The year 2021 was the fifth warmest year in India since 1901, with the country recording its annual mean air temperature at 0.44 degree Celsius above normal, the India Meteorological Department said on Friday. The country also reported 1,750 deaths due to extreme weather events such as floods, cyclonic storms, heavy rain, landslides, lightning, among others, during the year, it said. "The year 2021 was the fifth warmest year after 2016, 2009, 2017 and 2010 since 1901. The annual mean air temperature for the country was recorded at 0.44 degree Celsius above normal," the MeT department's annual climate statement, 2021 stated. "The warm temperature during winter and post-monsoon season mainly contributed to this," it said In 2016, the annual mean air temperature for the country w...
Read MoreTag: climate change
Last year was the world's fifth hottest on record, while levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere hit new highs in 2021, European Union scientists said. The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a report on Monday that the last seven years were the world's warmest "by a clear margin" in records dating back to 1850 and the average global temperature in 2021 was 1.1-1.2C above 1850-1900 levels. The hottest years on record were 2020 and 2016. Countries committed under the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C, the level scientists say would avoid its worst impacts. That would require emissions to roughly halve by 2030, but so far they have charged higher. As greenhouse gas emissions change the planet's...
Read MoreClimate change might be behind disappearance of ancient bears and lions
Lions and brown bears colonized North America in multiple synchronous waves of dispersal across the Bering Land Bridge An international team of researchers led by the University of Adelaide, suggest a change in climate is the likely cause of the mysterious disappearance of ancient lions and bears from parts of North America for a thousand years or more prior to the last Ice Age. In a study in Molecular Ecology, the researchers sequenced DNA from fossils of cave lions and bears from North America and Eurasia to better understand the timing and drivers of their past movement between continents. Co-author, Dr Kieren Mitchell from the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA said, “There's a common perception that outside of mass extinctions or direct human inte...
Read MoreIn June 2021, an unprecedented heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest and Canada, killing an estimated 1,400 people. On June 28, Seattle reached 108 F — an all-time high — while the village of Lytton in British Columbia recorded Canada’s highest-ever temperature of 121.3 F on June 29, the day before it was destroyed by a heat-triggered wildfire. Climate change is expected to bring more such extreme heat events globally, with far-reaching consequences not just for humans, but for wildlife and ecosystems. In 2019, University of Washington researchers witnessed this in Argentina at one of the world’s largest breeding colonies for Magellanic penguins. On Jan. 19, temperatures at the site in Punta Tombo, on Argentina’s southern coast, spiked to 44 C, or 111.2 F, and that was in the shade. A...
Read MoreAn unusual winter warm spell in Alaska has brought daytime temperatures soaring past 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5°C) and torrents of rain at a time of year normally associated with bitter cold and fluffy snow. At the island community of Kodiak, the air temperature at a tidal gauge hit 67 F (19.4°C) degrees on Sunday, the highest December reading ever recorded in Alaska, said scientist Rick Thoman of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy. FILE PHOTO: A house in Cordova, Alaska is covered with snow and icicles in this handout photo released to Reuters January 9, 2012. REUTERS/Erv Petty/Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management/Handout He called it "absurd." The new benchmark high came amid a spate of balmy December extremes, Thoman said, includin...
Read MoreThe tropics is becoming hotter due to a combination of warming associated with deforestation and climate change—and that can reduce the ability of outdoor workers to perform their jobs safely. Researchers reporting in the journal One Earth on December 17 estimate how many safe working hours people living in the tropics have lost due to local temperature change associated with loss of trees during the past 15 years. “There is a huge disproportionate decrease in safe work hours associated with heat exposure for people in deforested locations versus people in forestated locations just over the past 15 or 20 years,” says first author Luke Parsons, a climate researcher at Duke University. “There is a small amount of climate change that has happened over the same 15-year period, but the incr...
Read MoreMonths before the harvest began in November, Greek olive oil farmer Michalis Antonopoulos knew it would not be a good year. First, his trees did not fully blossom because last winter was not cold and wet enough. In the spring, temperatures soared to 38 degrees Celsius (100 Fahrenheit), damaging the flowers that were to grow into olives. Then the summer brought the worst heat wave in decades, drying up the olives and setting off wildfires that torched hundreds of thousands of trees. Standing in his grove in Kalamata, Greece's best-known olive producing region, among trees that are hundreds of years old, Antonopoulos pointed to the results: half empty branches, with small or shriveled olives, or rotting, attacked by a fruit fly. "We're witnessing phenomena and problems th...
Read MoreTornadoes ripped through over five US stated on Friday, killing dozens. Here's a look at what's known about Friday's tornado outbreak and the role of climate change in such weather events The calendar said December but the warm moist air screamed of springtime. Add an eastbound storm front guided by a La Nina weather pattern into that mismatch and it spawned tornadoes that killed dozens over five US states. Destroyed homes and debris are seen in a heavily damaged neighborhood at dawn after tornadoes ripped through several U.S. states in Dawson Springs, Kentucky, U.S., December 12, 2021. REUTERS/Jon Cherry At least 100 people were feared dead in Kentucky after a swarm of tornadoes tore a 200-mile path through the U.S. Midwest and South, demolishing homes, levelling businesses and ...
Read MoreA global carbon credits breakthrough at COP26 in Glasgow blew away any gloom from failing to phase out coal use, say many observers. Discussion at the UN climate conference had been dominated by soaring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, largely from fossil fuels but exacerbated by global deforestation, notably in tropical rainforests like the Amazon’s – often called the “Lungs of the Earth”. But while COP26 failed to strike a coal deal, a carbon credit agreement could channel trillions of private sector dollars into protecting rainforests and farms, building renewable energy facilities and other projects to combat Climate Change and promote the circular economy needed to stabilise the Earth’s environment. FILE PHOTO: Carlos Roberto Sanquetta, a forestry engineering professor at ...
Read MoreReferred to as "China's Venice of the Stone Age", the Liangzhu excavation site in eastern China is considered one of the most significant testimonies of early Chinese advanced civilisation. More than 5000 years ago, the city already had an elaborate water management system. Until now, it has been controversial what led to the sudden collapse. Massive flooding triggered by anomalously intense monsoon rains caused the collapse, as an international team with Innsbruck geologist and climate researcher Christoph Spötl has now shown in the journal Science Advances. FILE PHOTO: Aerial view of Liangzhu City Site (from southwest to northeast) in China. © Hangzhou Liangzhu Archaeological - Site Administrative District Management Committee In the Yangtze Delta, about 160 kilometres southwes...
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