Category: Environment

UNITED NATIONS (IPS) – Earth is in the throes of multiple environmental crises, with climate change and the loss of biodiversity the most pressing. The urgency to confront the two challenges has been marked by policies that tackle the issues separately. Now, a report by a team of scientists has warned that success on either front is hinged on a combined approach to the dual crises. It is the result of the first collaboration between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

“This has the potential to be game-changing both in terms of the way research is done and to highlight the synergies between these topics. Oftentimes, because we work in silos, we tend to forget that there is such a strong interconnection between these systems and clearly between climate and biodiversity,” co-author ShobhaMaharaj told IPS. Maharaj is a lead author on the small islands chapter of the IPPC’s 6th Assessment Report on the state of scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate change and 1 of 50 leading climate and biodiversity scientists who met virtually in December 2020, to explore the complex connections between the two fields. Their workshop report was presented to the media on Thursday.

Among its arguments for addressing global warming and species loss simultaneously is evidence of some narrowly-focused climate fixes that inadvertently accelerate the extinction of plant and animal species. According to the report, the scientific community has been working on synergies, or actions to protect biodiversity that contribute to climate change mitigation. “There are some measures that people have been taking that are considered to be climate mitigation, but when done on a large scale can be harmful,” Maharaj said. For example, if you plant trees on a savannah grassland this can harm an entire ecosystem. We always need to step back and look at the big picture and this is becoming more integrated into the current dialogue between climate change and biodiversity, so it is definitely headed in the right direction.”

Maharaj says the findings can be instructive for regions like the Caribbean, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. While the area boasts endemic species, rich land and marine ecosystems, for some countries limited land for economic development results in natural habitat degradation and deforestation, which is exacerbated by climate change. “Something as simple as the development of a regional protected area, rather than each island having its own protected area would go a long way in terms of highlighting, developing and growing the synergies and dealing with the trade-offs between biodiversity and climate change,” she told IPS.

The IPPC’s 6th Assessment Report on the state of scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate change calls for an increase in sustainable agriculture and forestry, better-targeted conservation actions. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS The peer-reviewed report comes ahead of two major climate meetings this year; the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, known as COP15, in October and the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in November. Co-Chair of the IPBES-IPCC Scientific Steering Committee, Prof. Hans-Otto Pörtner said a sustainable future for people and nature remains attainable, but requires ‘rapid and far-reaching’ action.

“Solving some of the strong and apparently unavoidable trade-offs between climate and biodiversity will entail a profound collective shift of individual and shared values concerning nature – such as moving away from the conception of economic progress based solely on GDP growth, to one that balances human development with multiple values of nature for a good quality of life, while not overshooting biophysical and social limits,” he said. The report lists measures to combat both climate change and biodiversity loss.

It cites ecosystems restoration as one of the cheapest and fastest nature-based climate mitigation solutions. Mangrove restoration, in particular, meets multiple global biodiversity and climate goals. It also calls for an increase in sustainable agriculture and forestry, better-targeted conservation actions and an end to subsidies that support activities that are detrimental to biodiversity such as deforestation and over-fishing. But it warned that just as climate change and biodiversity are inseparable, nature-based climate mitigation measures can only succeed alongside ambitious reductions in human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

“Land and ocean are already doing a lot, absorbing almost 50 percent of carbon dioxide from human emissions, but nature cannot do everything,” said Ana María Hernández Salgar, Chair of IPBES. The 2019 Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, the first of its kind in a decade, stated that the rate of global change in nature in the last half-century was unprecedented in history. It warned that the ruthless demand for earth’s resources had resulted in one million plant and animal species facing extinction within decades, with implications for public health.

Meanwhile, a recent World Meteorological Organisation ‘State of the Global Climate Report,’ found that concentrations of the major greenhouse gases increased, despite a temporary reduction in emissions in 2020, due to COVID-19 containment measures. The report also noted that 2020 was one of the 3 warmest years on record. This week’s IPBES-IPCC Co-Sponsored Workshop Report on Biodiversity and Climate Change underscores that action is needed on both the climate change and biodiversity front – but going forward, must be addressed as 2 parts of 1 problem.

Global climate politics in 2021 is focused on generating more ambitious climate pledges from member countries of the Paris Agreement before the Conference of the Parties meeting in November. With the addition of the United States, about two-thirds of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from countries that have committed to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century. These countries must now adopt policies to deliver those emissions reductions; a complete reworking of the of the world’s energy system in just three decades. With a recent court ruling, Germany has become ground zero for this challenge, as German law will now require an extremely ambitious schedule for change.

Climate as an issue of intergenerational equity

For most of history, successive generations have been better off than those that preceded them. The march of technology has provided benefits to humanity, giving people more goods to choose from, conveniences, and options in living and working.But climate change threatens to change that. The Earth’s climate is changing faster than anytime in human history, and we may soon be living in a vastly different environment. Some of the strongest voices in today’s climate movement come from youth, who claim that the changing climate is robbing them of their future.

For years, governments have tended to “kick the can” on climate policy, putting off action while the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere continues to climb. Climate is exactly the kind of problem that humans are terrible at dealing with — a tragedy of the commons that pits future generations against the present and developing countries against the wealthy world. Nevertheless, the costs of inaction are becoming clearer, and in recent years many countries have become more serious about cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

German high court’s landmark ruling

Against this backdrop, on April 29, 2021, the German Federal Constitutional Court made history, ruling that Germany’s Climate Action Law does not sufficiently protect the freedoms of the youth and future generations. The 2019 law obliged Germany to cut GHG emissions 55% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels. It also set out annual limits for emissions from sectors including energy, transport, buildings, and agriculture.

The court’s decision is based on a 1994 amendment to Article 20 of the German Basic Law, which added protection of the environment to the fundamental principles of constitutional order (democracy, federalism, rule of law, etc.) It states: “Mindful also of its responsibility toward future generations, the state shall protect the natural bases of life by legislation…” The German constitutional lawyer Christian Calliesscommented that the court’s ruling had “kissed awake” Article 20 and turned it into a benchmark for judging the sufficiency of legislative action. The court argued: “One generation must not be allowed to consume large portions of the CO₂ budget while bearing a relatively minor share of the reduction effort if this would involve leaving subsequent generations with a drastic reduction burden and expose their lives to comprehensive losses of freedom.” Essentially, the ruling relies on the carbon budget theory of emissions, which states that spending too much of the budget now will leave an insufficient budget for the future, causing undue hardship.

The ruling opens new ground about intergenerational equity in climate law. This finding goes further than a case decided in the Netherlands in late 2019, which was the first to order a state to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, on the basis that inadequate action on climate change can violate human rights. However, this case did not involve goals after 2020 and did not focus on the issue of intergenerational equity. Likewise, the current climate court cases in the United States focus on companies that produce fossil fuels rather than on government response to the climate challenge.

The Merkel government responds with ambitious pledge

German politicians are now playing a blame game. The various parties are blaming each other that the 2019 law did not go further, in a country that cares deeply about the climate with federal elections coming up in late September. However, there is some revisionist history here. The law was a delicate compromise achieved after months of debate that split the ruling coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The environment minister, a member of the SPD, pushed hard for a stringent law with sector-specific emissions reductions. Members of the more conservative CDU/CSU complained during the negotiations that the sector-specific provisions aimed to harm industries overseen by ministries under their parties’ control. The opposition Green Party leader in the parliament complained that the law didn’t go further, saying that, “You have failed in humanity’s task of protecting the climate.” Ever the pragmatist, Chancellor Angela Merkel noted, “Politics is what is possible.”

