Although living in Canada we have got used to the chilly and cold winter and the nuisance of snow storm and the dangerous freezing rain, I am rather concerned about the suffering of people in China who suffered from extremely cold weather of snow storm and freezing rain. Highways are shut off and many cities, towns were completely isolated without food, electricity and clean water for almost 20 days. In a nut shell, 14 provinces in the middle and NW and SW were frozen and black-out.
I am particularly interested in one of the released photo showing a family having dinner in candle light. This family is lucky and they have stocked up some food, perhaps for the New Year. Others are not that lucky. There are close to 10-15 million workers who have worked in the richer Southern provinces such as KwangTung Province that is located near Hong Kong. Closed to a quarter of million workers have to wait for a train to go back to their native villages at the Kwangchow (Canton, the capital city near Hong Kong.) A close look at the dinner table top, see what I’ve found – a Chinese Chess grid. This is a good game and I love to play when I was young and I was pride when I could defeat my father and my brothers.
Two other photos showed a frozen car on a hwy and another one showed a military vehicle crushing snow and ice (!!!) They are not prepared for snow and ice as there were no specialized vehicles, equipments and salts to defrost the icy roads.
We have a lot to learn from this emergency because we should be mentally prepared and sensitive to any emergency and technically prepared for any.
The accuracy of weather forecast of Chinese Meteorological Bureau for long period is said to be only 19% and the time for more accurate forecast is 2 hours. This is really poor. In the old days for several thousand years, Chinese farmers and ordinary people rely on the Lunar Chinese Calendar, called Tungshing. This is actually a book with detailed forecasting account on the the four seasons and the weather of raining and snow for a particular day, month and a year. The year of Pig is forecasted to be a year of a lot of rain water and in winter meaning snow and ice. Proficient scholars can forecast the regions that would suffer from floods, drought or snow storms! Unscientific, a lot of people would outright reject the findings of this calendar and the theories of forecast underlining the lunar calendar, especially the communist bureaucrats who burned all old Chinese books and ban the studies. These findings and studies of weather were actually empirical statistics being collected over a vast period of 5000 years. And most importantly, it has a far more accurate forecasting ability than the current tools. By combining the old knowledge accumulated in the past with the modern knowledge and equipments and computers, mankind will have a better chance to deal with future challenges. There were a lot of talented Chinese scholars, philosophers, scientists and inventors in the past and what they thought, studied, discovered or proposed still affected the world today. For example, Chinese scholars have long proposed the importance of people , living in harmony with the nature, and the surroundings on the earth in the backdrop of revolving time.
