The exceeding heat and humidity in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Tripura and other places can be construed as a fair warning of things to come in the immediate future if no mitigation and adaptive measures take place fast enough to cool down planet Earth.
By Salam Rajesh
Amidst the rising global temperatures, the deliberation on climate change impacts is increasingly being felt across the globe with different actors and agencies working overtime to find solutions. To make matters worse, the month of August this year was registered as Earth’s hottest August in 175 years!
A recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) noted that the average global land and ocean surface temperature during August this year was 2.29 degrees Fahrenheit (that is, 1.27 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average of 60.1 degrees Fahrenheit (15.6 degrees Celsius), therefore ranking the month as the warmest August in the global climate record for this century.
The NOAA report mentioned that Europe and Oceania had their warmest August on record. While Asia saw its second-warmest August, Africa and North America each had their third-warmest August this year, adding that the summer season in 2024 was the northern hemisphere’s warmest on record. The southern hemisphere, which was witnessing its winter, had its warmest winter on record at 0.96 degrees centigrade above average.
The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA)’s Chief Executive Officer, Professor Patrick V. Verkooijen has this to reflect on the emerging situation globally: Last year was not only the hottest on record ever, but dangerous and unprecedented climate events were also seen on every continent.
The GCA’s Annual Report 2023 “Climate-Proofing Development” noted that between May to July last year, around 30 million people in Mauritania and Niger in West Africa, and Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia in East Africa were hit by an extraordinary extreme drought. A town in China’s Xinjian province recorded 52.2 degrees Celsius while the world’s second most populous nation introduced a temporary ban on outdoor work in Beijing during a heatwave that broke records across Asia.
India’s North East region, too, is not being spared either in this global concern, as evident last week with the India Meteorological Department starting to use the phrase “Heatwave-like condition” for all of the eight sister States. Many of the States here notched up to 38 degrees Celsius of heat added with the spice of high humidity during September, and Noney subdivisional headquarters in Manipur’s Noney District topped the list with a whooping 42.16 degrees Celsius score.
Underscoring the global concerns, Europe recently has been contending with extreme weather conditions, bringing record-breaking snowfall and devastating floods across the continent. As September progressed, Austria and the neighboring countries around witnessed weather patterns that were described by experts as ‘unprecedented’.
While snowfall at high altitudes in September is not unusual, the current situation is extraordinary, observed the experts. Snow is now falling as low as 700 metres in Austria, with up to 2 metres expected at higher elevations, and according to the Austrian storm warning centre, UWZ, some regions could surpass their previous September snowfall records later this week.
Adding to the chorus is the assessment by the Copernicus Climate Change Services (C3S), which functions as a component of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission, that August 2024 was the joint-warmest August globally (together with August 2023), with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 16.82 degrees Celsius, 0.71 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average for August.
C3S asserted that August 2024 was 1.51 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level and is the 13th month in a 14-month period for which the global-average surface air temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels.
The global-average temperature for the past 12 months (September 2023 to August 2024) is the highest on record for any 12-month period, at 0.76 degrees Celsius above the 1991–2020 average and 1.64 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average, according to the C3S assessment. These values are identical to those recorded for the previous two 12-month periods, ending in June and July 2024.
The year-to-date (January to August 2024) global-average temperature anomaly is 0.70 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average, which is the highest on record for this period and 0.23 degrees Celsius warmer than the same period in 2023, the C3S report noted.
The average anomaly for the remaining months of this year would need to drop by at least 0.30 degrees Celsius for year 2024 not to be warmer than the previous year 2023. This has never happened in the entire ERA5 dataset, making it increasingly likely that 2024 is going to be the warmest year on record, asserted C3S.
Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service has this to say that during the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record. This string of record temperatures, therefore, is increasing the likelihood of the current year 2024 being the hottest year on record in a century, she observed.
The Global Center on Adaptation asserted that climate change impacts are macro-critical and key to sustainable economic and human development, as well as debt sustainability. Climate adaptation should be mainstreamed into budgeting, planning, and implementation with a strong climate adaptation focus on macro-critical sectors such as agriculture, water, coastal resilience, and urban development, GCA emphasized.
With the felt impact of extreme weather events globally and in North East India particularly, it is being assessed that the region would likely undergo a sea-change in the vegetation types, crop varieties, and subsequently in food habits owing to the increasing heat and humidity that are evidently influencing inroad of exotics and invasive alien species, and being a threat to native flora and fauna, and to human well-being.
The exceeding heat and humidity in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Tripura and other places can be construed as a fair warning of things to come in the immediate future if no mitigation and adaptive measures take place fast enough to cool down planet Earth.