Just two weeks after the ruling, Merkel’s government approved an update to the Climate Action Law that aims for a 65% reduction in GHG emissions by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2045, five years earlier than the previous goal. If approved by the parliament, these would be among the world’s most ambitious goals, with only the U.K. aiming for greater reductions — 68% by 2030 and 78% by 2035, on the way to net-zero by 2050.

There may be no example of a government legally bound to achieve a more difficult task. Americans like to compare reducing GHG emissions to the moon landing. President John F. Kennedy announced in September 1962 that the United States would put a man on the moon within the decade and that goal was achieved in July 1969. However, the task that Germany is taking on is far more difficult, involving changing the basis of the entire German economy within a decade rather than a Herculean effort by a group of engineers. Plus, the moonshot goal was not legally binding.

A victory for climate action, but the devil is in the details

Ambitious goals are one thing, but achieving those goals is another. Germany has a long history of investing in renewable power as part of its “Energiewende,” literally meaning “energy transition or turnaround.” However, the Energiewende also includes a phase-out of German nuclear power, with the last nuclear plants scheduled to close at the end of 2022. The German public also opposes carbon capture and storage. These two technologies are expected to be important in U.S. efforts to decarbonize but are largely off the table in Germany. In conversations over the past months, government, industry, and NGO representatives alike have focused on renewable power and green hydrogen (produced from renewable power) as the path forward. These are great technologies, but the timeframe for implementing them at scale is longer than the court ruling and the updated Climate Action Law allow, especially in the important German steel, chemical, and transportation industries.

What if Germany misses its goals? In that case, the federal government must buy emissions allowances from other countries, the responsible ministry must establish an emergency program to reach future targets, and the government will then establish remedial measures. The remedial measures needed to achieve such ambitious goals could be very harsh indeed. Will German politicians be able to implement them? Will the German public accept them? European governments generally have more ambitious climate policies than those in the United States, but we have seen backlash when they affect citizens’ everyday lives — the yellow vest protests that erupted in France in late 2018 after a fuel tax increase provide a good example. Policies to achieve Germany’s climate goals will likely test the resolve of German society.

The climate ruling could affect other equity issues as well. A rapid transition to a zero-carbon economy will require vast investment in buildings, transportation infrastructure, and industrial processes. Government support will be needed for some of these processes. For example, the German steel industry intends to transition to using hydrogen in its process. This change will be expensive and will require government support for both capital and operating expenditures, even though today’s steel production faces a European carbon price of more than €50 per ton. Large government expenditures will require debt financing, which also has implications for future generations. Germany has a “debt brake” in its Constitution that caps the federal government’s borrowing at 0.35% of GDP. The debt brake can be suspended in times of crisis, but will investing in decarbonization be considered a crisis? Or will the concept of intergenerational equity in the recent court ruling work against such investments, as it will leave future generations saddled with more debt? There are no easy answers to these questions.

Scientists and activists pushing for very fast emissions reductions are running headfirst into the reality of how difficult this task can be, especially once the easier emissions reductions in the power and light transportation sector are achieved. The climate ruling makes Germany a key test case in the transition, with very rapid reductions now enshrined in law. Godspeed and good luck.

Japan‘s famous cherry blossoms have reached their flowery peak in many places earlier this year than at any time since the first records began in 812 AD, over 1,200 years ago.

Amid an exceptionally warm March in Japan, the cherry blossoms in peaked Friday, March 26th, the earliest in more than 1,200 years of records. The record bloom fits into a long-term pattern toward earlier spring flowering, a compelling indicator of climate change, experts say.

The March 26, 2021, peak bloom date surpassed the previous record holder of March 27, 1409, nearly a century before Christopher Columbus sailed to America. The long-term record dates back to A.D. 812, about 12 years after Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor.

“The Kyoto Cherry Blossom record is incredibly valuable for climate change research because of its length and the strong sensitivity of flowering to springtime temperatures (warmer springs = earlier flowering, typically),” Benjamin Cook, a research scientist at Columbia University who specializes in reconstructing climate data from the past, said in an email.

Japan’s favourite flower, called ‘sakura,’ used to reach their peak bloom in April, just as the country celebrates the start of its new school and business year.

Yet that date has been creeping earlier and now most years the blossoms are largely gone before the first day of the Japanese school year, which starts in April.

The data was collected by Yasuyuki Aono, a researcher at Osaka Prefecture University, using diaries and chronicles written by emperors, aristocrats, governors, and monks.

This year’s bloom is also the earliest since the Japan Meteorological Agency started collecting the data in 1953 and 10 days ahead of the 30-year average. Similar records were set this year in more than a dozen cities across Japan.

Aono said the earliest blooms he has found before this year were March 27 in the years 1612, 1409 and 1236, though there are not records for some years.

The time of the peak bloom in Kyoto had been moving earlier in the year, from mid-April to the start of the month, from 1800 onwards, data shows.

‘We can say it’s most likely because of the impact of the global warming,’ said Shunji Anbe, an official at the observations division at the Japan Meteorological Agency.

Yasuyuki Aono, a researcher at Osaka Prefecture University, has tracked the data back to 812.

“I have searched and collected the phenological data for full flowering date of cherry tree (Prunus jamasakura) from many diaries and chronicles written by emperors, aristocrats, governors and monks at Kyoto in historical time,” he wrote.

Phenology is the study of seasons and recurring biological events. Since about 1800, the data suggest the peak date in Kyoto has gradually been moving back from mid-April towards the beginning of the month.

Unique for its longevity, the cherry blossom time series shows the average peak bloom date was relatively stable for about 1,000 years, from about 812 to 1800. But then, the peak bloom dates slope abruptly downward, revealing a shift earlier and earlier in the spring.

Since the 1800s, warming has led to a steady trend toward earlier flowering that continues to the present day, Some of this warming is due to climate change, but some is also likely from an enhanced heat island effect due to increased urbanization of the environment over the last couple of centuries.

Summer weather could grow to half a year in length by the end of this century if no mitigation efforts are done on climate change, according to a new study. In about the past 60 years, summer has increased by 17 days on average across the globe.

“Summers are getting longer and hotter while winters shorter and warmer due to global warming,” said Yuping Guan, lead author of the study.

Sure, longer summers may sound great for a family vacation or enjoying the outdoors, but this extended season could significantly impact our health, the environment and agriculture.

Heat waves could grow longer, mosquito-borne illnesses could become more widespread, allergy season from pollen could turn more severe and the growing season of crops will be longer.

Summers growing longer

The study reveals that warming temperatures globally are making the hottest quarter of the year, known as summer, longer, and this is also affecting when all the seasons start.

“The onsets of spring and summer are advanced, while the onsets of autumn and winter are delayed,” the study says.

The study splits the four seasons into four percentiles, with any temperature above the 75th percentile of the 1952-2011 temperature average being recognized as summer. Climate computer models are then operated to reveal how these defined seasons change over time.

