TUNGSHIH, Taiwan (AFP) – When worshippers built a temple for the goddess Matsu in south Taiwan 300 years ago, they chose a spot they thought would be at a safe remove from the ocean. They did not count on global warming.

Now, as the island faces rising sea levels, the Tungshih township is forced to set up a new temple nearby, elevated by three metres (10 feet) compared with the original site.

“Right now, the temple is flooded pretty much every year,” said Tsai Chu-wu, the temple’s chief secretary, explaining why the 63-million-dollar project is necessary.

“Once the new temple is completed, we should be able to avoid floods and the threat of the rising sea, at least for many, many years,” he said.

The temple of Matsu, ironically often described as the Goddess of the Sea, is only one example of how global warming is slowly, almost imperceptibly piling pressure on Taiwan.

Mountains cover two thirds of Taiwan, but the heart of the island’s economy is concentrated in the remaining third, which stretches down the west coast and consists mostly of flat land near sea level.

This part of Taiwan is home to a string of populous cities, several industry zones, three nuclear power plants — and a petrochemical complex, built in the 1990s by Formosa Plastics Group for over 20 billion US dollars.

And unlike the temple, none of these crucial economic establishments can possibly be lifted, leaving them exposed to the elements.

“If the sea levels keep rising, part of Taiwan’s low-lying western part could be submerged,” said Wang Chung-ho, an earth scientist at Taiwan’s top academic body Academia Sinica.

An influential Taiwan documentary released earlier this year argued the risk to the petrochemical complex was very real. However, a Formosa Plastics official told AFP stringent construction measures meant there was no danger.

Still, environmentalists consider the risk too high to ignore, and they point out that it is compounded by the overpumping of groundwater both for traditional agriculture and for fish farming.

This has caused the groundwater level to fall and land to subside below sea level in some coastal areas, experts warn.

The greatest extent of seawater encroachment has been estimated to be as far as 8.5 kilometres inland with an affected area of about 104 square kilometres (40 square miles) in southern Taiwan’s Pingtung county, according to a study co-written by Wang.

Once low-lying areas are routinely invaded by sea water, it is very hard to turn back the tide, analysts warned.

“They may not be restored and become wastelands within 100 years,” warned Hsu Tai-wen, the head of the Hydraulic and Ocean Engineering Department of the National Cheng Kung University in Tainan city in the south of Taiwan.

In its 2007 assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations said that due to the global warming, the world’s sea level is projected to rise by up to 0.59 metres before the end of this century.

However, Wang was more pessimistic, citing recent findings that greenhouse gas emissions are growing faster than previously believed.

“As more records show that the global warming is turning for the worse, we estimate that the sea level would rise by up to two metres before the close of the century, or up to 10 times that of the last century,” he said.

The residents of the capital Taipei may be among the first to suffer, due to the risk posed to Tamshui, a town within day-trip distance popular because of its lively and picturesque waterfront.

“The streets of coastal cities like Tamshui would be invaded by saline water,” said Wang.

The authorities have started drafting the island’s first climate change whitepaper, which aims to come up with comprehensive measures to prevent natural disasters caused by rising temperatures.

Apart from rising sea levels, scientists at Academia Sinica warned late last year that global warming would cause the amount of heavy rain dumped on Taiwan to triple over the next 20 years.

The projection was based on statistics showing the incidence of heavy rainfall has doubled in the past 45 years, which the scientists say has coincided with a global rise in temperatures.

The torrential rains unleashed by a typhoon could burst the Shihmen Dam, a reservoir on a river that flows past Taipei county, where millions of people reside, Wang warned.

The whitepaper draft calls for raising existing coastal embankments, constructing dams, improving conservation of river water and soil upstream, and laying idle some areas reclaimed from the ocean and rivers.

“This should have been done earlier,” said Hsu, a member of an academic panel that reviewed the whitepaper.

by Benjamin Yeh

MOSCOW – Hundreds of wildfires that has swept western Russia and cloaked Moscow in suffocating smog has caused billions of dollars in damage, a newspaper said Tuesday.

The business daily Kommersant said the damage from the fires was expected to amount to about $15 billion – or about one percent of the country’s gross domestic product. The government has yet to release any damage estimates.

The hottest summer since record-keeping began 130 years ago has cost Russia more than a third of its wheat crop and prompted the government to ban wheat exports for the rest of the year.

Kommersant said a rise in grain prices would likely lead to a spike in inflation and stifle growth.

