Present century is highly likely to get fierier to us than before, the phenomenon ascribed to more frequent and more intense heatwaves striking earth.
Inter-governmental panel on Climate Change, uncovered a report this week that lays emphasis upon the urgent need for instantaneous steps to curtail the greenhouse gas emissions on a wider scale, if we want to control global warming to close to about 1.5 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial times.
Titled as “Climate Change 2021 The Physical Science Basis” the report is prepared by Working Group I constitutes the first part of IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report, which will be complete by next year.
IPCC is wing of UN body that is assisted by 3 working groups, which are:
- Working Group I: It covers the physical science basis of climate Change,
- Working Group II: It studies impacts, adaptation and vulnerability,
- Working Group III: It analyses the level of climate change degeneration,
Alarmingly, this report bears the approval of 195 IPCC members while the reports from other two Working Group contributions would reach the final stage by next year.
At this point, this is worth mentioning that at the 2015 Paris Agreement, it was unanimously agreed that concerted efforts would be launched from inhabitants of this planet, to cut down the increase in global temperature in this century to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and that, ways would be explored to bring it down further to 1.5 degree Celsius.
But the report details are horrific and negligent human activities have been outlined as the major cause behind greenhouse gas emissions, causing 1.5 degree Celsius warmth since 1900 and foresee a sharp surge in global temperature by 1.5 degree Celsius, in coming 2 decades.
In the report, a warning is wrapped up that states that without significant cuts in emissions in the coming decades, there is every possibility that 2 degree Celsius threshold will be exceeded in the present century.
The reports also lays down the horror that all regions on the world map, will have to pay the price of Climate Change in the approaching years ahead and as temperature will heat up by 1.5 degree Celsius, there will occur massive heatwaves, prolonged warm sessions that would correspond to shorter cold sessions while for global warming worth 2 degrees Celsius, extreme heat would prevail which would be intolerable to us most of the times.
Opining about the report, Govindasamy Bala, professor at Divecha Centre for Climate Change at Indian Institute of Science, Bengluru, emphasized upon the critical message conveyed to humans, categorically, for our activities that influence climate change in the report.
Speaking to media, he said, ”There is also some emphasis on the unprecedented speed of climate change in the AR6 compared to AR5”.
When in 2018, IPCC released a special report with the title, “Global Warming at 1.5 degree Celsius” that predicted global warming to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius somewhere between 2030 to 2052 under the purview of common business scenario. But the new report reflects definitive timeframes and global temperature is slated to surpass the 1.5 degree Celsius point by 2040.
Professor Bala sums up, ”Compared to 2018 Special Report on 1.5 degrees Celsius {that said we will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040} this report says it’s going to happen in the next 20 years with the midpoint of 2030.}
So the time frame for reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius is advanced by 10 years compared to the 2018 Special Report. The new assessment is based on more sophisticated calculations”.
“The historical warming assessed in AR6 is 1.1 degrees Celsius, about 0.3 degree Celsius more than in the AR5 assessment. AR5 was based on temperature records of 2011 and a decade has passed since then. The last decade was warmer than the previous assessment period. There were improvements in observational records which also added to the historical warming”.
Pertinently enough, there has been an exclusive chapter about harsh weather conditions wherein the term “Compound Events” stand tall, related to collection of numerous drivers treated like hazards that deteriorate the environment further. Dreadful examples can be heatwaves and droughts occurring side-by-side, compound flooding referring to extreme rainfall and river flow, compound fire weather marked by hot, dry and windy conditions or such extremes at numerous locations.
The report discloses, “It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s, while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less frequent and less severe, with high confidence that human-induced climate change is the main driver of these changes”.
“Some recent hot extremes observed over the past decade would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. Marine heatwaves have approximately doubled in frequency since the 1980s (high confidence) , and human influence has very likely contributed to most of them since at least 2006”.
There is a warning outlined in the report that if there is a surge in global warming, a handful of compound extreme events will be a regular aspect (God forbids) and this is highly likely that extreme events with higher intensities, longer durations and / or spatial extents will take place which would never an occurrence before.
