{"id":7538,"date":"2023-10-14T14:42:41","date_gmt":"2023-10-14T11:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/?p=7538"},"modified":"2023-10-16T20:27:37","modified_gmt":"2023-10-16T17:27:37","slug":"extreme-weather-events-abound-leaving-no-escape-from-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/news\/extreme-weather-events-abound-leaving-no-escape-from-climate-change","title":{"rendered":"Extreme weather events abound, leaving no escape from climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One can grow numb to the temperature records that keep ascending around the world. For months across the Northern Hemisphere, we have\u00a0seen heat wave after heat wave\u00a0spike thermometers, melt roads and devastate crops. This week alone, we may\u00a0see all-time temperature highs across the world, including parts of the southwest United States and southern Europe. At the same time, other parts of the planet, such as north India<\/a> and New England, are experiencing record rainfall.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Readers of Today\u2019s WorldView\u00a0are likely accustomed to\u00a0the periodic missive\u00a0about these snowballing, extreme weather events, and their inescapable link to a planet that is warming from man-made emissions<\/a>. But the recent grim climate<\/a> superlatives bear consideration: According to\u00a0the U.N\u2019s World Meteorological Organization\u00a0(WMO), last week was the hottest on record for the planet. It came swiftly on the heels of the hottest June on record, as\u00a0measured\u00a0by\u00a0multiple U.S. government<\/a> agencies. Ocean<\/a> temperatures in parts of the Atlantic were\u00a0the hottest they have been in close to two centuries, and that\u2019s before the onset of typically hotter marine surface temperatures in the later months of summer.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe world is hotter than it\u2019s been in thousands of years, and it\u2019s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing,\u201d\u00a0my colleague Sarah Kaplan wrote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You can hear the\u00a0alarm in the widespread flooding in north India, a part of the world that is on the front lines of climate change, buffeted by heat waves, torrential rains and the growing consequences of melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Last week, New Delhi experienced\u00a0its wettest day in decades\u00a0as rain flooded the old city and triggered deadly flash floods in states nearby.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You can hear the alarm in\u00a0the skyrocketing price of olive oil, as record droughts and extended heat waves in countries like Spain wreck crops. You can hear it in the epic wildfires<\/a> that blazed through Canada and sent\u00a0plumes of smoke as far away as Europe. And you can hear it in the parched citizens of Uruguay\u2019s capital Montevideo, where residents are now finding salty water<\/a> in their taps after an extended drought has depleted aquifers and\u00a0led to a national crisis.<\/p>\n

And you can certainly hear it in the United States \u2014 even though the scale of the climate<\/a> disaster has taken long to register in the American imagination.\u00a0\u201cAmericans suffer from a longstanding delusion, a hangover of sorts from the Manifest Destiny era, that there will always be some corner of our vast country to escape to,\u201d wrote independent journalist Jonathan Mingle in the New York Times.<\/p>\n

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From coast to coast this week, the ravages of climate change were clear. In leafy Vermont,\u00a0historic rainfall led to the submersion of whole towns. \u201cThis, to me, is almost as classic a signal of climate change as warm temperatures,\u201d Art DeGaetano, a professor at Cornell University,\u00a0told my colleagues. \u201cIn a warmer world, this is what you would expect.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As temperatures soared, some third of all Americans faced combined heat and humidity conditions that posed\u00a0an immediate public health risk<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing temperatures exceed those that can support life. Certain places are becoming uninhabitable,\u201d Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research<\/a> Center,\u00a0said to my colleagues.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The weather is being exacerbated by the El Ni\u00f1o phenomenon,\u00a0brewing in the Pacific. \u201cWe are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Ni\u00f1o develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024,\u201d Christopher Hewitt, WMO director of climate services,\u00a0told reporters Monday.<\/p>\n

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For those tracking climate change, the implications are obvious and stark.\u00a0Kaplan pointed to the link between climate change and weather disasters. \u201cWhen the planet\u2019s average temperature is higher, heat waves can reach previously unheard of extremes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Kaplan also wrote about the hardening scientific consensus surrounding\u00a0the advent of the \u201cAnthropocene,\u201d\u00a0a new geological age where \u201chuman activity has had a significant impact<\/a> on the planet\u2019s climate and ecosystems, via increased fossil fuel consumption, nuclear weapons tests and deforestation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And yet the politics of this epoch fail to grapple with its scientific reality. In the United States, as much of the country baked under stifling heat, Republicans\u00a0circulated a memo\u00a0advising colleagues in the Senate to reject the Biden administration\u2019s efforts across agencies to focus on and fund climate resilience<\/a> and environmental justice efforts.\u00a0Pessimism hangs over\u00a0the next major global climate<\/a> summit, dubbed COP 28, to be held in the United Arab Emirates toward the end of the year.<\/p>\n

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While governments and companies have made commitments to slash emissions, scientists still insist more needs to be done and faster, citing,\u00a0with growing alarm, the ways in which we may have already breached dangerous climactic tipping points.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThis is not the new normal,\u201d Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College London,\u00a0told Kaplan. \u201cWe don\u2019t know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we do stop burning fossil fuels \u2026 and we\u2019re nowhere near doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One can grow numb to the temperature records that keep ascending around the world. For months across the Northern Hemisphere, we have\u00a0seen heat wave after heat wave\u00a0spike thermometers, melt roads and devastate crops. This week alone, we may\u00a0see all-time temperature highs across the world, including parts of the southwest United States and southern Europe. At […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7539,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7538"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8425,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7538\/revisions\/8425"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}