Unprecedented record climate change across the globe
Scientists are alarmed by global temperature rises, ocean warming, and record-breaking sea ice in polar regions. They say the speed and time these records are being broken is unprecedented.
The UN says the heat wave sweeping across Europe is on course to break more records. Determining whether these unusual records are directly linked to climate change is difficult because weather behavior and the Earth’s oceans are complex.
Intensive research is currently being conducted on them. But scientists are already worried that dire situations are about to happen.
Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at the London School of Economics, says there have never been such unprecedented and remarkable changes in the climate system.
The world is now in the midst of unbridled changes, behind which is the global warming caused by the use of fossil fuels and the first global warming process due to the effect of “El Niño” since 2018 – says Dr. Paul Seppi, a climate science lecturer at Imperial College London.
El Nino is a natural warming process. It occurs when ocean temperatures rise above average in the tropical part of the Pacific Ocean, which warms nature. Here’s a look at four record-breaking anomalous changes this summer saw and what their implications could be.
July this year was the hottest day on record in the world. This year’s temperature surpassed the record for the warmest average global temperature in 2016.
An unprecedented heat wave is going on in many parts of Europe. Firefighters struggled to contain 80 blazes in Greece on August 4, 2023, as the global average temperature exceeded 17C for the first time.
The EU’s climate monitoring agency Copernicus said the average global temperature on July 6 was 17.08. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels like oil, coal, and gas are the main reason behind global warming.
Frederico Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, agrees with the prediction that unless global warming from greenhouse gases is addressed, this is what will happen.
Dr. Smith said, “Climate models can predict what’s going to happen in the long term, but it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen in the next ten years.”
He said the weather models we developed in the 1990s gave us a good understanding of current weather patterns. However, it is difficult to accurately predict what will happen in the next ten years.
Antarctic sea ice extent was at a record low in July. An ice sheet ten times the size of Britain has melted. The amount of ice that melted there was a record decrease from 1981 to 2010.
Scientists are concerned about the cause of this change – climate change.
The world’s climate is warming alarmingly, and the Antarctic sea ice is melting alarmingly. However, British Antarctic Survey Dr. Caroline Holmes explains that local weather conditions or ocean currents can cause this.
He says it’s not just the record-breaking that worries them but the scale at which it’s being broken. This is the first time we have seen this amount of ice melt in July. This level is 10% below the previous level of ice melt. It is huge.
They say they fear more record-breaking incidents in the future. They think that many disasters will happen even in 2024.
But Dr. Otto says this doesn’t mean there is ‘climate destruction’. He says that in light of the new situation, “the time is not yet over to make the earth suitable for human survival.”
