1997+ China Drought: Shitting Where It Eats.

110227 Update When one shits where one eats, one sickens and dies. A timistic analysis of China's economic, political and energy actions justifies this assessment. Nowhere in the world is the elephant in the room--global dying--bigger than in China. where its existentially blind Leap Forward will be a greater leap backward than its Cultural Revolution. China's inferiority and insecurity complex (manifesting it in an exaggeration of the hubris behind the fanaticism and fascism of Nazi Germany and Bushito Japan) blinds China to another, inevitable collapse. In just a few years, China has returned to and exacerbated the feudal decay of 1911. To call China a communist country is like calling the U.S. Republican Party the Party of Lincoln . China's colonizing other countries's economies with purchases of private lands and public debt is a futile waste of time and money: Look at how foreigners flee homegrown economic failed states: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc. [Sadly, this writer in 2006 predicted failed states by 2012--they began in 2010.] As countries foolishly fight each new war using the last war strategy, China's Big Game gamble is an out-of-date, too-little, too-late rush to a sudden foreign and domestic collapse. As Egypt and Libya ceased to function as states in a few days, so will China's shitting where it eats cause an internal pandemic that will be like the 60-mile highway constipation on a nationwide scale.

The worst drought affecting humanity is the growing drought in China. It can only be lessened by the Chinese eliminating oil production in the newly developed western fields of the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang Province (which is of the same geological formation as the West Texas/New Mexico oil: Permian). Because China's oil production is primitive, the vast majority of the natural gas is flared or vented, creating vast plumes that blow from the western China across eastern China and Korean Peninsula. Both of the latter regions are racked by multi-year droughts with international repercussions. Will China eliminate oil production to save agricultural production? Or, will humanity face a new cold war that grows warmer with each day of local/global warming? China is a paper tiger with nuclear teeth without the respect for the human zoo.

All maps and quotation from ChinaOnLine (COL) unless otherwise noted.
China's oil fields are in the upper left quadrant. China's drought is in the upper right quadrant.
Wind flows prevalently from the left to the right as lower maps show.

1. Xinjiang Province w/Tarim Oil Basin w/Wind Generators w/desertification	2. Qinghai Province w/Qaidam Oil Basin	3. Ganzu Province w/increased Sand Storms via Hexi Corridor (part of Silk Road)

Prevailing winds are the westerly trade winds from the southwest to the northeast(left)
until they encounter Pacific water mass where they do a U-turn back over South China.

Global Wind Patterns (China, upper left)	China  Enlargement	Oil field and pipeline (click to enlarge)

For actual satellite images of wind and cloud movement over hours or days, click Prevailing Winds.

Description of Drought

• "It is reported that rainfall decreased from 30 to 90 percent in central and southern parts of Northeast China, North China, most areas along the Yellow River and Huaihe River, eastern parts of Northwest China, in Southwest China's Sichuan Province and in Yunnan Province."
• "The flow of water has stopped in many local rivers, more than 100,000 ponds have dried up" in Central China.
• "Lack of rainfall comes first, with the spell of dry weather lasting over 200 days in some places." Severe Drought
• "In most years the Yellow River dries up 800 kilometers from the sea .... The Yellow River was kept flowing this year only because all the reservoirs along its length were emptied."
• "This year's drought [2001] in northern China was so bad that the central Government diverted Yellow River water from drought-stricken regions in Shandong to keep China's third-largest industrial city going. It is only a temporary solution in a year which, for the first time in decades, saw waters from the Yellow River reach the sea for an entire year. This was thanks to Beijing taking charge and ordering all upstream provinces to empty their reservoirs to ensure a continual flow. In effect, this transferred the burden of supplying Tianjin with water to far poorer parts of the country's interior." (source) The Rio Grande River also stopped flowing a four-year drought affected Mexico, Texas and New Mexico.
• "Sandstorms [a la Dustbowl storms and SaharaTexas dust storms] have increased in frequency and the distance traveled from the western deserts in Xinjiang including Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. Province." (COL-Feb 2, 2001) Sandstorms from the African drought areas travel across the Atlantic Ocean to Texas bringing dust and bugs.
• "Beijing has suffered increased sandstorms with eleven in two months, May and June 2000" (COL-Jun 28,2000)
• "From AD 300 to 1949, China experienced a dust storm on average every 31 years. After 1990, a dust storm occurred almost every year." 080104NASA-Gov
• Like all droughts since Biblical times, the plague of bugs is upon the land.
• "The Chinese government has announced details of a crash, multi-billion-dollar plan it hopes will salvage the deteriorating water supply here, which along with other northern cities has suffered from years of unusually low rainfall and decades of unchecked pollution and poorly planned development .... Officials offered no details of how they would meet the huge cost of building so many plants and hooking up sprawling communities to the main sewerage system."   WSJ010623
• "Peasants are abandoning their land to search for work in factories and mines." WashPost010701 An estimated 200 million rural folks are leaving the rural area for cities. That is more than two-thirds of the population in the United States. [This is a Catch-22: The people work in CO2 generating jobs, the larger the drought.]
• The Korean peninsula is suffering with North Korea compounding its problems with its lack of adequate democracy.
• "With the Korean Peninsula suffering its worst drought in 100 years, the army said 110,000 troops would help farmers build new ditches to carry water to parched rice paddies. 2001-06-12 NYT
• "Parched town locks wells, not homes" 030228
• "Dust and sand storms have plagued Northeast Asia for centuries but are getting worse in modern times" 040331

