The post Climate change is causing destruction all over the world appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>In the past week alone, 380,000 people have been evacuated due to floods in China’s Henan province, 30 villages in Uganda were affected as rivers overflowed and 25 people died in landslides after Mumbai was hit by big storms that also inundated regions surrounding the megacity. Temperatures in Turkey and North Africa approached 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), while South Africa and Brazil froze. Siberia is battling wildfires again.
Finland experienced 31 consecutive days with maximum temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius, the longest heatwave ever recorded in the country. Emergency rooms filled up, mostly with people suffering from dehydration and cardiac issues, local media reported.
“Research shows that similar long heatwaves can lead to several hundreds of excess deaths, mostly among the elderly,” said Virpi Kollanus, a researcher at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. A 2018 heatwave is estimated to have caused about 380 deaths in Finland.
In Iran, the hottest summer in decades has led to water shortages that in turn sparked protests in the country’s southwest. At least one protester has been killed by gunfire and a policeman was shot dead during the unrest.
All these calamities are part of a constellation of extreme weather events that paint a picture of a world that’s already warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times. There’s no doubt it will get warmer.
The global climate is out of balance, German meteorologist Johannes Quaas said in an interview last week as his country reeled from floods that killed over 170 people and left hundreds missing. Our climate’s reaction to greenhouse gas emissions isn’t immediate. The warming and resulting weather events that we see today are a reaction to emissions that entered the atmosphere decades ago.
“Even if societies meet the target to reduce carbon dioxide pollution to net zero in 2050, the planet will continue to warm after that,” Quaas said. “The planet needs to reach a new balance and will continue to warm until it does.”
Scientists estimate that, even if we meet global emissions reduction goals, some amount of warming is baked in. That will take the planet to somewhere between 1.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times by the end of the century. While their warming predictions have been correct in the past, there’s no way to be absolutely sure when temperatures will stop rising, because the experiment we’re running on the planet has never been attempted before.
“We’ll definitely make it to 1.5 degrees Celsius and it will be hard to stop the warming and remain there,” said Hans-Otto Portner, a professor at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and an adviser to the German government on climate and the environment. “This tells us that we haven’t reached the end of it. The motivation to do something about climate change only grows because we see the signs on the wall.”
Death, violence and destruction are all signs of humanity’s struggle to adapt to a changing climate. “It seems like there’s something in human mentality that makes us be behind the events, and not ahead,” Portner said. “Maybe that’s because the nature of unprecedented events is that we can’t imagine what’s coming.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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]]>The post Cyclone Tauktae stops the COVID vaccination drive in Gujarat appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>In the meantime, Cyclone Tauktae killed atleast seven people in Gujarat. It has left behind an aftermath of destruction along the coast. It uprooted the electric poles and tress and damaged several houses and roads.
The cyclone has now weakened into a “cyclonic storm” and will slowly become just a “deep depression”. The cyclone has caused heavy rainfall in various parts of the states. The rainfall has caused water logging in Ahmedabad.
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]]>The post Amitabh Bacchan’s Mumbai office flooded due to cyclone Tauktae. appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>He wrote,”There is an eerie silence in the midst of the cyclone…the pounding and the lashing rains all day.. trees fell, leakages all over, flooding in the vulnerable Janak Office..impromptu plastic cover sheets still in prep for the heavy monsoon rain, ripped apart.. sheds and shelters for some staff blown away.. BUT the spirit of fight impregnable… all hands on deck… stepping out, repairing, preventing helping in extenuating circumstances drenched.. but on it”.
He added that the staff is simply amazing in such conditions, their uniforms were wet and dripping but they continued. The megastar also gave them an immediate change of clothes from his own wardrobe. He also tweeted,”T 3906- The winds and the rain of cyclone Tauktae lashes us with intense ferocity.. my prayers for all to be safe and protected”.
T 3907 – इन संकट की घड़ियों में, प्रार्थना, प्रार्थना, प्रार्थना !
श्री काशी विश्वनाथ,#वाराणसी,
दि.17.5.2021 के सप्तऋषि /संध्या आरती के दर्शन।
हर हर महादेव
ॐ नम: शिवाय्pic.twitter.com/I612gZw61W
— Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) May 17, 2021
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]]>The post Mumbai Airport cancels 22 flights due to Cyclone Tauktae appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL) said in a statement,”The airport has so far witnessed 7 diversions. In the wake of the alert, a few airlines have decided to cancel services to Mumbai. CSMIA has registered the cancellations of 34 arrivals and 22 departure flights”.
The Indian Meteorological Department has earlier issued an orange alert for Mumbai due to the prediction of heavy to very heavy rainfall.
A number of 12 Air India flights were operated till 11 am on Monday. However, the airline later cancelled its five deoartures.
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]]>The post Palestinian militant commander killed in a rocket fire from Israel, US has called for peace appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>According to the Gaza health officials, the death toll reached 201 last week, which also included 58 children and 34 women. The Israeli authorities said that 10 people were killed in Israel including two children.
The death of the Hussam Abu Harmeed, the armed commander of north Gaza’s Islamic Jihad will most certainly draw an aggressive response from the militant group.
The Israeli military said,”Harbeen had been behind several anti-tank missile terror attacks against Israeli civilians”. However the militant groups in Gaza have not given any sign of stopping the fights. Later after the incident, Islamic Jihad said that it had fired rockets on the coastal cities of Israel. Israel has also bombed the underground tunnels used by Hamas to take revenge for the attack on their coastal cities.
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