Increasing temperatures, wildfires: Global warming cause for grave concern

Although the global warming report indicates that carbon emissions should fall at least by 45 per cent by the end of 2030 when compared to 2010, there are no efforts being put towards achieving the same.

Hyderabad: The world is reeling from a series of disasters with wildfires, hurricanes, floods, famine ravaging people's lives. Fires are raging in 12 states on the west coast of the United States, due to the hot waves across the coast.

The sky turned into a fire glow of orange. Not only did the smoke from those fires spread to a height of 10 kilometers, but it also reached the eastern coastal states of the United States and increased air pollution.

So far, 69 million acres have burned in the United States of that, 33 million acres were burnt down in California.

Forests continue to burn somewhere or the other, throughout the year, ranging from Alaska and Siberia in the North Pole to Australia in the south and Asia in the east to the west American Pacific coast.

A threat to all nations

In India, 21.4 per cent of forests are identified as areas affected by the forest-fires. Last year 29,547 fires were recorded in our forests. In May this year, forest fires broke out in the state of Uttarakhand.

While floods in Afghanistan on September 1 killed 190 people, Nepal, Chad, Senegal, Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Pakistan, Cameroon, Algeria, Tunisia, Vietnam and Uganda were affected with floods in the month of September.

In August, around 868 people in 11 states in India country were hit by floods, and one-fifth of the country was hit by famine.

One-third of America was starving with around 5 crores 30 million identified as famine victims. All this indicates that there is no country on earth that is not prone to disaster.

Although this year, the COVID pandemic has frozen life in general, carbon emissions from the burning forests and peatlands are expected to fall by only 4 to 7 percent. Although the global warming report indicates that carbon emissions should fall at least by 45 per cent by the end of 2030 when compared to 2010, there are no efforts being put towards achieving the same.

Governments, the public, and the media are not even ready to recognize this problem. No party has mentioned this issue in their electoral manifesto during the 2019 elections in our country.

A report released in September 2020 by the World Environment Organization, along with six other leading scientific institutes, reveals that by 2024, global warming will temporarily exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius. Very soon, there is every possibility that this increase in limit will permanently be on the rise.

Another report issued later this month made it clear that by 2050, 120 billion people will be displaced due to the climate crisis, which is likely to shrink the entire world. In the location where the equator passes through the Pacific Ocean when the surface temperature falls less than 0.5 degrees Celsius than the normal temperatures, it is called the La Nina effect and this results in the current situation of rising fires in the U.S. Pacific coast.

Extreme weather conditions

The Spanish word ' La Nina' means 'Little Girl'. The condition that occurs when the temperature rises by at least 0.5 degrees Celsius is called 'El Nin‌o' (Little Boy). La Nina brings dry, hot winds to the south and west Pacific coasts of the United States, and cold and wet winds to the north and west Pacific coasts.

Also, it is providing physical conditions suitable for major storms off the east Atlantic coast. La Nina is a natural process. But leading meteorologist Michael Mann says that in the event of climate change, it will give rise to hot waves, forest fires and major storms that come in pairs. With the impact of La Nina on rising temperatures due to global warming, the fire is spreading uncontrollably in America.

The annual area of ​​burning forests in California has increased fivefold when compared to that of the 1970s. This further increased eightfold during the summer. This is due to the drying up of trees and grass with rising temperatures.

In the United States, while the wildfire has been raging uncontrollably in west coastal America, a few hundred miles east to this place, where cities like Colorado and Wyoming are located, it has been snowing with a steep fall in the temperature by around 33 degree Celsius, for a continuous 18-hour stretch starting from the evening of 7th till the morning of the next day.

The snow blanketed the earth by a depth of almost 2 feet from the surface. At the same time, the US Meteorological Department has forecast a maximum of 25 hurricanes off the east coast of the United States. It is a symbol of extreme weather conditions. With such extreme climatic changes and weather conditions, the new extreme climate is by itself becoming the new normal range.

Currently, conditions are developing such that the average earth's surface temperature is about to increase by 4 degrees Celsius. If this happens, scientists say, that only 10 percent of the current population will be able to survive.

Everyone must move forward to prevent such a situation which is difficult to imagine. Humans must eliminate this catastrophe caused by the extreme actions of humans. This effort requires joint action of the humankind.

Indifference to nature’s warnings

Why has the climate that has been so cooperative and contributed to the evolution of human civilization over the past twelve thousand years now become so dangerous to the existence of humankind?

It is an undebated fact stated clearly by science that all of this is not a natural phenomenon, but that there are human fingerprints and footprints behind each of these extremities in the climatic changes. Hundreds of years ago, Arrhenius' research warned that global warming would be caused by the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

But the problem has been exacerbated by governments and human societies in the notion of achieving economic growth of the world as a whole. Although James Hansen described global warming back in 1988 itself, the first IPCC was in 1990.

Although the report concludes on the risk of global warming and the launch of international conferences under the auspices of the United Nations for preventive measures, carbon emissions into the air have accounted for 62 percent of total air emissions over the past 30 years. This means that it is clear that most of the carbon is emitted only after the identification and forecast of the hazardous happenings.

By increasing the dose of greenhouse gases in the air we have created an imbalance in the Earth's energy levels. The countries that agreed to the Paris Agreement in December 2015 to limit the rise in the average surface temperature between 1.5-2 degrees Celsius have failed to implement and maintain the same.

Emissions continue to rise each year on a constant basis.

- Dr. K Babu Rao, (Environmental Expert)