Upwind Oil Field Development

• Tarim Basin in Xinjiang Province (left top map) of western China. In proportional size and location, it is like a oversize yolk inside an egg.  
• Qaidam Oil Basin in Qingdam Province (center  top map).
• Overall, China has one of the world's lowest gas:oil recovery ratio , about .11 while the U.S. is 1.1. (pg 10, http://www-tsa.lanl.gov/tsa4/pdf/china_energy.pdf). Gas:oil recovery ratio describes amount of gas captured. A ratio of 0 (zero) means all is burned off. None is captured. China's ratio is the average between the older eastern Daqing fields and the newer western fields. Daqing is in the center of industrialized eastern China which has a higher gas:oil recovery rate than the newer western fields. The western recovery ratio is probably worse than it was in the 1930's Texan oil fields which this paper holds responsible for the Dustbowl and Drought of 1933-1940.

Terminating Factor:

• China has one of the worse gas:oil recovery ratios: It flares off natural gas because it has no means to transfer from Western China to Eastern China. It burns off ten times as much natural gas as the U.S. does per barrel of oil. DOE pg 10.
• "With 13.2% of the world's energy-related carbon emissions, China is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide after the United States. China's contribution to world carbon emissions is expected to increase in coming years, with some estimates suggesting China's emissions may exceed those of the United States by 2020." China-USEIA.
• The older, eastern Daqing fields are in decline (COL-March 23, 1999) with the western fields expected to not only make up the losses but support China's energy-demanding economic expansion: "Xinjiang oil and gas output will increase significantly in the next few years."  (COL Feb 23, 2001)
• Chinese leaders are committed to making China second to none by rapid industrialization and energy production:
  "China accounted for 9.6% of world energy consumption in 1997. By 2020, however, projections indicate that China will be responsible for approximately 16.1% of world energy consumption." China-USEIA.
• China is lying about its energy/environment plans: "Research Casts Doubt on China's Pollution Claims"
• China will never be a economic power on par with the US nor will the US maintain its energy-dependent lifestyle.

Prevailing Winds:

• China's prevailing winds into the drought areas is from the west over the Tarim and Quidam Basins.
• Wind are so strong that China's largest wind-driven electricity generator is located here.(COL-Dec 7, 2000)
• The interesting thing is how the prevailing northern lands winds are from the west which brings drought to Northern China until they encounter the Sea of Japan and Pacific Ocean where they do a U-turn back on to Southern China. Under the proposed model:
  1. The CO2 laden plumes from the western oil fields of China act like a dessicant to not only prevent precipitation
  2. but to remove water from the land masses and pick up from the oceans
  3. until a pop bottle shake happens--massive, sudden rainfall over southern China--Tropical storm claims 73 lives in China.

