14 minutes agoHow are climate changes causing extreme heat worldwide
Periskopi(2 years ago)
(2 years ago)Climate change is promoting dangerous heat waves in the northern hemisphere this week and will continue to cause dangerous weather for decades, according to research. “We are now suffering from a wave of global heat”, said Christiana Figueres, former head of the UN climate agency. Below we can [...]
Climate change is promoting dangerous heat waves in the northern hemisphere this week and will continue to cause dangerous weather for decades, according to research.
“We are now suffering from a wave of global heat”, said Christiana Figueres, former head of the UN climate agency.
The following is how climate change is driving heat to a extreme degree.
How are climate changes promoting heat?
While the constant burning of fossil fuels emits more carbon emissions in the hemisphere, the air can collect more heat from the sun, thus boosting average global temperature over time.
The average global temperature has already risen to nearly 1.3 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution began, when Western countries started burning coal and other fossil fuels.
This increase implies that climate change is making heat waves warmer than it would have been without atmospheric heat. They are also becoming more frequent in general and more dangerous as a result.
Each wave of heat “has become much more likely and hotter than it would have been, as a result of climate change caused by human hand”, scientist Daniel Swain from UCLA said earlier this month.
The “at this time, making such a statement is small because there is too much evidence to support this”, he said.
What is the impact of climate change?
Besides global warming, there are other factors and conditions that can affect heat waves. Climate phenomena, such as El Nino or La Nina, can have great impact, along with the wind stream system.
Earth's coverage can also play a role because dark surfaces and construction facilities become warmer than white surfaces or natural environments such as forests or lagoons.
To understand exactly how much climate change has impacted a certain wave of heat, scientists perform <x0-cyclumbing”
They have conducted hundreds of such studies in the last decade by making computer simulations to compare today's weather systems to what the weather would have been like if people hadn't changed the chemistry of the atmosphere in the last century.
For example, scientists at the World Weather Authority have found that dangerous heat in South Asia in April is likely due to climate change. During a heat wave in the northeast of the Indian city of Kolkata, the temperature reached 46 degrees Fahrenheit [46 ° C] - 10 degrees higher than the seasonal average.
What can we expect in the near future?
Even if carbon emissions were to stop today, the world has released enough carbon to ensure that climate change will continue to affect temperatures for decades.
The world certainly has to lower emissions by half from levels of 1995 to 2030 B.C., as well as on a zero scale until 2050 to keep the average temperature rising to about 1.5 degrees below the pre-industrial average, according to scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.
However, global emissions have only increased since 1995. The world is on track to reach an average of 2.7 degrees by 2100, which will exceed the 1.5th threshold, beyond which scientists have predicted catastrophic and irreversible impacts in climate.
The fact that millions of people “in the United States suffer from unprecedented heat waves is an indication of the fact that we have not yet addressed the worst climate changes”, Figueres told Reuters on Thursday. /rel
