Calamitous Earth Reheats International Efforts to Curb Emissions are Needed

‘The year 2020 has been an unprecedented year for people and planet. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives worldwide. At the same time, the heating of our planet and climate disruption has continued apace. Record heat, ice loss, wildfires, floods and droughts continue to worsen, affecting communities, nations, and economies around the world,’ United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres, said recently. In this article, Dr Anil Pratap Singh discusses the urgent need to accelerate and deepen global actions with the political commitment and governments’ willingness. It would forge new partnerships while maintaining the tempo for mitigation and ways of cooperation to support international efforts to curb emissions.

- Dr Anil Pratap Singh

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed that the last decade, that is, 2011–2020 was the warmest decade on record,in a persistent long-term climate change trend. United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Mr António Guterres cautioned that substantiation by the WMO about the year 2020 as one of the warmest years on record is yet another stark reminder of the relentless pace of climate change, which is destroying lives and livelihoods across our planet. The report, United in Science 2020, being a multiorganization high-level compilation of the latest climate science information, also highlighted the increasing and irreversible impacts of climate change on glaciers, oceans, nature, economies, and its cost on people across the globe.

Cataclysmic Events and Mounting Global Temperatures

In the past 5–6 years, the world has witnessed several catastrophic weather events across the continents and in 2020 record fires and hurricanes and near-record low Arctic Sea ice extents were observed, which were probably the consequences of increasing global temperatures.

Hundreds of Siberian, Australian and western Unites States’ wildfires, Atlantic hurricane, low Arctic Sea ice extents were among few conspicuous features of the year 2020. There observed ‘transnational-transfer’ of smoke generated due to Australian bushfires of 2019 and 2020, which accounted burning of over 20 per cent of the Australian temperate forest biome. Pyrocumulonimbus events, that is, fire-induced thunderstorms crossed into the stratosphere widely and circumnavigated as well. Similar fireburns in California also destroyed over a million acres. In certain parts of Siberia, peculiar kind of ‘zombie fires’ reignited in areas with permafrost, which can continue from the previous year.