“Over the period of 1952-2011, the length of summer increased from 78 to 95 days and that of spring, autumn and winter decreased from 124 to 115, 87 to 82 and 76 to 73 days, respectively,” the study states.

Most regions across the Northern Hemisphere have been experiencing longer summers already, but in the Mediterranean region it is growing by more than eight days per 10 years since the 1950s. This may not sound like much, but over a longer time scale it becomes more significant.

Global sea and land temperatures continue to rise relative to average, and the difference compared to average is also growing. The last time annual temperatures were below average globally was in the late 1970s, meaning that the last time it was cooler than normal was more than 40 years ago, according to data from NOAA.

Climate change driven by emissions of Greenhouse gases is the main contributor to the warming temperatures.

If nothing is done to mitigate these emissions to slow down the effects of climate change, then summer could evolve into lasting half a year by the end of this century, according to the study.

“Under the business-as-usual scenario, spring and summer will start about a month earlier than 2011 by the end of the century, autumn and winter start about half a month later, which result in nearly half a year of summer and less than two months of winter in 2100.”

Countries around the world are trying to take action, but the goals set in the Paris Climate Agreement are not being met. That includes efforts to curb emissions.

What this means for you

Aside from the warming temperatures and shifting seasons, this does have implications on human life.

That includes agriculture. Spring is the season when plants begin to grow across parts of the US. The plants bud when they experience the warmer temperatures at the start of the season.

This time of year is also met with temperature variability, however, when one day may be warm while the next is cold. These temperature extremes are a common occurrence with climate change.

Starting spring a month earlier could mean disastrous losses for crops. Earlier weeks and months in the transition seasons could result in more drastic cold snaps following spring bud openings.

“For monsoon areas, shifting seasons can alter the time of monsoons. This means that patterns of monsoon rains are changed as well. These kind of changes may not sync with crops growth,” Guan told CNN.

“It could also limit the types of crops grown, encourage invasive species or weed growth, or increase demand for irrigation,” the Environmental Protection Agency says. “A longer growing season could also disrupt the function and structure of a region’s ecosystems and could, for example, alter the range and types of animal species in the area.”

There are other types of plants, like ragweed, that produce pollen. With an extended period of warmer temperatures, that allows plants to produce pollen for a longer time and at higher quantities.

The changing of the seasons will also affect wildfires and heat waves, likely increasing their occurrence.

“A hotter and longer summer will suffer more frequent and intensified high-temperature events — heatwaves and wildfires,” said Congwen Zhu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences who is unaffiliated with this study.

Heat events are already the deadliest on average compared to other weather events, such as flooding or hurricanes, in the US, as stated by the National Weather Service.

The report also references how mosquitos could be affected by the longer summers and the warmer temperatures at the higher latitudes. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, diseases carried by mosquitos, such as Dengue, could become more widespread in a warmer climate and the time period of the year when it spreads could become longer.

A study conducted by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) used a 30-year data set to investigate how climate change is impacting the deepest parts of Lake Michigan, the world’s fourth-largest freshwater lake.

“We found that this long-term data set not only confirms that Lake Michigan’s deep waters are warming, but also shows that winter is vanishing from them,” said Eric Anderson, the study’s lead author.

This could have a profound impact on everything from the region’s weather to its food supply.

Scientists used a long string of high-tech thermometers, which float vertically in the water and record temperatures at different depths in the lake. This instrument has been recording water temperatures every hour, almost continuously, for the past three decades.

This allowed scientists to examine the lake’s year-round temperature changes throughout the entire water column, rather than just lake surface temperatures in the summer.

(Courtesy: CNN.COM)

Two-thirds of people think the climate crisis is a “global emergency”, according to a UN poll, the biggest ever on the environment. Younger people showed the greatest concern, with 69% agreeing, but 58% of those over 60 also agreed, so perhaps the green generation gap is slimmer than we thought.

Described as the biggest climate survey yet conducted, UN Development Programme (UNDP)’s “People’s Climate Vote” poll also showed that people supported more comprehensive climate policies to respond to the challenges. The survey covered 50 countries with over half the world’s population.

“The results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender and education level,” Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator said in a news release. 

The poll also showed “how” people want their policymakers to tackle the climate crisis. 

“From climate-friendly farming to protecting nature, and investing in a green recovery from COVID-19, the survey brings the voice of the people to the forefront of the climate debate. It signals ways in which countries can move forward with public support as we work together to tackle this enormous challenge,” Mr. Steiner added. 

The facts you need to know about the Climate Emergency:

The science of climate change is well established:

Climate change is real and human activities are the main cause. (IPCC)

The concentration of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere is directly linked to the average global temperature on Earth. (IPCC)

The concentration has been rising steadily, and mean global temperatures along with it, since the time of the Industrial Revolution. (IPCC)

The most abundant greenhouse gas, accounting for about two-thirds of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), is largely the product of burning fossil fuels. (IPCC)

IPCC was set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to provide an objective source of scientific information on climate change. In 2013, the IPCC provided a globally peer-reviewed report about the role of human activities in climate change when it released its Fifth Assessment Report. The report was categorical in its conclusion: climate change is real and human activities, largely the release of polluting gases from burning fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas), is the main cause. 

What are the effects and impacts of climate change?

Impacts of a 1.1-degree increase are here today in the increased frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events from heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes and wildfires. (IPCC)

The global average temperature in 2019 was 1.1 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial period, according to WMO.

2019 concluded a decade of exceptional global heat, retreating ice and record sea levels driven by greenhouse gases produced by human activities. (WMO)

Average temperatures for the five-year (2015-2019) and ten-year (2010-2019) periods are the highest on record. (WMO)

2019 was the second hottest year on record. (WMO)

The total annual global greenhouse gas emissions reached its highest levels in 2018, with no sign of peaking. (EGR, 2019).

Based on today’s insufficient global commitments to reduce climate polluting emissions, emissions are on track to reach 56 Gt CO2e by 2030, over twice what they should be. (EGR, 2019)

What do we need to do to limit global warming and act on climate change?

To prevent warming beyond 1.5°C, we need to reduce emissions by 7.6% every year from this year to 2030. (EGR, 2019)

10 years ago, if countries had acted on this science, governments would have needed to reduce emissions by 3.3% each year. Every year we fail to act, the level of difficulty and cost to reduce emissions goes up. (EGR, 2019)

Nations agreed to a legally binding commitment in Paris to limit global temperature rise to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels but also offered national pledges to cut or curb their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This is known as the Paris Agreement. The initial pledges of 2015 are insufficient to meet the target, and governments are expected to review and increase these pledges as a key objective this year, 2020.  

The updated Paris Agreement commitments will be reviewed at the climate change conference known as COP 26 in Glasgow, UK in November 2021. This conference will be the most important intergovernmental meeting on the climate crisis since the Paris agreement was passed in 2015.

The success or otherwise of this conference will have stark consequences for the world. If countries cannot agree on sufficient pledges, in another 5 years, the emissions reduction necessary will leap to a near-impossible 15.5% every year. The unlikelihood of achieving this far steeper rate of decarbonization means the world faces a global temperature increase that will rise above 1.5°C.   Every fraction of additional warming above 1.5°C will bring worsening impacts, threatening lives, food sources, livelihoods and economies worldwide.

