The post Extreme heat waves are now expected to happen once per decade : UN climate science report appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The report found that we are already experiencing those effects of climate change, as the planet has surpassed more than 1 degree Celsius in average warming. Heat waves, droughts and torrential rains are only set to become more frequent and extreme as the earth warms further.
It is the first time that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has quantified the likelihood of these extreme events in a wide variety of scenarios.
The report found that once-in-a-decade heavy rain events are now 1.3 times more likely and 6.7% wetter, compared with the 50 years up to 1900 when major human-driven warming started to occur.
Previously once-in-a-decade droughts could happen every five or six years.
Scientists emphasized that these effects of climate change are already here, with events like the heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest killing hundreds in June and Brazil currently experiencing its worst drought in 91 years.
“The heat wave in Canada, fires in California, floods in Germany, floods in China, droughts in central Brazil make it very, very clear that climate extremes are having a very heavy toll,” said Paulo Artaxo, a lead author of the report and an environmental physicist and the University of Sao Paulo.
The future looks even grimmer, with more warming meaning more frequent extreme events.
Heat waves show stronger increases in frequency with warming than all other extreme events. Twice in a century heat waves could happen roughly every six years with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, a level which the report says could be surpassed within two decades.
Should the world become 4 degrees Celsius hotter, as could happen in a high-emissions scenario, those heat waves would happen every one to two years.
Carolina Vera, another report author and a physical climate scientist at University of Buenos Aires and Argentina’s main agency for science research (CONICET), said there is also an increasing likelihood that multiple extreme weather events could happen at the same time.
For example, extreme heat, drought and high winds – conditions that could feed wildfires – are more likely to happen at the same time.
The IPCC has a medium or high-level confidence that many important agricultural regions around the world will see more droughts or extreme rain. That includes parts of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil that are major growers of soybeans and other global commodities.
“It is scary, sure, with the risk that fires, heat waves, droughts will affect humans in the form of weather and food insecurity, energy insecurity, water quality and health – mainly in poor regions,” said Jose Marengo, a climatologist at the Brazilian Science Ministry’s disaster monitoring center.
Marengo was not involved in the IPCC report.
For example, regions that are already prone to drought are likely to experience them more frequently, including in the Mediterranean, southern Australia, and western North America, said Friederike Otto, IPCC author and climatologist at University of Oxford.
Increased frequency of drought and heavy rain also are not mutually exclusive and are predicted in places like Southern Africa, she said.
The projections on extreme weather events laid out in the report reinforce the importance of curbing climate change to the levels laid out in the Paris Agreement, scientists said.
“If we stabilize at 1.5 degrees, we can stop them from getting much worse,” Otto said.
(This story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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]]>The post Irreversible impact of climate change to hit India in recent years appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Most of these impacts are irreversible and hence cannot be remediated even if greenhouse gas emissions decline dramatically, the IPCC said.
The IPCC report titled ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’ released on Monday said heatwaves and humid heat stress will be more intense and frequent during the 21st century over South Asia.
The Indian Ocean, which includes the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, has warmed faster than the global average, the IPCC said with “very high confidence”. The oceans factsheet released by IPCC on Monday indicates that sea surface temperature over Indian ocean is likely to increase by 1 to 2 degrees C (°C) when there is 1.5°C to 2°C global warming.
Over high mountains in Asia which include the Himalayas, snow cover has reduced since the early 21st century, and glaciers have thinned, retreated, and lost mass since the 1970s, the IPCC said, although the Karakoram glaciers haven’t recorded any major retreating trend.
Snow-covered areas and snow volumes will continue to decrease during the 21st century, snowline elevations will rise and glacier mass is likely to decline further as emissions rise. Rising global temperature and rain can increase the occurrence of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) and landslides over moraine-dammed lakes, the IPCC warned.
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]]>The post Uttarakhand Villagers Dedicated Forests To Local Deity As A Way Of Conserving Forests appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Local residents in the Bageshwar district met last week to voice their concerns about the degradation of water supplies and unlawful tree cutting in forests around them. Without action, they warned, there would be a number of difficulties, including water shortages and landslides, in their hamlet and the neighboring areas.
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]]>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 Delhi Might Witness Monsoon In Few Days appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>According to the department, the rainfall throughout Northwestern India is very probable from July 9 on and the isolated severe pluvial rainfall is most likely in Uttarakhand from July 8. The rainfall is also very likely over Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh from July 9.
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]]>The post Dead Turtles Float To Shore Post Ship Sink In Sri Lanka appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Wildlife officials removed off the container ship, which continued to fire for over two weeks outside Sri Lanka, the remains of dead sea turtles and dolphin killed by chemistry toxins and severe heat. In collaboration with the Indian Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force of Sri Lanka worked to finally fire.
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