Even as we are getting ready to mark ‘Earth Day’ on April 22, there is a growing pressure on world leaders to show the pace of global climate change, says a United Nations (UN) report. Most scientists believe that human activities are rapidly shaping climate trends. More disturbingly, these climatic shifts are affecting the global economy.
Experts say that weather extremes have reduced China’s agricultural output, contributing to the depletion of global grain reserves and driving up prices. The United States experienced a severe drought in 2002 and an extreme heat wave in 2012, and as a result it suffered huge losses due to the weather related disasters. Worldwide weather-related disaster losses reached billions of dollars, annually.
Although these losses are not yet definitively linked to climatic change, they demonstrate human vulnerability to even minor climate shifts and have sparked the emergence of new political and economic coalitions favoring action to stabilize the climate. Island nations whose property values and very existence are threatened by rising seas and the insurance companies, concerned that storm-related losses could bankrupt them, are calling on world leaders to take prompt action to slow climate change.
Stabilizing the climate will require overhauling our energy and transportation systems – an end to the fossil fuel economy as we now know it, says a study report. But it notes optimistically that recent innovations hold promise for rapid development of an economical, low-carbon energy system based on many of the decentralized electronic technologies that are reshaping communications, entertainment and medicine.
Worldwide carbon emissions, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and global average temperature all reached record highs last year. The year 2014 was the warmest on record; the world is increasingly seeing extreme weather events which are devastating livelihoods and economies. Incidentally, all of the warmest years, since record keeping began nearly 150 years ago, have occurred since 1980.
Local and regional weather patterns seem to confirm the broader trend. The National Climate Data Centre says that the United States has experienced more extreme weather events in recent years. The rapid warming of Antarctica has led to the disintegration of many major ice shelves. And not surprisingly, malaria-carrying mosquitoes are rapidly spreading into temperature regions.
Besides, in a new sign of long-term climate change, recent US data showed that Arctic sea ice this year is the smallest in winter since satellite records began in 1979. The ice floating on the Arctic Ocean around the North Pole reached its maximum annual extent of just 14.54 million square km on February 25, 2015 – slightly bigger than Canada – and is now expected to shrink with a Spring thaw. The ice is 1.1 million square kms smaller than the 1981-2010 average, and below the previous lowest maximum in 2011. “This year’s maximum ice extent is the lowest in the satellite record, with below-average ice condition everywhere except in the Labrador Sea and Davis Strait,” The US National show and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), said in a statement.
Rapid increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, combined with a leveling off or decline in sulfate aerosols – which tend to offset the warming effects of greenhouse gases — will result in disruptive and unpredictable changes in local weather patterns during the next decades, a new study suggests. Floods, droughts, wild fires and heat wave outbreaks will likely become more frequent as temperatures rise.
At a time when the world is adding 87 million people each year, and suffering unprecedented loss of forests, we are not well positioned to cope with such extreme disruptions, chronic water shortages already plaguing more than 80 countries; hotter, drier weather conditions could undermine a precarious global food balance. Industries that are especially vulnerable to climate change include fishing, forest products, and insurance. After losing billions of dollars in weather-related claims during the last about a decade, some insurance companies concluded that increased weather extremes could be devastating. In fact, it is pointed out that the insurance industry is first in line to be affected by climate change, as it could bankrupt the industry.
Now, technologies can improve energy efficiency, and allow energy needs to be met by harnessing sunlight and wind. The study notes that the world market for solar cells has nearly trebled since 1990, while that for wind turbines has expanded six-fold. Mass production and falling costs have made some of these carbon-free energy systems less expensive. than ones based on fossil fuel.
Such innovations are badly needed according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of scientists from across the globe that advices climate treaty members. It concluded that a drastic reduction in fossil fuel use will be needed in the next few decades in order to meet the treaty’s goal of preventing ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system.”
Since the climate convention was signed at Rio de Janeiro, in 1992, the world is a long way from meeting this objective. In the last two decades or so, annual fossil-fuel related emissions of carbon, which produce carbon dioxide (CO2), the leading greenhouse gas, rose tremendously. Earth’s atmospheric concentration of CO2, the main culprit in global warming, soared to 396 parts per million, or 142 per cent of pre-industrial levels – defined as before 1750. That marked a hike of 2.9 parts per million in the last about a year – the largest annual increase in 30 years. Fossil-fuel related emissions would have risen even higher if not for the economic collapse of central and eastern Europe, which temporarily drove down emission in that region.
Under the climate convention, industrial countries that contribute most heavily to climate change are committed to holding their emissions of greenhouse gases at below the 2005 level in 2025. Only a few of these nations appear to be making the target. Developing countries’ greenhouse gas emissions are still rising rapidly, driven by demand for transportation, refrigeration, lighting and other modern amenities.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