Countries are not on track to fulfil the promises they have made. 

Increased commitments can take many forms but overall they must serve to shift countries and economies onto a path of decarbonization, setting targets for net zero carbon, and timelines of how to reach that target, most typically through a rapid acceleration of energy sourced from renewables and rapid deceleration of fossil fuel dependency. 

Why is 1.5°C important?

While there will still be serious climate impacts at 1.5°C, this is the level scientists say is associated with less devastating impacts than higher levels of global warming. Every fraction of additional warming beyond 1.5°C will bring worse impacts, threatening lives, livelihoods and economies. 

At 1.5°C, over 70% of coral reefs will die, but at 2°C, all reefs over 99% will be lost.

Insects, vital for pollination of crops and plants, are likely to lose half their habitat at 1.5°C but this becomes almost twice as likely at 2°C.

The Arctic Ocean being completely bare of sea ice in summer would be a once per century likelihood at 1.5°C but this leaps to a once a decade likelihood at 2°C.

Over 6 million people currently live in coastal areas vulnerable to sea-level rise at 1.5°C degrees, and at 2°C, this would affect 10 million more people by the end of this century.

Sea-level rise will be 100 centimetres higher at 2°C than at 1.5°C.

The frequency and intensity of droughts, storms and extreme weather events are increasingly likely above 1.5°C.

(Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)/ Picture: Modern Diplomacy)

As if we don’t have enough to worry about, climate change is becoming an increasing burden on humanity. The year 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest on record, according to an arm of the European Commission. (NASA will release its own assessment, using slightly different measurements, later this month.) According to the European assessment, every year since 2015 has been warmer than every year before it, based on records going back to the late 1800s.

Global average temperatures tied with 2016 at 0.6°C above the long-term average – despite the absence of an El Niño event, a climate phenomenon that has a warming effect. There was an El Niño in 2016.

Europe, by contrast, demolished records by a wide margin, at 1.6°C above the long-term average. This compared with 2019’s 1.2°C above the average – itself record-breaking at the time. Norway and Sweden both had their hottest years on record.

Although the figures today from European Earth observation programme Copernicus place 2020 as joint hottest globally, aggregated data from other major temperature data sets including those of US agencies NASA and NOAA, and the UK Met Office – expected next Thursday – may yet relegate it to the second or third warmest.

Copernicus’s 2020 figures show a clear north-south split, with below-average temperatures in the southern hemisphere and above-average ones in the northern hemisphere. Siberia and other parts of the Arctic were exceptionally warm, at 3-6°C above average in some regions.

“The year 2020 was extreme for the Arctic, even compared to the past 20 years,” said the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in a statement on Tuesday. That led Arctic sea ice to shrink to its second-lowest extent on record in September 2020.

Figures published this week by Mark Parrington at Copernicus also show that, while media attention focused on exceptional blazes in the US and Australia, globally wildfires were at one of their lowest levels in two decades due to below-average fires in Africa.

Separately, the UK Met Office today said it expects carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere this year to pass the milestone of being 50 per cent higher than before the industrial revolution, reaching 417 parts per million between April and June, when seasonal CO2 levels peak.

(Picture Courtesy: KBTX News)

What did Earth look like 3.2 billion years ago? New evidence suggests the planet was covered by a vast ocean and had no continents at all. Continents appeared later, as plate tectonics thrust enormous, rocky land masses upward to breach the sea surfaces, scientists recently reported.

They found clues about this ancient waterworld preserved in a chunk of ancient seafloor, now located in the outback of northwestern Australia.

Around 4.5 billion years ago, high-speed collisions between dust and space rocks formed the beginnings of our planet: a bubbling, molten sphere of magma that was thousands of miles deep. Earth cooled as it spun; eventually, after 1,000 to 1 million years, the cooling magma formed the first mineral crystals in Earth’s crust.

Meanwhile, Earth’s first water may have been carried here by ice-rich comets from outside our solar system, or it may have arrived in dust from the cloud of particles that birthed the sun and its orbiting planets, around the time of Earth’s formation.

When Earth was a hot magma ocean, water vapor and gasses escaped into the atmosphere. “It then rained out from the atmosphere as conditions got cool enough,” said lead study author Benjamin Johnson, an assistant professor in the Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences at Iowa State University.

“We can’t really say what the source of the water is from our work, but we do suggest that whatever the source, it was present when the magma ocean was still around,” Johnson told Live Science in an email.

In the new study, Johnson and co-author Boswell Wing, an associate professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, turned to Panorama’s unique landscape in the Australian outback. Its rocky scenery preserves a hydrothermal system dating to 3.2 billion years ago, “and records the entire ocean crust from the surface down to the heat engine that drove circulation,” Johnson said.

Preserved in that craggy seafloor were different versions, or isotopes, of oxygen; over time, the relationship between these isotopes can help scientists decode shifts in ancient ocean temperature and global climate.

However, the scientists uncovered something unexpected through their analysis of more than 100 sediment samples. They found that 3.2 billion years ago, oceans held more oxygen-18 than oxygen-16 (the latter is more common in the modern ocean). Their computer models showed that on a global scale, continental land masses leach oxygen-18 from the oceans. In the absence of continents, the oceans would carry more oxygen-18. And the ratio between these two oxygen isotopes hinted that at the time, there were no continents at all, the study found.

“This value is different than the modern ocean in a way that can be explained most easily by a lack of emergent continental crust,” Johnson said in the email.

Other researchers have previously proposed the idea that Earth was once ocean covered, Johnson said. However, there’s less agreement about how much of that crust was visible above sea level. This new discovery “provides actual geochemical constraints on the presence of land above sea level,” he explained.

The prospect of an ancient waterworld Earth also offers a new perspective on another intriguing question: where the planet’s earliest forms of life appeared and how they evolved, the researchers wrote in the study.

“There are two major camps for the origin of life: hydrothermal vents and ponds on land,” Johnson said. “If our work is accurate, it means the number of environments on land for life to emerge and evolve was really small or absent until sometime after 3.2 billion years ago.”

The findings were published online today (March 2) in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Editor’s note: The headline of this article was updated on March 3 to correct the age of a continent-free Earth; while the evidence in this study dates to more than 3 billion years ago, Earth at that time was only 1.5 billion years old, not 3 billion years old.

A recent study covering 13 towns across four countries — India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan — in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region shows the Himalayan towns are facing increased water insecurity in the wake of inadequate urban planning coupled with a rapidly changing climate.

The study — the first-of-its-kind on the Hindu Kush Himalayan — shows that the interlinkages of water availability, water supply systems, rapid urbanization, and consequent increase in water demand (both daily and seasonal) are leading to increasing water insecurity in towns.

This water insecurity is attributed to poor water governance, lack of urban planning, poor tourism management during peak season, and climate-related risks and challenges.

The study, published in the journal ‘Water Policy’, also shows that communities are coping through short-term strategies such as groundwater extraction, which is proving to be unsustainable.

The authors are Anjal Prakash and David Molden.

While Prakash is the Research Director and Adjunct Associate Professor with the Bharti Institute of Public Policy of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, Molden is the Director General with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an intergovernmental organization based in Kathmandu in Nepal.