The acrid smog that has engulfed Moscow for a week eased a bit on Tuesday, but the concentration of pollutants remained high.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin summoned Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who said the situation in the capital was difficult but that city health authorities were doing what was needed to help the population cope with the heat and smog.

Ambulances calls have risen by nearly a quarter, compared with the period before the heat wave struck, Luzhkov said.

Later Tuesday, Putin was expected to tour two villages which were burned to the ground by fires southeast of Moscow to discuss rebuilding efforts.

He previously has promised new houses to all those who lost housing in the fires before the fall, and ordered to place Web cameras at burned villages to raise pressure on local officials on reconstruction efforts.

Despite Putin’s visits to the areas hit by fires, opinion polls have shown a drop in approval ratings for both him and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Medvedev was slow to interrupt his Black Sea vacation even as fires around Moscow grew worse, and, unlike Putin – who met with villagers and firefighters – mostly conferred with officials after his return.

A nationwide poll of 2,000 conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation earlier this month showed Putin’s approval ratings dropping from 63 to 61 percent compared with a survey in late July, while Medvedev saw his popularity drop from 57 to 52 percent. The margin of error for the poll was about plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The business daily Vedomosti quoted Kremlin-linked political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky saying the Russian leadership was unprepared for the fires.

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press Writer

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Ozone blowing over from Asia is raising background levels of a major ingredient of smog in the skies over California, Oregon, Washington and other Western states, according to a new study appearing in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

The amounts are small and, so far, only found in a region of the atmosphere known as the free troposphere, at an altitude of two to five miles, but the development could complicate U.S. efforts to control air pollution.

Though the levels are small, they have been steadily rising since 1995, and probably longer, said lead author Owen R. Cooper, a research scientist at the University of Colorado attached to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

“The important aspect of this study for North America is that we have a strong indication that baseline ozone is increasing,” said Cooper. “We still don’t know how much is coming down to the surface. If the surface ozone is increasing along with the free tropospheric ozone, that could make it more difficult for the U.S. to meet its ozone air quality standard.”

The study is the first link between atmospheric ozone over the U.S. and Asian pollution, said Dan Jaffe, a University of Washington-Bothell professor of atmospheric and environmental chemistry.

He contributed data from his observatory on top of Mount Bachelor in Oregon to the study.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering lowering the current limit on ozone in the atmosphere by as much as 20 percent, and has been working with China to lower its emissions of the chemicals that turn into ozone.

Ozone is harmful to people’s respiratory systems and plants. It is created when compounds produced by burning fossil fuels are hit by sunlight and break down. Ozone also contributes to the greenhouse effect, ranking behind carbon dioxide and methane in importance.

Ozone is only one of many pollutants from Asia that reach the United States. Instruments regularly detect mercury, soot, and cancer-causing PCBs.

Jaffe said it was logical to conclude that the increasing ozone was the result of burning more coal and oil as part of the Asia’s booming economic growth.

The next step is to track the amounts of Asian ozone reaching ground levels on the West Coast, said Cooper.

Work will start in May and end in June, when air currents produce the greatest amounts of Asian ozone detected in the U.S. Weather balloons and research aircraft will be launched daily to measure ozone closer to ground, where it affects the air people breathe, Cooper said.

The study to be published in Nature looked at thousands of air samples collected between 1995 and 2008 and found a 14 percent increase in the amount of background ozone at middle altitudes in springtime. When data from 1984 were factored in, the rate of increase was similar, and the overall increase was 29 percent.

When ozone from local sources was removed from the data, the trend became stronger, Cooper said. Using a computer model based on weather patterns, the ozone was traced back to southeastern Asia, including the countries of India, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The ozone increases were strongest when winds prevailed from southeastern Asian, Cooper said.

In a commentary also published in Nature, atmospheric chemist Kathy Law of Universite de Paris in France said the study was “the most conclusive evidence so far” of increasing ozone over the Western United States.

Law noted that natural sources of ozone could contribute to the increases, and there were limitations to the computer model used to trace the sources of the increases, but the study remained a “vital benchmark” that could be used to test climate change models, which have been unable to reproduce increases in ozone.

William Sprigg, a research professor at the University of Arizona who studies the global movement of airborne dust, said in an e-mail that he agreed with Law’s comments, adding that studies like this one make it possible to really control air quality.

“Part of the solution to controlling emissions from abroad is to show the negative consequences and our own efforts to lower emissions,” he wrote.

By JEFF BARNARD, AP Environmental Writer