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, sweet-scented osmanthus is already in blossom.

In the northeast, the average January temperature is up 4.1 degrees Celsius on normal years and up 2.7 degrees in the southwestern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Citing the latest report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), Qin said that if a temperature increase of 1.9 to 4.6 degrees was sustained for a millennium, the Greenland ice sheet would melt completely and result in a sea-level rise of 7 meters.

Qin, who co-chairs IPCC working group I, said that, under the influence of human activities, the global climate had been warming since 1750, as evidenced by higher average air and ocean temperatures, the widespread melting of snow and ice and rising sea levels.

Last summer's severe drought around Chongqing Municipality in southwestern China and typhoon attacks in east coast both occurred against a background of global warming, he said.

Qin said that meteorological disasters caused direct economic losses of 200 to 300 billion yuan (US$25 billion to US$37.5 billion) in China annually, which was equivalent to two to five percent of China's gross domestic product.

Greenhouse gas emissions, and carbon dioxide discharges in particular, are widely considered to be the prime factor in global warming. China, the world's second largest greenhouse gas emitter after the United States, may have to face the challenge of declining grain output and increasingly scarce water resources.

The government has backed the UN-brokered Kyoto treaty, and committed itself to improving its energy efficiency by setting the goal of cutting its energy consumption by 20 percent per unit of GDP in the period from 2006 to 2010, Qin noted.

China reduced emissions by some 800 million tons of coal equivalent from 1991 to 2005. The country's forests, grasslands and natural reserves have helped absorb another 3.06 billion tons, he said.

(Xinhua News Agency February 7, 2007)