Tag: global warming

Categories
-Top News India News World News

Guterres seeks G20 for pact to hold down global warming

Kevadia, Oct 20 (ANI): Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres at the launch of the Mission LiFE at Statue of Unity in Ekta Nagar, in Kevadia on Thursday. (ANI Photo)

Guterres urges India-led G20 for a Climate Solidarity Pact in which wealthier countries mobilize financial and technical resources to support emerging economies, writes Arul Louis…reports Asian Lite News

As a panel of UN experts warned that India’s food production could see a massive fall if global warming went unchecked, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said that he was asking the G20 for a pact to keep warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade.

“In India, rice production can decrease from 10 per cent to 30 per cent, whereas maize production can decrease from 25 per cent to 70 per cent assuming a range of temperature increase from 1 degree centigrade to 4 degrees centigrade,” a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on Monday.

Guterres said that he has proposed to the India-led G20, the group of major emerging and developed economies, “a Climate Solidarity Pact – in which all big emitters make extra efforts to cut emissions, and wealthier countries mobilize financial and technical resources to support emerging economies in a common effort to keep 1.5 degrees alive”.

Although he cautioned that “the climate time-bomb is ticking”, he also sounded a note of hope: “Today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb. It is a survival guide for humanity”.

The report shows that global warming can be kept down to 1.5 degrees centigrade, “but it will take a quantum leap in climate action”, Guterres said.

He said that he is presenting a plan to “a super-charge” the Climate Solidarity Pact.

It would require “leaders of developed countries committing to reaching net zero as close as possible to 2040, and developing countries as close as possible to 2050”, he said.

Guterres’s plan calls for an end to use of coal and net-zero electricity generation by 2035 for all developed countries and 2040 for the rest of the world.

It also requires an immediate stop to all licensing or funding of new oil and gas ventures, and expansion of existing ones.

The report known as the Sixth Synthesis Report of the IPCC said that temperatures have already risen to 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels because of fossil fuel burning and unequal and unsustainable energy use.

This has led to more frequent and intense extreme weather dangerously impacting people around the world, it said.

Without action to hold global warming, “in South Asia, extreme climatic conditions are threatening food security; thus, agro-based economies, such as those of India and Pakistan, are the most vulnerable to climate change in this regard”, the report said

India is “emerging as the most vulnerable nation in terms of crop production” in South Asia, it said.

It said that in South Asia, “water demand in sectors such as irrigation, industry and households will increase by 30 per cent to 40 per cent around 2050 in comparison with 2010”.

“Within a country as well, the water scarcity could be exacerbated, such as in India and China, due to various drivers like population increase and climate change,” it added.

ALSO READ-India showcases its strength in research at G20

Categories
-Top News Environment World

Antarctic Sea Ice Receding at Alarming Rate

This year, the ice is receding even more quickly than in the previous record year of 2022.

The sea ice in Antarctica has reached its lowest extent since satellites have been observing the changes in the ice cover in the past 40 years, the German Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) said.

The sea ice of the Southern Ocean had shrunk to a new record minimum of 2.2 million square km by early February, the study found on Friday.

This year, the ice is receding even more quickly than in the previous record year of 2022. According to the study, the sea ice in the Antarctic is expected to continue to melt during the second half of February, Xinhua news agency reported.

“The rapid decline in sea ice over the past six years is quite remarkable since the ice cover had hardly changed at all in the 35 years before,” Christian Haas, head of the Sea Ice Physics Section at AWI, said in a statement.

One possible reason for the strong melting of the ice cover was the above-average warm air temperatures in the western and eastern parts of the Antarctic Peninsula, which were around 1.5 degrees Celsius above the long-term average, according to AWI.

Photo shows an iceberg on the sea near the Zhongshan Station a Chinese\ research base in Antarctica.

“It is still unclear whether what we are seeing is the beginning of a rapid end to summer sea ice in the Antarctic, or if it is merely the beginning of a new phase characterised by low but still stable sea ice cover in the summer,” Haas added.

The crew of the research vessel Polarstern reports “almost ice-free conditions” in their current research area, the Bellingshausen Sea.

Historical records also show “tremendous changes” in sea ice conditions, the AWI added. In 1899, the Belgian research vessel Belgica was stuck for more than a year in massive pack ice in exactly the same area where Polarstern can now operate completely free of ice.

