What is Climate Crisis?

Earth’s average temperature has been fluctuating throughout Earth’s existence because of the imbalance created in Nature. But in the last two centuries, there has been an exponential rise in temperature because of human interference. To fuel the well-being of our existence, we have been venting greenhouse gases uncontrollably. This reckless act has led to an aggressive rise in temperature inciting Nature to counter-act vigorously.

What is the Green House Gas Effect?

To understand the Green House Gas Effect, imagine that a specific type of gases called Green-House gases behaves like a blanket around the Earth. So what this blanket does is traps the heat which comes from the sun, making the planet hotter. Some examples of these gases are Carbon-dioxide, Methane, NitrousOxide and Fluorinated gases.

Has This Ever Happened Before?

Yes, 56 million years ago, Earth faced a severe heating crisis. Earth’s climate does naturally oscillate — over tens of thousands of years, its rotations around the sun slowly change, resulting in variations in everything from seasons to sunlight. Partly, as a result of the oscillations, Earth experiences glacial periods (better-called ice ages) and warmer interglacial periods.

During the previous global warming crisis, considered a highly rapid case of warming, temperatures took 10,000 to 20,000 years to reach their height. Today’s crisis has taken only 150 years. That is the critical difference between today’s climate crisis and past climatic highs. It’s also what makes the consequences of the current climate crisis so difficult to predict,

How Does This Increase in Temperature Affect Earth?

Different aspects of Nature have grown into each other so profoundly that a slight variation faced in one of the facets puts all the others at risk. Let me discuss a few of the effects faced by Earth due to the Climate Crisis.

Melting of Ice Caps/Glaciers

Glaciers that exist today are leftover fragments of the last ice age. Continent-scale ice sheets exist as Greenland and Antarctica. In contrast, smaller ice caps and glaciers live in the world’s high latitudes and mountains. Glaciers gain mass through snowfall and lose mass through melting. Long summers and diminished winters caused by the climate crisis have forced glaciers to lose mass over the years permanently. The world’s high-mountain glaciers are losing mass much faster than scientists previously calculated. Since 2015, they have been permanently melting nearly 300 billion tons of ice per year. In the case of the Himalayas, the rapid melting of ice caps/glaciers will cause more prominent landslides and frequent flooding. The researchers claimed that around 800 million people depend on seasonal runoff from Himalayan glaciers for irrigation, hydropower and drinking water. The increased melting appears so far to be swelling runoff during warm seasons, but scientists predict that this will subside off within decades as the glaciers lose mass.

Melting of Ice Sheets

NASA and European Space Agency calculated that Greenland and Antarctica, together, lost 81 billion tons per year in the 1990s. In contrast with 475 billion tons of ice per year in the 2010s—a six hundred percent increase. In total, Greenland and Antarctica, together, have lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice since the 1990s. The resulting ice-turned water boosted global sea levels by 17.8 millimetres. Every centimetre of sea-level rise contributes to coastal flooding and coastal erosion, breaching people’s lives around the planet, A large volume of methane is stored in the Arctic as natural gas deposits; they are called permafrost and undersea clathrates. Permafrost and clathrates degrade on the temperature rise. Thus significant releases of methane from these sources may arise as a result of global warming. And methane has 70 times the power of trapping heat compared to carbon dioxide.

Drier Climate

Every decade since 1980 has been hotter than the prior decade. The period between 2010 and 2019 was the hottest since worldwide temperature records began in the 19th century. The increase in average temperature is rapidly gathering pace. In the last decade, they were spiked up to 0.39C warmer than the long-term average, compared with a 0.07C average increase per decade stretching back to 1880. The temperature rise amplifies the drying of organic matter in forests (the matter that burns and causes wildfire) and has doubled the number of extensive fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western United States. Research shows that climate changes create warmer, drier conditions. Increased drought and a more extended fire season are boosting these increases in wildfire risk.

Coral Reefs

Coral reefs harbour the very best biodiversity of any ecosystem globally. Despite existing in less than 0.1% of the ocean bottom, reefs are home to one-quarter of all marine fish species and several other marine animals. Reefs contribute a significant form of ecosystem services like subsistence food, protection from flooding and sustaining the fishing and tourism industries. Their degradation will therefore have economic, social and health consequences. Due to the increase in temperature, corals expel the symbiotic algae living in their tissues, giving them their colour. A spike of 1–2°C in ocean temperatures sustained over several weeks can result in bleaching, turning corals white. If corals are bleached for extended periods, they eventually die. Coral bleaching events often result in the death of enormous amounts of corals.

Floods/Cyclones

Climate scientists are clear: storms, cyclones and floods will worsen as the planet warms. The rise in average global temperatures have led to a concerning trend of no rain for prolonged periods and then a sudden spell of excessive rainfall, causing extreme weather calamities, particularly floods which wreaked havoc, took lives, destroyed homes and agricultural yields as well as resulted in substantial revenue losses 1.4 million people were subject to the direct impact of the floods due to sudden heavy rainfall across the North East. Kerala experienced floods killing more than 500 people, also faced a passive monsoon before the rains began, which went on for almost two weeks. A study conducted by the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, had anticipated an increase in extensive rainfall events in Central and Southern India and discovered its root to global warming(climate change).