Clearing air about things that the report has clarified, Prof. Bala reveals the term, “delicate balance” referring to aerosols and greenhouse gas emissions and describing their outcome on monsoon rainfall by referring “observed warming is driven by emissions from human activities, with greenhouse gas warming partly masked by aerosol cooling”.
The report further declares, ”decreases in global land monsoon precipitation from the 1950s to the 1980s are partly attributed to human-caused Northern Hemisphere aerosol emissions, but increases since then have resulted from rising greenhouse gas concentrations and decadal to multi-decadal internal variability”.
Further therein, “Greenhouse gas-induced warming will lead to intensification of rainfall but observational records show a decrease in monsoon rainfall between 1950 and 1980”.
Prof Bala reiterates, “So this report clarifies that in the 30 year period the aerosol was stronger than the greenhouse effect. After that in the last three decades, the effect of GHGs and aerosols are almost balanced so we do not see any trend in monsoon rainfall in the last 20 to 30 years. In the next couple of decades this delicate balance may continue but by mid-century and end of the century the report projects we will see an increase in monsoon rainfall”.
At Council on Energy, Environment and Water, which is think tank set up for environmental issues, there is Abinash Mohanty who is Programme Lead in the Risks and Adaptation, reckons reiteration made in IPCC latest report as urgency on stepping up climate action and identifying the need to map the compounded impacts of extreme events”.
He went on, “The report suggests that the nationally determined contributions will not be sufficient to mitigate the impacts of a 1.5 degree Celsius breach”.
“The IPCC acknowledges that human-induced climate change is significantly disrupting the land-use surface attributes that are leading to the intensification of extreme events”.
India In The Middle:
Well friends, there is a horrible forecast in this report that is about extreme weather events to hit South Asia with India included. It appears that intense heatwaves will be a regular occurrence this century will witness and that summer and monsoon precipitation will also grow more common.
Mr. Mohanty comes in, “Indian sub-continent will have a 20 percent surge in extreme rainfall events. The projections suggest that rainfall will become incessant and erratic leading to floods, depressions will intensify into deep depressions and cyclonic events will become more frequent across eastern and western coasts”.
He warned, “Further, heat extremes and drought events will be the new normal across South Asia and India”.
“Identification of compound impacts of extreme weather events with the help of climate risk atlas and climate proofing of infrastructures becomes a national imperative for emerging economies like India”.
Besides, the report also smacks of horrors arising out of rising sea levels globally in the backdrop of oceanic warming and glacier melting and as India has beyond 7500 kilometers of coastline, people living in such areas close to sea, are covered under such threat.
In better words, if there is an increase in sea levels measuring even 50 centimeters, 28.6 million people could get exposed to coastal flooding in 6 port cities, namely, Chennai, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai , Surat and Visakhapatnam, while damage to collaterals could run into trillions of dollars.
Mr. Chandra Bhushan, who occupies the seat of CEO and President at International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology, laments, “As far as India is concerned, we have a double burden now. We have to build resilience in our economy, infrastructure and social systems to deal with the increasing impacts of extreme weather events. At the same time, we have to act on mitigation measures”.
The timing of the report phenomenal too, as Conference of Parties (CoP) on Climate Change Convention is going to be held in November in Glasgow and the report will serve as a deciding instrument in discussions and outcome of conference.
The report highlights the need for more earnest goals to check climate change. However, in case of India, we have yet to decide our goals concerning net-zero emissions.
The IPCC report has been hailed by the central government and our environment minister Bhupender Yadav took to twitter claiming, “clarion call for the developed countries to undertake immediate, deep emission cuts and decarbonization of their economies”.
India believes, following the report that the developed world has more supplanted the share of allocated carbon budget.
Ministry of Environment shared, “Reaching net-zero alone is not enough, as it is the cumulative emissions up to net-zero that determine the temperature that is reached”.
This has been amply borne out in the IPCC report. It vindicates India’s position that historical cumulative emissions are the source of the climate crisis that the world faces today”.
Our ministry also defends us stating that our current cumulative and per-capital emissions are fairly low and less than the share allocated to us in global carbon budget. About measures scheduled, we would install 450 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030 to take-up the menace of climate change.
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