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State of the Global Climate 2020: WMO
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- The story: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released its annual State of the Global Climate for 2020, in April 2021. It was released ahead of the Leaders Summit on Climate, hosted by the US. Extreme weather combined with Covid-19 was a double blow for millions of people in 2020. The pandemic-related economic slowdown failed to put a brake on climate change drivers and accelerating impacts.
- Points to note: There are many crucial areas that are now rapidly evolving.
- Global temperature - Year 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record, despite a cooling La Niña event, and global average temperature was about 1.2° Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) level. The other two warmest years are 2016 and 2019. The six years since 2015 have been the warmest on record. The decade 2011-2020 was the warmest decade on record.
- Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) - Emission of major greenhouse gases increased in 2019 and 2020, and will be higher in 2021. Concentrations of the major greenhouse gases in the air continued to increase in 2019 and 2020. Globally, averaged mole fractions of carbon dioxide (CO2) have already exceeded 410 parts per million (ppm), and if the CO2 concentration follows the same pattern as in previous years, it could reach or exceed 414 ppm in 2021. [Mole fraction represents the number of molecules of a particular component in a mixture divided by the total number of moles in the given mixture. It's a way of expressing the concentration of a solution]
- Oceans - In 2019, the oceans had the highest heat content on record. In 2020, it has broken this record further. Over 80% of the ocean area experienced at least one marine heatwave in 2020. [A marine heatwave is defined when seawater temperatures exceed a seasonally-varying threshold for at least 5 consecutive days] The percentage of the ocean that experienced “strong” marine heat waves (45%) was greater than that which experienced “moderate” marine heat waves (28%).
- Sea-level Rise (SLR) - Since record-taking started in 1993 using the satellite altimeter, sea-level has been rising. It is due to the La Niña induced cooling. Sea level has recently been rising at a higher rate partly due to the increased melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
- The Arctic and the Antarctica - In 2020, the Arctic sea-ice extent came down to second lowest on record. The 2020 minimum extent was 3.74 million square kilometre, marking only the second time (after 2012) on record that it shrank to less than 4 million sq km. In a large region of the Siberian Arctic, temperatures in 2020 were more than 3°C above average. A record temperature of 38°C was noted in the town of Verkhoyansk, Russia. The Antarctic sea-ice extent remained close to the long-term average. However, the Antarctic ice sheet has exhibited a strong mass loss trend since the late 1990s.
- Indian extreme weather events: India experienced one of its wettest monsoons since 1994, with a seasonal surplus of 9% that led to severe floods and landslides. The Cyclone Amphan, which hit Kolkata in May 2020, has been named as the costliest tropical cyclone for the North Indian Ocean region that brought about an estimated loss of USD 14 billion.
- Extreme weather: Along with the pandemic, people across the world struggled to survive as they faced extreme weather in the form of storms, cyclones, heavy rainfall and record heat. Response and recovery to people hit by cyclones, storms and similar extreme weather was constrained throughout the pandemic in 2020. Mobility restrictions and economic downturns owing to Covid-19 slowed down delivery of humanitarian assistance to vulnerable and displaced populations, who live in dense settlements. The pandemic added to human mobility concerns, highlighting the need for an integrated approach to understanding and addressing climate risk and impact on vulnerable populations.
- World Meteorological Organization: The WMO is an intergovernmental organization with a membership of 192 Member States and Territories. India is a member, which originated from the International Meteorological Organization (IMO), which was established after the 1873 Vienna International Meteorological Congress. Established by the ratification of the WMO Convention on 23rd March 1950, WMO became the specialized agency of the United Nations for meteorology (weather and climate), operational hydrology and related geophysical sciences.
- Knowledge centre:
- Extreme weather event - Extreme weather is a weather event such as snow, rain, drought, flood, or storm that is rare for the place where it occurs. For example, normal temperatures at the equator would constitute a heat wave if they occurred at the North Pole. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that “rare” means in the bottom 10% or top 10% of severity for a given event type in a given location. Because extreme weather is by definition rare, it is difficult to assess the risk of such events, including changes in risk with global warming.
- Tipping point - The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) introduced the idea of tipping points, as ‘large-scale discontinuities’ in the climate system considered likely only if global warming exceeded 5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Information in recent IPCC Special Reports suggested that tipping points could be exceeded even between 1 and 2 °C of warming. If current national pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are implemented — and that’s a big ‘if’ — they are likely to result in at least 3 °C of global warming. This is despite the goal of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit warming to well below 2 °C. However, if tipping points are looking more likely, then the ‘optimal policy’ recommendation of simple cost–benefit climate-economy models4 aligns with those of the recent IPCC report2. In other words, warming must be limited to 1.5 °C. This requires an emergency response.
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