“We had installed it in June and August, we couldn’t even find the remains,” said the glaciologist from the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore.
Aside from the catastrophe facing one of the world’s poorest and most populous nations, what worries scientists today is that the extreme weather crippling Pakistan is reverberating around the world.
This year flood, fire and drought records have fallen around the world.
In China, rivers have dried up, crippling power generation, closing factories and shrinking crops. For more than 70 days in a row this year, nearly a billion people suffered from a heat wave that saw daily temperatures above 40 degrees in 17 provinces.
In Europe the rusting ghost ships of Hitler’s Black Sea fleet have left the retreating Danube River, and for the first time a temperature of 40 degrees was recorded in England. Much of the continent is now in the worst drought in 500 years, exacerbating food and energy shortages caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Crop yields have collapsed and river traffic has ground to a halt (literally) on Germany’s Rhine River, suspending the movement of coal barges. In France, dry rivers have affected agriculture and water temperatures in some rivers are so high they could not be used to cool nuclear reactors, restricting output from the system that provides 70 percent of the country’s energy country
Similarly, the water temperature in the Persian Gulf was so hot this month, nine degrees above average, that it could not be used to cool Iran’s only reactor.
The relentless La Nina systems that have washed over Australia’s east coast have parched South America, shortening the wet season and reducing corn and soybean production in Brazil and Argentina.
A report in Nature Climate Change Earlier this year, he said the western US states were in the midst of the driest stretch since the year 800, a situation made 40 percent more likely by climate change.
The drought has caused catastrophic fires and drained the region’s reservoirs. The shells of sunken pleasure boats and the skeletal remains of victims of a long-forgotten mob war have risen from the dry mud of Lake Mead, the source of water and power for about 40 million people .
The dry spell shows no sign of ending. “Not only is this drought continuing, it’s continuing at a rate as intense as ever,” UCLA climate scientist Park Williams and author of the new research told National Geographic earlier this year.
What is to blame for climate change?
Scientists are cautious about linking any specific weather event or even weather pattern to climate change, particularly because what is known as attribution science is a relatively new field, although it is being expanding and improving rapidly.
But experts have no doubt that global warming is driving the rapid increase in extreme weather.
The world has already warmed about 1.2 degrees since humans started pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the start of the industrial age. It is now believed to be warming by about 0.18 degrees per decade.
This week, the International Annual Review of World Climate, led by scientists at the US National Centers for Environmental Information and published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, revealed that greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea levels and oceanic heat content reached record highs. in 2021.
Although there are no global net zero goals, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to rise, and the rate of increase may even have increased.
Weather extremes observed around the world are in line with predictions about the impact of warming caused by these gases.
With each degree of warming, the atmosphere is able to hold about 7% more moisture, and sudden and massive deluges have long been predicted by climate scientists.
Dr Andrew King, an attribution specialist at the University of Melbourne and the ARC Center of Excellence for Climate Extremes, says this year, the world has been hit by weather patterns that have slowed and even stagnated for periods. Some scientists believe that this phenomenon may be caused by climate change.
“When we have this kind of weather standing still in one place, it’s more likely to stand still somewhere else,” King says. “When you have a heat building in one place, a few 100 or 1000 kilometers away, you may have more humid conditions.”
At great distances, the connection between events becomes more tenuous.
The “seasonal” monsoon in Pakistan is unlikely to be directly related to, say, the recent flash flooding in Dallas, King says. But both are much more likely to have occurred as a result of climate change, he adds.
Some of these events are simply unimaginable without him.
“I think everything [these events] they have some fingerprints of climate change, but the heat and drought in Europe and the heat in China are very, very strongly related to climate,” says King.
“We simply wouldn’t be getting temperatures as high as we’ve seen without human-caused climate change. Records have really been broken. Especially in China recently with ridiculously high night-time temperatures. And to see 40 degrees in the UK you wouldn’t recently imagined.”
King believes that in recent years, Australia’s east coast has been protected from such wild heat by La Ninas on its back. Without them, he believes more records would have been broken here as well.
A 40 degree day in London, he says, is equivalent to seeing 50 degrees in Melbourne or eastern Sydney.
As hundreds of millions of people around the world struggle with the immediate devastation of extreme weather in recent weeks and months, implications for global climate diplomacy are also emerging.
Fijian Prime Minister Bainimarama tweeted this week: “Let’s be clear: The Pakistani people did not do this in Pakistan – we all did, and the high-emitting nations are most responsible. Unless we end the addiction of our species to fossil fuels, every country in the world will remain in the crosshairs of the climate crisis.”
Fiji may be small on the world stage, but it has an outsized voice in climate negotiations. Bainimarama’s comment has already resonated in the region and the world.
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“Small island developing states have been at the forefront of climate ambition,” says Richie Merzian, head of the Australia Institute’s climate and energy program. “They were instrumental in the 1.5 degree target of the Paris Agreement and have now been handed the reins of the key UN climate body.”
Merzian is referring to the appointment of Simon Stiell, Grenada’s former climate minister, as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, taking over as the world prepares for the COP27 climate talks that will be held in Egypt in November.
There, developing nations are expected to demand not only greater ambition in the world’s reductions, but more money for what is known as “loss and damage” to climate-vulnerable nations.
“Loss and damage” is a diplomatic speech to compensate for the ravages caused by climate change caused by the industrial revolution. So far, it has proven to be a sticking point in the climate negotiations. With emissions from Western nations beginning to level off and falling, while those from industrialized nations are increasing, as allowed by the Paris framework, it is unlikely that an agreement will be reached soon.
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All that is clear is that the climate will continue to warm until we reach zero, and for a period beyond that, too, as greenhouse gases are reabsorbed by the Earth’s climate system or removed from the atmosphere by artificial means not yet developed.
For most of us alive now, King says, the weather we see today is likely the most benign we’ll ever know.
If we follow the science, however, we could still make it better for our children.
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