1 August 2016, The Guardian, World weather: 2016’s early record heat gives way to heavy rains. The record-breaking worldwide heat of the first six months of 2016 has turned to abnormally severe seasonal flooding across Asia with hundreds of people dying in China, India, Nepal and Pakistan and millions forced from their homes. In India, the Brahmaputra river, which is fed by Himalayan snow melt and monsoon rains, has burst its banks in many places and has been at danger levels for weeks. Hundreds of villages have been flooded in Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh and other northern states. Some of the heaviest rains in 20 years have forced nearly 1.2 million people to move to camps in Assam. Floods have submerged around 70% of the Kaziringa national park, home to the rare one-horned rhino which was visited by Prince William earlier this year. “The situation is still very bad. We are taking measures to help people in every possible way,” the Indian forest minister, Pramila Rani Brahma,told Reuters. In the state of Bihar, 26 people have died, nearly 2.75 million people have been displaced or affected, and 330,000ha of land inundated. Many major rivers are still flowing at or above danger levels. In China, the summer monsoon which started in June after a series of heatwaves is said to have caused $22bn of damage so far. State officials say it has killed more than 500 people, destroyed more than 145,000 homes and inundated 21,000 sq miles of farmland. Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
20 July 2016, Carbon Brief, In the latter half of the 20th century, the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula was among the fastest warming places on Earth. But since the late 1990s, this fast-paced warming has been tempered by extreme natural forces, according to new research. So much so, that some parts have switched to cooling. In many ways, the results are unsurprising. Scientists know that natural variability superimposes temporary ups and downs on top of greenhouse gas-induced warming everywhere on Earth. Prof Robert Mulvaney, part of the team of British Antarctic Survey scientists who carried out the research, tells Carbon Brief: “The results are as we would expect.” The authors of the study, published today in Nature, also stress their findings are restricted to a small part of the Antarctic Peninsula, and do not imply cooling across the ice sheet as a whole. Read More here
20 July 2016, Climate News Network, Humans play high-risk ecological roulette. Analysis of millions of records by thousands of scientists across the world shows that human impacts have helped push the planet’s vital biodiversity into the danger zone. Humans have reduced biodiversity – the teeming variety of plant and animal life that competes and co-operates in every ecosystem – tobelow safe levels across more than 58% of the planet’s land surface. This is ultimately bad news for human food security because biological diversity underwrites what naturalists call the resilient ecosystem services on which humans and all higher animals depend – crop pollination and pest control, nutrient decomposition and recycling, water and air purification − and because that 58% of the terrestrial planet is home to 71% of all humans, That humans are reducing biodiversity − and at a cost to the disturbed ecosystems − is not news. Separate research teams have repeatedly warned of thedangers of extinction of species. Biggest picture But Tim Newbold, a bioscience research associate at University College London, and colleagues report in Science journal that instead of drawing conclusions from one or a series of studies, they looked at the biggest picture available. The research, which is part of a British partnership study called PREDICTS, analysed 2.38 million records made by other scientists of 39,123 species at 18,659 places. Read More here
19 July 2016, Climate News Network, Climate change’s costs are still escalating. Scientific reports released for a conference today on disaster risk reduction warn that people are already dying and economies being hit by climate change − and that the dangers are growing. The massive economic and health losses that climate change is already causing across the world are detailed in six scientific papers published today. Perhaps most striking is the warning about large productivity losses already being experienced due to heat stress, which can already be calculated for 43 countries. The paper estimates that in South-East Asia alone “as much as 15% to 20% of annual work hours may already be lost in heat-exposed jobs”. And that figure may double by 2030 as the planet continues warming − with poor manual labourers who work outdoors being the worst affected. The release of the papers coincides with the start of a conference on disaster risk reduction, held in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, and jointly sponsored by the International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) and the UN Development Programme. The aim is to alert delegates to the already pressing scale of the problem and the need to take measures to protect the health of people, and to outline the economic costs of not taking action. Read More here