Impact of Global Climate Emergency

Let us start with David Frederick Attenborough, who is an English BBC broadcaster and natural historian. In 2019, he also received Landscape Institute Medal for Lifetime Achievement and Landscape Institute Honorary Fellow (HonFLI). He mentioned about the global climate impact as follows:

“It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies”.

--- Attenborough, Our Planet

Scientific experts and researchers are under monitoring and providing the global climate context to the crisis, including:

Dr. James Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Science Studies
Professor Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University
Richard Black, UK Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit
Sunita Narain, India’s Centre for Science and Environment
Professor Michael Mann, Penn State University
Professor Andrew Shepherd, University of Leeds
Greta Thunberg, Climate advocate and Nobel Peace Prize nominee

Global climate observations are based on the water and ice mass effect and redistribution in our planet (Earth) system at periodically or monthly to decadal time. The interval scales are an complicated one for understanding the climate system and their related issues specifically, Earth’s energy storage, land surface water-storage, ocean heat content, and ice-sheet response to global warming. We must to take an account of both the ocean and atmosphere sides for the climate assessment [1].

The GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission was initiated on 17^th March 2002. The GRACE mission has an collaborative work with the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and the German Aerospace Centre in response to past situational studies results, and future directions. In GRACE, the major objective was to the monthly assessment of the global gravity field to track the present mass changes in the cryosphere, hydrosphere, and oceans. It helps to understand the complicated and realizing the complex interactions and transitions involved in today’s climate changes. With the supportive and successful intimation of the GRACE mission, they achieved a multi-decadal result of mass changes in our Earth system [2]. This mission provided an actual and unique variable to the Earth observations - the mission’s (legacy of a 15-year) record of mass changes or transport in the global climate effect will serve as an important baseline for future directions.

We all live in an alert of time about our “Climate Emergency” and alternatively “to stop the violence against the atmosphere” for our safest next generations [1]. The climate emergency in global demands profound and identified historical changes in our civilization. In some cases, we are responsible for pouring greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere and also the reason for exceeding the regenerative natural duty of the earth’s resources and eco-systems.

Based on NASA 2019 report on global warming, its shows that 17 of the 18 hottest years ever reported in the pervious 136 years were during 2001–2018. Annual report of GtCO₂ (Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide) emissions was in 2000 (less than 25 GtCO₂), during 2012-2018(over 35 GtCO₂) and increased an high level of GtCO₂ in 2017–2018 [2].

In this pandemic situation (since March 2020) announced by the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome – Corona Virus 2 or SARS-CoV-2), the virus effect have spread over from China, Europe countries, the United States and Asian countries. From 5^th July 2020, increasing trends of COVID-19 is identified in worldwide (188 countires), it is affecting human lifestyle, traveler and workers for their normal schedule due to unprecedented forced and heavy restricitions. Another side, both GHG emission and quality of air pollutants were changed to reduced. Recently, mobile apps of Google and Apple software were also helpful to monitor our environmental issues and climate scenarios from April 2020. These effects of emission changes are the reason for the resultant global changes in temperature effect [3].

Figure 1. Effects of the globe in different situations via cooling and warming.

Enhancement of the global care and response, due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic situation has led to an accidental reduction of both air quality and GHG emissions and other pollutants [4]. They identified and estimated the global emission reductions for ten species in the period of February to June 2020 using national mobility data.

In the case of NO_x emissions noted in April (by as much as 30%) and in the case of global SO₂ emissions (by ~20% reduction). As per the above changes in emissions, the cooling trend and warming effect happened in our earth [5]. Global warming conditions causes climate change, which exposes a impact of threat to lifetime on earth attention in widespread flooding and very temperature or extreme weather. As per Scientific reports, experts are also continous monitor to study global warming and their impact on Earth. The experts identified that the direct reason for the COVID-19 pandemic situation, the cooling conditions around (0.01 ± 0.005 °C by 2030). In contrast situation that happened in 2050, the experts view green stimulus and lowering in fossil fuel utilization, it is the possible one to avoid next generation warming of 0.3 °C.

Our SNB team recommended this research article to enrich our viewer’s knowledge to understand about the climate emergency and its effect on the global environmental. The experts expressed the assessment via different pathway scenarios (1. Baseline, 2. Two-year blip, 3. Fossil-fuelled recovery, 4. Moderate green stimulus, and 5. Strong green stimulus) and their description notes. Due to the variation in cooling and warming trends from short time lived pollutants, the 2020–2030 climate concept response to the different pathways remains uncertain but it is most probably an negligible one, whatever pathway the recovery takes. The experts announced the different types of pathway approach in the upcoming decades to handle climate change as precautionary activity. Companies such as Apple, and Google big data providers are engaged and encouraged to provide the continuous data offerings for environmental support in ecofriendly scenarios.

References:

M. Amen, et al., Globalizations, 5, 49–52, (2008).
B. Gills, J. Morgan, Globalizations, 17, 885–902, (2020).
P. M. Forster, et al., Nat. Clim. Change 10, 913–919, (2020).
C. Le Quéré, et al., Nat. Clim. Change 10, 647–653 (2020).
T. Le, et al. Science (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb7431.

Blog Written By

Dr. K. Rajkumar

Central University of Tamil Nadu

Thiruvarur, Tamil Nadu, India

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Editors

Dr. A. S. Ganeshraja

Dr. S. Chandrasekar

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Dr. Y. Sasikumar

Dr. S. Thirumurugan

Dr. K. Vaithinathan

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