Global Wind Patterns (China, upper left)	China  Enlargement	China Wind Patterns, another view

A NASA photo shows not only the smoke plumes but numerous fires in China. Like other nations with massive upwind oil fields and the apparent threshold of the CO2 matrix phenomenon, China is experiencing extremes in weather including record floods. Japan, as the map in the upper right shows, is under the same wind flow with rising, record temperatures like the Asian mainland. Unfortunately for the energy-poor island nation of Japan, its agreement with Russia to develop energy fields upwind from Japan above the Korean peninsula will cause a national defeat greater than the oil-drive to Southeast Asia in 1941.

International Implications:
On the surface and from immediate impressions, China is the only country that can challenge the economic and military might of the United States. Russia is passe as a superpower, especially with its politicians brokering their influence to the global money dictators, e.g., Russia becoming the nuclear waste dump for the rest of the world with the Russian politicians taking the upfront money to Switzerland for comfortable retirement.

China will never be a superpower, in part, because of the growing drought and pollution. China does not have the money to fund its drought and pollution relief programs. As these problems grow, the bureaucrats will formulate grandiose plans, but the average Chinese will be forced to steal from the supporting infrastructure in order to survive. As Russia cannot pay its nuclear support staff to have a coherent nuclear deterrent, nor will China in the coming days and years be able to maintain let alone expand its nuclear capacity to be a superpower. As Russian scientists and technicians have scavaged infrastructural parts, the same will happen in China. You can't build a sophisticated system with minimum wage workers lacking basic living services who not only live in squalor but don't get regular paychecks.

Part and parcel to this "Ain't gonna be a superpower" is the insufficiency of democratic institutions within China to address and solve the everyday problems that drain human time, emotions, efforts, commitment and resources. The Red Tide will never rise, for the Chinese are increasingly drowning in the problems of their own creation that are being created faster than they are being solved. Chinese economists are like American economists, giving the habitual politicians the facts the politicians want to spin. Each time the Chinese arrest a news editor who raises enough controversy to warrant arrest, it is an arrest for world peace by virtue of castrating the fountainhead of progress. For without an end to corruption at the top which the editors document, China will never achieve the productivity per capita to be a superpower.

China will have another internal struggle like the Cultural Revolution that will dwarf Tinneman Square. This upheaval will leave it a basket case before it will ever become a superpower. Because Mother Nature will not let and is not letting China have the high BTU efficiency for superpower toys. China cannot compete against the country that has the super CO2 generation that represents many time-saving devices. The best hope for the Chinese people is to not only join the Kyoto accords (rather than seek self-destructive, suicidal exemption) but China should demand the US observe the Kyoto accords. The trading of emission credits should be banned like the trading of prostitutes among whorehouse owners.

China is more likely to be another Russia rather than a US or Euro-Community. It will bleed its basic institutions to fund its global symbols until there is no economic blood left to bleed: Draining water from western farms for eastern cities only makes matters worse as there is less agricultural production and increased city population because of hungry, thirsty farmers having only the eastern cities as a final refuge. The existential meltdown is hotter in China.

While China cannot be a superpower, it can be a super terrorist. US policy and military expenditures should be targeted to making China a co-partner in world peace. Billion-dollar missile defense will increase the chances of super-terrorism, for the US cannot fund such a monster without more exportation of inflation and unemployment which China will bear more than any other country. The missile defense system will create the next generation of USS Cole attacks using "lost" nuclear weapons. If the Chinese mafia can daily import countless illegal aliens with personal luggage larger than most tactical nuclear weapons, it is only a matter of time before a hot football comes ashore.

Also see China Is Not A Threat

2011 Update: drought ... UN report ... Downpayment ... drought ... like every gallon of gas displaces about 30 gallons of water so does every pound of coal displace about 30 pounds of water ... Stability? china is a ticking timebomb. ... parallels: New Mexico power plants and East Coast drought bubble.

Additonal Information

• 020408 "Sand smothers Mongolia to Korea"
• 020424 "Taiwan faces worst drought in decades"
• 020413 "China's Growing Deserts Are Suffocating Korea"