Eastern China set for record-hot summers

Yahoo via AFP: By 2024, more than half of summers in eastern China will be as hot as in 2013, when the region was hit by a record-busting heatwave and devastating drought, a study said Sunday. Based on current global warming trends, the big heat will happen even if rising greenhouse gas emissions are braked over the next decade, it said.

The summer of 2013 was the hottest on record in eastern China -- a massive 1.1 degrees Celsius (two degrees Fahrenheit) above the long-term average. On 31 days, the temperature reached or exceeded the heatwave benchmark of 35 degrees Celsius -- more than double the usual June-August tally.

Nine provinces, with half a billion inhabitants, were affected. Direct economic losses, in China's most populated and economically developed region, have been put at 59 billion renminbi ($9.6 billion).

Reporting in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists in Beijing, Canada and the United States said the probability of a 2013-like summer in eastern China had increased by a factor of 60 since the early 1950s....