There is a lack of long-term strategies for water sustainability in urban centres, and this requires the special attention of planners and local governments, says the study.

Urbanization has pulled people from rural areas in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region into nearby urban centres.

Although only three per cent of the total Hindu Kush Himalayan population lives in larger cities and eight per cent in smaller towns, projections show that more than 50 per cent of the population will be living in cities by 2050.

This will naturally place tremendous stress on water availability.

The study shows that the water demand-supply gap in eight of the surveyed towns is 20 to 70 per cent.

There is a high dependence on springs (ranging between 50 and 100 per cent) for water supply in three-fourths of the urban areas.

Under current trends, the demand-supply gap may double by 2050. A holistic water management approach that includes springshed management and planned adaptation is, therefore, paramount for securing safe water supply in the urban Himalaya.

Along with springshed management, other options could be explored in the wake of rising water demand and use.

From the case studies of the Himalayan towns, it is evident that increasing urbanization and climate change are two critical stressors that are adversely affecting the biophysical environment of the urban Himalaya.

With development plans and policies focusing more on rural areas, issues surrounding urban environments have been sidelined.

Across the region, the encroachment and degradation of natural water bodies (springs, ponds, lakes, canals, and rivers) and the growing disappearance of traditional water systems (stone spouts, wells, and local water tanks) are evident, says the study.

The degradation and reclamation of water bodies affect wetland ecosystems and reduce retention capacities that prevent flooding.

Consequently, urban drainage and flood management systems are being impaired.

An iceberg about twice the size of the District of Columbia broke off Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica sometime between Saturday and Sunday, satellite data shows, confirming yet another in a series of increasingly frequent calving events in this rapidly warming region.

The Pine Island Glacier is one of the fastest-retreating glaciers in Antarctica, and along with the Thwaites Glacier nearby, it’s a subject of close scientific monitoring to determine whether these glaciers are in a phase of runaway melting, potentially freeing up vast inland areas of ice to flow to the sea and raising sea levels.

According to NASA, the region surrounding the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers contains enough “highly vulnerable ice” to raise global sea levels by about four feet.

The new iceberg from Pine Island did not last long as a single chunk of ice, instead breaking off into smaller pieces that will gradually head out to sea. But this behavior is consistent with recent studies of this glacier. The calving event resulted from two cracks that were first spotted last year using satellites.

While this calving did not give rise to a record-large iceberg, as occurred with the Larsen C ice shelf in 2016, scientists are nonetheless concerned that such events are becoming increasingly common as the glacier flows into the sea via a floating ice shelf. If the shelf destabilizes sufficiently, the glacier — like Thwaites nearby — could begin a rapid and potentially unstoppable cycle of ice loss, since the land upon which the ice rests dips downward as one heads inland.

This could allow relatively mild ocean waters to penetrate well inland, melting more ice and speeding its movement into the sea.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), Pine Island Glacier’s ice velocity has accelerated to exceed 33 feet per day. The faster movement of ice causes the ice shelf to stretch and crack, which can cause additional ice loss. In fact, more ice appears to have broken off the ice shelf during the Sunday through Monday time frame, according to satellite imagery. Large calving events used to take place at Pine Island Glacier every four to six years, but they’re now a nearly annual occurrence.

Calving events have occurred in 1992, 1995, 2001, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018 and now in early 2020. The 2018 iceberg was larger than this one, at about the size of Chicago.

In addition, the large cracks in the ice shelf are forming in places that scientists hadn’t seen before, such as the middle of the ice shelf.

“There have been six previous calvings from the Pine Island Glacier since 2000, and the time intervals between them have been getting smaller,” said Adrian Luckman, a geographer at Swansea University who closely follows this glacier, via email.

“These events themselves are part of the normal behavior of large glaciers with floating sections, so, whilst spectacular, this event is not significant in its own right. However, we know that, like Thwaites, the glacier has been thinning, and its shear margins have been getting weaker, all as a result of warmer ocean waters eroding the ice,” Luckman said.

A project led by NGO Mahila Housing Sewa Trust to organise and empower women in low-income households to increase their resilience to impacts of climate change will get a UN award next month.

It is one of the 15 recipients of the 2019 United Nations Global Climate Action Awards that help shine a light on some of the most practical examples of what people across the globe are doing to combat climate change.

The award will be given at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25), hosted by the Chilean government in Madrid in Spain, on December 10. The COP25 is being held from December 2-12.

The Mahila Housing Sewa Trust’s initiatives have so far helped 25,000 low-income families across seven cities in India, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The project is centred around an integrated model wherein women take the lead through collective action and technology incubation to devise locally relevant, pro poor, gender-sensitive and climate-resilient solutions.

For example, women were trained to be energy auditors who encourage households to switch to more efficient products, forming a women-led distribution network of green energy and building products.

Other solutions include using sprinkler taps to reduce the flow of water, harvesting rainwater, and other behavioural changes leading to more than 60 per cent of households reporting to have increase in water quantity and more than 32 per cent having sufficient water during summers.

Through projects like these, the Mahila Housing Sewa Trust is empowering women to take action against four major climate risks: heat waves, flooding and inundation, water scarcity, and water-vector-borne diseases, says the United Nations Climate Change.

It says the Mahila Housing Sewa Trust has helped organise 114 community action groups, which have reached out to 27,227 women in 107 slums.

Of the women they’ve worked with, 8,165 women were recorded to demonstrate an increase in “knowledge seeking behavior”.

Over 1,500 women have been trained as climate-saathis, who are responsible for communicating the issue of climate change with their community in their local language. Through this communications exercise, the proportion of participants who viewed climate change as an act of god reduced from 26 to nine per cent.

With world leaders gathering in Madrid next week for their annual bargaining session over how to avert a climate catastrophe, the latest assessment issued by the United Nations said Tuesday that greenhouse gas emissions are still rising dangerously.

“The summary findings are bleak,” said the annual assessment, which is produced by the United Nations Environment Program and is formally known as the Emissions Gap Report. Countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions despite repeated warnings from scientists, with China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, further increasing their emissions last year. The result, the authors added, is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.”

As if to underscore the gap between reality and diplomacy, the international climate negotiations, scheduled to begin next week, are not even designed to ramp up pledges by world leaders to cut their countries’ emissions. That deadline is still a year away.

Rather, this year’s meetings are intended to hammer out the last remaining rules on how to implement the 2015 Paris climate accord, in which every country pledged to rein in greenhouse gases, with each setting its own targets and timetables.

“Madrid is an opportunity to get on course to get the speed and trajectory right,” said Rachel Kyte, a former United Nations climate diplomat who is now dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “What the Emissions Gap Report does is take away any remaining plausible deniability that the current trajectory is not good enough.”

The world’s 20 richest countries, responsible for more than three-fourths of worldwide emissions, must take the biggest, swiftest steps to move away from fossil fuels, the report emphasized. The richest country of all, the United States, however, has formally begun to pull out of the Paris accord.

Global greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 1.5 percent every year over the last decade, according to the annual assessment. The opposite must happen if the world is to avoid the worst effects of climate change, including more intense droughts, stronger storms and widespread hunger by midcentury. To stay within relatively safe limits, emissions must decline sharply, by 7.6 percent every year, between 2020 and 2030, the report warned.

