The emergency and rescue departments around the world had rarely been this busy as a dramatic string of extreme weather events in recent months have wreaked havoc in many places around the world.
Scorching heatwaves, wildfires, rising seas, floods and more severe storms are battering every region of the world.
Climate catastrophes that struck the world in recent weeks sent millions of people away from homes and caused the loss of billions of dollars.
In the US, for example, firefighters actively battled 44 large blazes that have burned nearly 700,000 acres, while thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes in Greece as firefighters struggled to contain huge, days-old wildfires that also threatened populated areas, electricity installations and historic sites in Turkey and destroyed vast forest areas in Lebanon and Syria.
Meanwhile, the death toll in central China’s unprecedented flash floods that were triggered by the heaviest rainfall in 1,000 years has reached 33. Torrential rain turned rivers into raging torrents in parts of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, dragging cars and roads with them, bringing down whole houses and leaving more than 150 people dead.
The southwest monsoon is wreaking havoc in several parts of India, while nearly half a million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as the country grapples with dust storms, locusts and its worst drought in decades.
According to the Organisation for World Peace, the ice sheet which has historically been known to cover Greenland has recently gone into a state of rapid melting. There was enough melted ice that occurred in one single day, which is estimated to be enough to cover the entire surface of the Florida, US, in 2 inches of water.
The barrage of extreme weather events over the past two months invokes to mind what many scientists have been warning about for years. It’s the obvious consequence of rising average temperatures.
What is happening now is just an alarm about what would happen if we keep ignoring such warnings and continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, which can lead the Earth to be three to four degrees Celsius hotter by the end of the century. According to the same warnings, if this happens, the Arctic will be free of ice in summertime. Hundreds of millions of people will suffer from food shortages and extreme drought. Many species will be driven to extinction. Some regions will become so hot and disaster-prone and gradually become uninhabitable.
With the current striking extreme weather events, one can find such hypotheses very convincing.
The growing effects of climate change can tell that governments are still not taking enough action to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions from human activity such as burning fossil fuels for heating, transport and power supplies to curb rising temperatures.
Many governments still waiting for the economically viable alternatives, however, the climate change is not waiting for anyone to prove that it’s real and that its impact can cost trillions of dollars and devastate the lives of millions of people.
According to a blistering report released by the United Nations just yesterday, climate change is changing Earth in ways that are “unprecedented” in thousands – and in some cases, hundreds of thousands – of years,
The sobering assessment also found that some changes that are already playing out, such as warming oceans and rising sea levels, would be “irreversible for centuries to millennia.”
With all these climate change effects taking place concomitantly, the year 2021 can be pivotal for global action on the climate crisis as we approach the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), which will take place in Glasgow in November. On the backdrop of increasing climate crises, countries are expected to come forward with new and ambitious climate plans to rapidly reduce global emissions in line with the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global temperature increase to well below two degrees Celsius, simultaneously with pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees; otherwise get ready for inevitable consequences.