“The photographs and diaries of the Belgica’s crew offer a unique chronicle of the ice conditions in the Bellingshausen Sea at the dawn of the industrial age, which climate researchers often use as a benchmark for comparison with today’s climate change,” the AWI said.

ALSO READ: Climate change poses big threat to Emperor Penguins

Categories
Environment World News

Global warming causing oceans to lose ‘memory’

However, the mixed layer over most oceans will become shallower in response to continued anthropogenic warming, resulting in a decline in ocean memory…reports Asian Lite News

Most of the world’s oceans are steadily losing their year-to-year ‘memory’ under global warming, researchers have warned.

Ocean memory decline is found as a collective response across the climate models to human-induced warming. As greenhouse-gas concentrations continue to rise, such memory decline will become increasingly evident.

The study published in the journal Science Advances compared the fast weather fluctuations of the atmosphere to find that the slowly varying ocean exhibits strong persistence, or “memory,” meaning the ocean temperature tomorrow is likely to look a lot like it does today, with only slight changes.

“We discovered this phenomenon by examining the similarity in ocean surface temperature from one year to the next as a simple metric for ocean memory,” said Hui Shi, lead author and researcher at the Farallon Institute in Petaluma, California. “It’s almost as if the ocean is developing amnesia.”

Ocean memory is found to be related to the thickness of the uppermost layer of the ocean, known as the mixed layer. Deeper mixed layers have greater heat content, which confers more thermal inertia that translates into memory.

However, the mixed layer over most oceans will become shallower in response to continued anthropogenic warming, resulting in a decline in ocean memory.

Along with ocean memory decline, the thinning mixed layer is also found to increase the random fluctuations of the sea surface temperature.

As a result, although the ocean will not become much more variable from one year to the next in the future, the fraction of helpful signals for prediction largely reduces.

“Reduced ocean memory together with increased random fluctuations suggest intrinsic changes in the system and new challenges in prediction under warming,” said Fei-Fei Jin, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Hawaii.

Ocean memory loss doesn’t just impact the prediction of physical variables, but could also influence the way we manage sensitive marine ecosystems.

Besides ocean prediction, forecasting land-based impacts on temperature, precipitation as well as extreme events might also be affected by ocean memory decline due to their dependence on the persistence of sea surface temperature as a predictability source, the team said.

Sea levels rising twice as fast in New Zealand

New data released on Monday revealed that sea levels in New Zealand were rising some 20 to 30 years faster than previously expected.

Based on current international emissions reduction policies, global sea levels are expected to rise about 0.6 metres by the year 2100.

However, for large parts of New Zealand this will double to about 1.2 metres due to ongoing land subsidence, said Professor Tim Naish from the Victoria University of Wellington, co-leader of the NZ SeaRise programme.

“We have less time to act than we thought,” Naish said.

What may be a real surprise to people is that for many of New Zealand’s most populated regions, such as Auckland and Wellington, “this unavoidable rise is happening faster than we thought.”

“Vertical land movements mean that these changes in sea level may happen 20 to 30 years sooner than previously expected,” said Richard Levy from GNS Science and Victoria University of Wellington, co-leader of NZ SeaRise.

For many parts of New Zealand’s coast, 30 cm of sea-level rise is a threshold for extreme flooding, above which the 100-year coastal storm becomes an annual event, Levy said.

NZ SeaRise, a five-year research programme funded by the government, brings together 30 local and international experts from universities and research institutes to improve projections of sea-level rise in New Zealand.

On Monday, the programme released location-specific sea-level rise projections out to the year 2300 for every 2 km of the coast of New Zealand.

These projections can be accessed through a new online tool.

For the first time, New Zealanders will be able to see how much and how fast sea levels will rise along their own stretch of coast and in their neighbourhood, according to the programme.

The new projections are being incorporated into the next Ministry for the Environment guidance for local governments’ work on coastal hazards and climate change, Levy said.

Climate change and warming temperatures are causing sea levels to rise, on average, by 3.5 mm per year. This sea-level rise is caused by thermal expansion of the ocean, and the melting of land-based glaciers as well as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

However, local sea-level rise around the coast of New Zealand is also affected by the up-and-down movements of its land.

ALSO READ-Delimitation: Jammu 43 gets seats, 47 for Kashmir