Separately, the World Meteorological Organization reported on Monday that emissions of three major greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — have all swelled in the atmosphere since the mid-18th century.

“We are sleepwalking toward a climate catastrophe and need to wake up and take urgent action,” said Alden Meyer, director of policy and strategy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, on a phone call with reporters Tuesday after the publication of the report.

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Even if every country fulfills its current pledges under the Paris Agreement — and many, including the United States, Brazil and Australia, are currently not on track to do so — the Emissions Gap Report found average temperatures are on track to rise by 3.2 degrees Celsius from the baseline average temperature at the start of the industrial age.

According to scientific models, that kind of temperature rise sharply increases the likelihood of extreme weather events, the accelerated melting of glaciers and swelling seas — all endangering the lives of billions of people.

The Paris Agreement resolved to hold the increase in global temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit; last year, a United Nations-backed panel of scientists said the safer limit was to keep it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

There are many ways to reduce emissions: quitting the combustion of fossil fuels, especially coal, the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel; switching to renewable energy like solar and wind power; moving away from gas- and diesel-guzzling cars; and halting deforestation.

In fact, many countries are headed in the wrong direction. A separate analysis made public this month looked at how much coal, oil and natural gas the world’s nations have said they expect to produce and sell through 2030. If all those fossil fuels were ultimately extracted and burned, the report found, countries would collectively miss their climate pledges, as well as the global 2 degree Celsius target, by an even larger margin than previously thought.

A number of countries around the world, including Canada and Norway, have made plans to reduce emissions at home while expanding fossil-fuel production for sale abroad, that report noted.

“At a global level, it doesn’t add up,” said Michael Lazarus, a lead author of the report and director of the Stockholm Environment Institute’s United States Center. To date, he noted, discussions on whether and how to curb the production of fossil fuels have been almost entirely absent from international climate talks.

The International Energy Agency recently singled out the proliferation of sport utility vehicles, noting that the surge of S.U.V.s, which consume more gasoline than conventional cars, could wipe out much of the oil savings from a nascent electric-car boom.

“For 10 years, the Emissions Gap Report has been sounding the alarm — and for 10 years, the world has only increased its emissions,” the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, said in a statement. “There has never been a more important time to listen to the science. Failure to heed these warnings and take drastic action to reverse emissions means we will continue to witness deadly and catastrophic heat waves, storms and pollution.”

The pressure on world leaders to pivot away from fossil fuels and rebuild the engine of the global economy comes at a time when the appetite for international cooperation is extremely low, nationalist sentiments are on the rise, and several world leaders have deep ties to the industries that are the biggest sources of planet-warming emissions.

If there’s any good news in the report, it’s that the current trajectory is not as dire as it was before countries around the world started taking steps to cut their emissions. The 2015 Emissions Gap Report said that, without any climate policies at all, the world was likely to face around 4 degrees Celsius of warming.

Coal use is declining sharply, especially in the United States and Western Europe, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief. Renewable energy is expanding fast, though not nearly as fast as necessary. City and state governments around the world, including in the United States, are rolling out stricter rules on tailpipe pollution from cars.

Young people are protesting by the millions in rich and poor countries alike. Even in the United States, with its persistent denialist movement, how to deal with climate change is a resonant issue in the presidential campaign.

Sea level along the Indian coast has risen by 8.5 cm in the last five decades, India’s Union Minister Babul Supriyo said in the Rajya Sabha. The rising sea levels can exacerbate the coastal inundation along the low lying areas during extreme events such as tsunami, storm surge, coastal flooding and coastal erosion, he added.

Responding to a question on whether several cities will be submerged as temperatures are rising due to global warming, the Minister of State for environment said that the rate of increase of sea level due to climate change cannot be attributed with certainty.

“On an average, the sea level along the Indian coast is considered to be rising at about 1.70 mm/year meaning thereby that during the past 50 years, the sea level along the Indian coasts has risen by 8.5 cm,” he said in the upper house of Parliament.

“Further, satellite altimetry and model simulations showed that the North Indian Ocean (NIO) also exhibits decadal variability. During the last decade (2003-2013) it experienced sea level rise at a rate of 6.1 mm/year,” he said in a written response.

The Minister further said that the rising sea levels can exacerbate the coastal inundation along the low lying areas during extreme events such as tsunami, storm surge, coastal flooding and coastal erosion.

“However, the coastal areas that might get inundated due to the rising sea level need to be evaluated based on their elevation above mean sea level. Since no long term data on land subsidence or emergence are available for these locations, the rate of increase of sea level due to climate change cannot be attributed with certainty,” he said.

“For example, the higher rate of sea level increase at Diamond Harbour is also due to the larger land subsidence happening there. The same may apply to Kandla, Haldia and Port Blair as well,” Mr. Supriyo told the Rajya Sabha.

Recently, a report of the UN’s Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had warned that global sea levels are set to rise by at least 1m by 2100 if carbon emissions go unchecked, submerging hundreds of cities, including Mumbai and Kolkata, and in some cases entire countries.

Human-caused climate change is on track to make the Arctic Ocean functionally ice-free for part of each year starting sometime between 2044 and 2067, according to a study. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the U.S. noted that as long as humans have been on Earth, the planet has had a large cap of sea ice at the Arctic Circle that expands each winter and contracts each summer.

Satellite observations show that since 1979, the amount of sea ice in the Arctic in September — the month when there is the least sea ice, before water starts freezing again — has declined by 13% per decade, the researchers said.

Scientists have been attempting to predict the future of Arctic sea ice for several decades, relying on an array of global climate models that simulate how the climate system will react to all of the carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere.

However, the models’ predictions have disagreed widely, according to the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Among the current generation of models, some show ice-free Septembers as early as 2026, while others suggest the phenomenon will begin as late as 2132.

The study’s lead author, Chad Thackeray, an assistant researcher at UCLA, said one reason predictions about sea ice loss diverge so much is that they differ in how they consider a process called sea ice albedo feedback.

The process occurs when a patch of sea ice completely melts, uncovering a seawater surface that is darker and absorbs more sunlight than ice would have.

That change in the surface’s reflectivity of sunlight, or albedo, causes greater local warming, which in turn leads to further ice melt, the researchers said.

The cycle exacerbates warming — one reason the Arctic is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the globe, they said. Thackeray and co-author Alex Hall, a UCLA professor, noted that sea ice albedo feedback not only happens over long periods of time due to climate change, but also happens every summer when sea ice melts for the season.

Satellite observations over the past few decades have tracked that seasonal melt and resulting albedo feedback, they said.

Thackeray and Hall assessed 23 models’ depiction of seasonal ice melt between 1980 and 2015 and compared them with the satellite observations. They retained the six models that best captured the actual historical results and discarded the ones that had proven to be off base, enabling them to narrow the range of predictions for ice-free Septembers in the Arctic.

“Arctic sea ice is a key component of the earth system because of its highly reflective nature, which keeps the global climate relatively cool,” Thackeray said. There are other environmental and economic implications to ice loss as well, the researchers said.

