‘Extreme weather may kill 152,000 annually’

 A newly-published European study on climate showed that weather-related disasters could kill some 152,000 people every year in Europe alone — if climate change is not curbed and that heatwaves would be the cause of 99 per cent of those deaths.

The study, co-authored by European Commission’s joint research centre and published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal, said if no actions are taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impact of extreme weather events, Europe will see 50 times more deaths per year between 2071 and 2100 than in the 1981-2010 period.

It also found that weather-related disasters could affect about two-thirds of the European population per year by 2100, which translates into 351 million annually.

The rate in the 1981-2010 reference period, however, is 5 per cent, the study showed.

Geographically, the study said southern Europe will be worst affected. Premature mortality rate due to extreme weathers by the end of the century — 700 in a million inhabitants — “could become the greatest environmental risk factor,” it added.

Scorching heatwaves

Europe, especially the southern part of it, has been experiencing scorching heatwaves this summer as countries like Italy once recorded temperatures of above 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit), levels not seen during the same period in previous years.

Global warming, according to the study, dominates the causes of those changes, with heatwaves projected to be responsible for 151,500 of the 152,500 annual deaths, or 99 per cent, by 2100.

Scientists dim sunlight, invent devices to suck up carbon dioxide to cool the planetMeanwhile, coastal flooding is also on track of becoming increasingly life-threatening, from which death tolls are expected to rise substantially from six per year at the start of the century to 233 per year by the end of it, or a 3,780 per cent increase.

Scientists are sucking carbon dioxide from the air with giant fans and preparing to release chemicals from a balloon to dim the sun’s rays as part of a climate engineering push to cool the planet.

Targets off track

Backers say the risky, often expensive projects are urgently needed to find ways of meeting the goals of the Paris climate deal to curb global warming that researchers blame for causing more heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels.

The United Nations says the targets are way off track and will not be met simply by reducing emissions — for example from factories or cars — particularly after US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 pact.They are pushing for other ways to keep temperatures down.

In the countryside near Zurich, Swiss company Climeworks began to suck greenhouse gases from thin air in May with giant fans and filters in a $23 million project that it calls the world’s first “commercial carbon dioxide capture plant”.

Worldwide, research on “direct air capture” by a handful of companies such as Climeworks has gained tens of millions of dollars in recent years from sources including governments, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the European Space Agency.

If buried underground, vast amounts of greenhouse gases extracted from the air would help reduce global temperatures, a radical step beyond cuts in emissions that are the main focus of the Paris Agreement.

— Reuters

Just going outdoors could become deadly in many places in South Asia

Venturing outdoors may become deadly across wide swaths of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh by the end of the century as climate change drives heat and humidity to new extremes, according to a new study.

These conditions could affect up to a third of the people living throughout the Indo-Gangetic Plain unless the global community ramps up efforts to rein in climate-warming carbon emissions.

Today, that vast region is home to some 1.5 billion people.

“The most intense hazard from extreme future heatwaves is concentrated around the densely populated agricultural regions of the Ganges and Indus river basins,” wrote the authors of the study, led by former MIT research scientist Eun-Soon Im, now an assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

While most climate studies have been based on temperature projections alone, this one — published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances — also considers humidity as well as the body’s ability to cool down in response. Those three factors together make up what is called a “wet-bulb temperature,” which is the air temperature taken when a wet cloth is wrapped around the thermometer. It is always lower than the dry-bulb temperature — how much so depends on the humidity. It can help estimate how easy it is for water to evaporate.

It can also offer a gauge for where climate change might become dangerous. Scientists say humans can survive a wet-bulb temperature of up to about 35 degrees Celsius.

World’s ‘highest’ village runs dry as warming hits even the Himalayas

With a backdrop of the snow-capped Himalayas stretched out across a vibrant blue sky, it is hard to dispute the sign as you enter Komik that declares it to be the world’s highest village with a road.

Others also boast the title — from Nepal’s Dho Tarap to Bolivia’s Santa Barbara. But at 4,587 metres (15,050 feet), this remote Buddhist hamlet near India’s border with Tibet is no doubt among the planet’s topmost motorable human settlements.

Yet despite its coveted status, life is harsh for the 130 residents of Komik, a quaint collection of whitewashed mud-and-stone houses located in the desolate Spiti Valley.

The region is a cold trans-Himalayan desert cut off from the rest of India for six months of the year when snowfall blocks mountain passes. Phone and internet connectivity is almost non-existent. Schools and clinics are a tough trek away.

But Spiti’s some 12,000 inhabitants, who eke out a living farming green peas and barley, have a much bigger concern: their main sources of water — streams, rivers, ponds — are drying up.

“We are used to being in a remote place. We have our traditional ways of living,” said farmer Nawang Phunchok, 32, as he sat tying bundles of a prickly desert bush together to insulate the local monastery’s roof. “But these days the water is not coming like it used to. The seasons are changing. We see there is less water than before.”

— Washington Post

Even minor global warming could worsen super El Ninos, scientists fear

Even if we meet our most ambitious climate goal — keeping global temperatures within a strict 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degree Fahrenheit) of their preindustrial levels — there will still be consequences, scientists say.

And they’ll last for years after we stop emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

New research suggests that extreme El Nino events — which can cause intense rainfall, flooding and other severe weather events in certain parts of the world — will occur more and more often as long as humans continue producing greenhouse gas emissions.

And even if we’re able to stabilise the global climate at the 1.5 degree threshold, the study concludes, these events will continue to increase in frequency for up to another 100 years afterward.

The findings were published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“It was really a surprise that what we find is after we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius and stabilise world temperatures, the frequency of extreme El Nino continued to increase for another century,” said Wenju Cai, a chief research scientist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and one of the new study’s lead authors.

“We were expecting that the risk would stabilise.”

The study builds on a 2014 paper, also published in Nature Climate Change by Cai and a group of colleagues, which first suggested that extreme El Nino events will increase with global warming.

source: GULF NEWS