Floating Ice Threatens Major Chinese Sea Lanes

China's National Marine Forecasting Station on Tuesday issued an alarm that the worst sea ice of the past 30 years is rapidly developing off the country's eastern coast. By next week, floating chunks of ice up to one foot thick could extend up to 90 nautical miles off the coast of Baohai Sea and 25 nautical miles in the northern Yellow Sea, the station said.

The Bohai Sea, the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea, is one of the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in the world, serving Beijing and other population centers. The station warned of threats to port infrastructure, transportation and maritime operations. This, the worst sea ice in the past 30 years, appeared in early January along these coasts as cold fronts pushed the temperature down to minus 10 degrees Celsius and below.

Lyndon LaRouche commented today that "We are now in a situation where we have not only the broad, environmental evidence of global cooling, but you now have this very specific kind of view of the sea ice. The way the mechanism works, is you have the solar system, which is the great energy system, which controls pretty much everything—the sun. Then you have the refractions of that, which generally get associated with the balance between water and ice. So now you have a glaciation potential being built up inside the oceans—which is very inconvenient news for those who want to have this global warming thesis, which is a genocide thesis."

An irony of current icing is that at the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula which divides the Baohai Sea from the Yellow Sea is Dalian (known in colonial times as Port Arthur). Control of Port Arthur over 105 years ago was one of the immediate issues of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, because it provided Russia with an ice-free port.