Sea ice is critical to the Arctic ecosystem, and to the fishing industry and indigenous peoples who depend on that ecosystem, they said. The researchers explained that as Arctic ice is lost, more waters are used for commercial shipping and oil and gas exploration, which presents economic opportunity for some nations. However, they noted, this also contributes to further greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

Before climate change thawed the winters of New Jersey, this lake hosted boisterous wintertime carnivals. As many as 15,000 skaters took part, and automobile owners would drive onto the thick ice. Thousands watched as local hockey clubs battled one another and the Skate Sailing Association of America held competitions, including one in 1926 that featured 21 iceboats on blades that sailed over a three-mile course.

In those days before widespread refrigeration, workers flocked here to harvest ice. They would carve blocks as much as two feet thick, float them to giant ice houses, sprinkle them with sawdust and load them onto rail cars bound for ice boxes in New York City and beyond.

New Jersey’s average temperatures have risen nearly 2 degrees Celsius since 1895 — double the average for the Lower 48 states. “These winters do not exist anymore,” says Marty Kane, a lawyer and head of the Lake Hopatcong Foundation.

That’s because a century of climbing temperatures has changed the character of the Garden State. The massive ice industry and skate sailing association are but black-and-white photographs at the local museum. And even the hardy souls who still try to take part in ice fishing contests here have had to cancel 11 of the past dozen competitions for fear of straying onto perilously thin ice and tumbling into the frigid water.

New Jersey may seem an unlikely place to measure climate change, but it is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation. Its average temperature has climbed by close to 2 degrees Celsius since 1895 — double the average for the Lower 48 states.

Over the past two decades, the 2 degrees Celsius number has emerged as a critical threshold for global warming. In the 2015 Paris accord, international leaders agreed that the world should act urgently to keep the Earth’s average temperature increases “well below” 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 to avoid a host of catastrophic changes.

The potential consequences are daunting. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 2 degrees Celsius, virtually all the world’s coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear.

A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark.

— Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius mark.

— Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country, but Rhode Island is the first state in the Lower 48 whose average temperature rise has eclipsed 2 degrees Celsius. Other parts of the Northeast — New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts — trail close behind.

— While many people associate global warming with summer’s melting glaciers, forest fires and disastrous flooding, it is higher winter temperatures that have made New Jersey and nearby Rhode Island the fastest warming of the Lower 48 states.

The average New Jersey temperature from December through February now exceeds 0 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which water freezes. That threshold, reached over the past three decades, has meant lakes don’t freeze as often, snow melts more quickly, and insects and pests don’t die as they once did in the harsher cold.

The freezing point “is the most critical threshold among all temperatures,” said David A. Robinson, New Jersey state climatologist and professor at Rutgers University’s department of geography.

The uneven rise in temperatures across the United States matches what is happening around the world. Rhode Island is the first state in the Lower 48 whose average temperature rise has eclipsed 2 degrees Celsius.

In the past century, the Earth has warmed 1 degree Celsius. But that’s just an average. Some parts of the globe — including the mountains of Romania and the steppes of Mongolia — have registered increases twice as large. It has taken decades or in some cases a century. But for huge swaths of the planet, climate change is a present-tense reality, not one looming ominously in the distant future.

To find the world’s 2C hot spots, its fastest-warming places, The Post analyzed temperature databases, including those kept by NASA and NOAA; peer-reviewed scientific studies; and reports by local climatologists. The global data sets draw upon thousands of land-based weather stations and other measurements, such as ocean buoys armed with sensors and ship logs dating as far back as 1850.

In any one geographic location, 2 degrees Celsius may not represent global cataclysmic change, but it can threaten ecosystems, change landscapes and upend livelihoods and cultures.

In Lake Hopatcong, thinning ice let loose waves of aquatic weeds that ordinarily die in the cold. This year, a new blow: Following one of the warmest springs of the past century, harmful bacteria known as blue-green algae bloomed in the lake just as the tourist season was taking off in June. New Jersey’s largest lake was shut down after the state’s environmental agency warned against swimming or fishing “for weeks, if not longer.”

The nation’s hot spots will get worse, absent a global plan to slash emissions of the greenhouse gases fueling climate change. By the time the impacts are fully recognized, the change may be irreversible.

Daniel Pauly, an influential marine scientist at the University of British Columbia, says the 2-degree Celsius hot spots are early warning sirens of a climate shift. “Basically,” he said, “these hot spots are chunks of the future in the present.”

America’s hot spots

Nationwide, trends are clear. Starting in the late 1800s, U.S. temperatures began to rise and continued slowly up through the 1930s. The nation then cooled slightly for several decades. But starting around 1970, temperatures rose steeply.

At the county level, the data reveals isolated 2-degree Celsius clusters: high-altitude deserts in Oregon; stretches of the western Rocky Mountains that feed the Colorado River; a clutch of counties along the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan — home to the famed Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore near Traverse City.

Along the Canadian border, a string of counties from eastern Montana to Minnesota are quickly heating up. The topography of warming varies. It is intense at some high elevations, such as in Utah and Colorado, and along some highly populated coasts: Temperatures have risen by 2C in Los Angeles and three neighboring counties. New York City is also warming rapidly, and so are the very different areas around it, such as the beach resorts in the Hamptons and leafy Westchester County.

The smaller the area, the more difficult it is to pinpoint the cause of warming. Urban heat effects, changing air pollution levels, ocean currents, events like the Dust Bowl, and natural climate wobbles such as El Niño could all be playing some role, experts say.

The one U.S. region that has not warmed since 1895: the South, where data in some cases even shows a modest cooling. The only part of the United States that has not warmed significantly since the late 1800s is the South, especially Mississippi and Alabama, where data in some cases shows modest cooling. Scientists have attributed this “warming hole” to atmospheric cycles driven by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, along with particles of soot from smokestacks and tailpipes, which have damaging health effects but can block some of the sun’s intensity. Those types of pollutants were curtailed by environmental policies, while carbon dioxide remained unregulated for decades. Since the 1960s, however, the region’s temperatures have been increasing along with the rest of the country’s.

The Northeast is warming especially fast.

Anthony Broccoli, a climate scientist at Rutgers, defines an unusually warm or cold month as ranking among the five most extreme in the record going back to the late 1800s. In the case of New Jersey, he says, “since 2000, we’ve had 39 months that were unusually warm and zero that were unusually cold.”

Scientists do not completely understand the Northeast hot spot. But fading winters and very warm water offshore are the most likely culprits, experts say. That’s because climate change is a cycle that feeds on itself.

Warmer winters mean less ice and snow cover. Normally, ice and snow reflect solar radiation back into space, keeping the planet relatively cool. But as the ice and snow retreat, the ground absorbs the solar radiation and warms.

NOAA data shows that in every Northeast state except Pennsylvania, the temperatures of the winter months of December through February have risen by 2 degrees Celsius since 1895-1896. And U.S. Geological Survey data shows that ice breaks up in New England lakes nine to 16 days earlier than in the 19th century.

This doesn’t mean the states can’t have extreme winters anymore. Polar vortex events, in which frigid Arctic air descends into the heart of the country, can still bring biting cold. But the overall trend remains the same and is set to continue. One recent study found that by the time the entire globe crosses 2 degrees Celsius, the Northeast can expect to have risen by about 3 degrees Celsius, with winter temperatures higher still.

In Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay has warmed as much as 1.6 degrees Celsius in the past 50 years, and for want of cooler water, the state’s lobster catch has plummeted 75 percent in the past two decades. Along the shoreline, the hotter and higher sea is shuffling the lineup of oceanfront homes.

“Living the Change” was the theme of the 32nd annual Interfaith Brunch on February 18, 2019 at the elegant Seasons banquet hall in Township of Washington, Bergen County, New Jersey. It was attended by over 260 participants and elected officials from Bergen County and the State of New Jersey.

Sponsored by Interfaith Brotherhood/Sisterhood Committee of Bergen County, a coalition of nine faith traditions, and hosted this year by the Hindu community, this year’s event focused on interfaith initiatives for climate action and environmental sustainability, according to a press release.

Each of the 9 participating faith communities, Baha’i, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Sikh and Unitarian Universalist, set up tables with displays from their religious teachings on respecting and protecting the environment.

Gopal Patel, director of Bhumi Project at Oxford Center for Hindu Studies and Greenfaith, in his keynote speech emphasized the dire consequences of climate change and the need to restore balance and harmony between earth and nature.

He mentioned the two questions asked by the Hindu seeker, which are “Who am I?” and “What is the purpose of human life?” Rooted in his Vedic spiritual teachings, he translated the mantra from Rigveda explaining that God is all pervading and humans should be reverent, grateful and compassionate towards earth by living a life of spiritual purity and awareness.

A leading figure in international faith based environmental movement, Patel offered practical solutions to reduce carbon footprint by making climate friendly lifestyle changes and urged the participants to reduce meat and dairy consumption and eat a healthy plant-based diet. He encouraged travelling by mass transit and reducing air travel. He also encouraged the installation of solar panels to lower the energy consumption.

‘One of the questions he asked was, what contributes most to the climate change? a) The food we eat b) The way we travel c) The energy we use. How does it impact our lives? Where and how can we make a difference? It is our moral responsibility to reconnect with earth. Be in Harmony and in balance with Mother Earth,’ the press release said.

The program included round table discussions on climate change during the lavish and delicious vegetarian brunch. The summary of these discussions was presented as the memorandum on climate action by the Interfaith Committee.

Also included in the program were unity prayers on the environment by representatives of the nine faith communities, the enthralling Hindu prayer dance and joyful music by the interfaith youth choir.

The 2011 Census says that 1.79 crore of rural and 1.41 crore of urban population is affected with high arsenic level in West Bengal. Around 1,800 million people would be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by the year 2025, when two-thirds of the world population could be under stress, an expert said here on Tuesday.

In India, which is one of the major countries hit by the menace of arsenic contamination of groundwater, the government projects have suffered due to lack of people’s involvement, West Bengal government’s Arsenic Task Force Chairman K.J. Nath said at a workshop organised by the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation (SISSO).

“During 1970s and 80s, a large number of people in the Ganga-Brahmaputra plains (West Bengal, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Assam) were affected by arsenic contaminated groundwater. It is acute in Bangladesh and China. The government programmes providing arsenic free water involves operational problem as people are not involved in it,” said Nath, former Director of All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health.

He pointed out that in the 1930s and 40s, surface water was the primary source of drinking water. But due to epidemic of diarrhoea and cholera, the government shifted to deep tubewells and that brought the problem of arsenic.

Permissible amount of arsenic in drinking water is 0.05 mg/l in India as per Bureau of Indian Standards.

The 2011 Census says that 1.79 crore of rural and 1.41 crore of urban population is affected with high arsenic level in West Bengal.

Turning to the global scenario, Nath said the way water defies political boundaries and classification, the crisis is also beyond the scope of any individual country or sector and cannot be dealt with in isolation.

“By 2025, 1800 million people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity and two-thirds of the world population could be under stress condition,” he said.

SISSO, working to improve sanitation in the country, has taken up pilot projects in five places of West Bengal for providing treated surface water at a nominal price.

“Through our pilot projects in Madhusudankati (North 24 Parganas), Paschim Midnapur, Harisdaspur (Bongaon), we have been able to assist local NGOs and self-help groups to provide safe water by treating surface water,” SISSO Founder Bindeshwar Pathak said.

The plant in Madhusudankati provides almost 8,000 litres of water per day at Rs 1 per litre.
Pathak mentioned that there are similar projects where the plant is run by community people in Bihar and Delhi.

“We are also planning to set up a new plant in Madhusudankati and another one in Bengal that will treat groundwater and make it arsenic free. With a new technology from Denmark, there will be no problem of dealing with the disposal of the collected arsenic,” Pathak said.

State Panchayat and Rural Development, and Public Health Engineering Minister Subrata Mukherjee called for spreading more awareness.

“Around 83 blocks in West Bengal and some places in Kolkata have high arsenic level in ground water. We are working hard to provide safe water but the main issue is awareness. It is not just about arsenic but also about saving our depleting water resources,” Mukherjee said.

Several young Indian Americans made it to the list of the President’s Environmental Youth Award, awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A total of 17 winning projects from 10 regions were announced, including at least six Indian American or South Asian Americans among the group.

In Region 2, Samuel, a second grader from New Jersey, is teaching his school and community about the importance of composting through his project, “Worm Tower, Earth Power.” Samuel created a composite or worm bin with the help of his second grade teacher and sponsor, as well as his parents.

He shared the information he learned throughout the community, with his fellow classmates, with other classes in the school, and with the Bergenfield Garden Club. He will continue this composting project and ultimately distribute all the worms used in his bin to the Garden Club so that these worms can continue to have a positive effect on the environment.

For his “Electronic Recycling Initiative,” Jay M., a senior from Indiana, was a winner in the EPA’s Region 5. Jay partnered with the e-recycling organization TechRecyclers to ensure responsible handling and data destruction of materials collected during multiple community electronics drives. He advertised through local news, online publications, social media, and flyers.

The electronic drives took place between 2015-2017 involving 15-to-20 volunteers per event and diverted over 30,000 pounds from landfills.

Because of his efforts electronics recycling drives are now conducted annually. In addition to the drives, he undertook an e-waste education initiative for third and fourth grade students. He noticed detrimental effects that heavy metals in broken electronics can have on both people and the environment.

Realizing the extent of these effects, he began a research project to test the protective effects of a green algae, Chlorella vulgaris, on zebrafish exposed to multiple concentrations of methylmercury (a poisonous form of mercury in electronics).

His research received an award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. In addition, he has been a Distinguished Finalist for the Prudential Spirit of Community Awards, and has written lesson plans for Kids are Scientists Too, a non-profit organization, the EPA said.

Asvini T., with her “Save the Place Where We Are Living and Save the Planet” project, and Madhalasa I., with her “Saving the Hands that Feed Us” project, were named winners in the EPA Region 6.

As a grade schooler in Texas, Asvini implemented a city-wide battery recycling initiative diverting over 25,000 batteries (weighing more than a ton) away from landfills. Asvini did her research and conducted a series of presentations about the dangers of the chemicals found in batteries.

She made a clear connection between those dangers and associated human health risks, as well as damage done to the natural environment. Soon after, she had her school, the library, and city officials involved, placing battery collection bins in her school’s classrooms, in the local library, recreation centers, and elsewhere.