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Verão Catastrófico
por Kllüx Qui Ago 12, 2010 7:46 am
Verão Catastrófico
NEW YORK – Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.
The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.
The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They'll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship.
"There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott.
He said modelers of climate systems are "very keen" to develop supercomputer modeling that would enable more detailed linking of cause and effect as a warming world shifts jet streams and other atmospheric currents. Those changes can wreak weather havoc.
The U.N.'s network of climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends "have already been observed," in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example.
Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day's weather.
Stott and NASA's Gavin Schmidt at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it's better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for a heat wave, for example. "That is exactly what's happening," Schmidt said, "a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes."
The WMO did point out, however, that this summer's events fit the international scientists' projections of "more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming."
In fact, in key cases they're a perfect fit:
RUSSIA
It's been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia with Moscow temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees C) for the first time. The drought there has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing western Russia with a toxic smog. Moscow's death rate has doubled to 700 people a day. The drought reduced the wheat harvest by more than one-third.
The 2007 IPCC report predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses.
PAKISTAN
The heaviest monsoon rains on record — 12 inches (300 millimeters) in one 36-hour period — have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside. It's left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected, and killed 1,500. The government calls it the worst natural disaster in the nation's history.
A warmer atmosphere can hold — and discharge — more water. The 2007 IPCC report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia's monsoon region.
CHINA
China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, the WMO says, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed at least 1,117 people and left more than 600 missing, feared swept away or buried beneath mud and debris.
The IPCC reported in 2007 that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 percent since 1961, and floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the 1950s. It predicted still more frequent flooding this century.
ARCTIC
Researchers last week spotted a 100-square-mile (260-square-kilometer) chunk of ice calved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland's far northwest. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation.
The huge iceberg appeared just five months after an international scientific team published a report saying ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is expanding up its northwest coast from the south.
Changes in the ice sheet "are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated," said one of the scientists, NASA's Isabella Velicogna.
In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.
The melting of land ice into the oceans is causing about 60 percent of the accelerating rise in sea levels worldwide, with thermal expansion from warming waters causing the rest. The WMO'S World Climate Research Program says seas are rising by 1.34 inches (3.4 millimeters) per decade, about twice the 20th century's average.
Worldwide temperature readings, meanwhile, show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year in 150 years of global climate record keeping. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures in 2010, more than in any other year.
Scientists blame the warming on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pouring into the atmosphere from power plants, cars and trucks, furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning industrial and residential sources.
Experts are growing ever more vocal in urging sharp cutbacks in emissions, to protect the climate that has nurtured modern civilization.
"Reducing emissions is something everyone is capable of," Nanjing-based climatologist Tao Li told an academic journal in China, now the world's No. 1 emitter, ahead of the U.S.
But not everyone is willing to act.
The U.S. remains the only major industrialized nation not to have legislated caps on carbon emissions, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week withdrew climate legislation in the face of resistance from Republicans and some Democrats.
The U.S. inaction, dating back to the 1990s, is a key reason global talks have bogged down for a pact to succeed the expiring Kyoto Protocol. That is the relatively weak accord on emissions cuts adhered to by all other industrialized states.
Governments around the world, especially in poorer nations that will be hard-hit, are scrambling to find ways and money to adapt to shifts in climate and rising seas.
The meetings of climatologists in the coming weeks in Paris, Britain and Colorado will be one step toward adaptation, seeking ways to identify trends in extreme events and better means of forecasting them.
A U.N. specialist in natural disasters says much more needs to be done.
Salvano Briceno of the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction pointed to aggravating factors in the latest climate catastrophes: China's failure to stem deforestation, contributing to its deadly mudslides; Russia's poor forest management, feeding fires; and the settling of poor Pakistanis on flood plains and dry riverbeds in the densely populated country, squatters' turf that suddenly turned into torrents.
"The IPCC has already identified the influence of climate change in these disasters. That's clear," Briceno said. "But the main trend we need to look at is increasing vulnerability, the fact we have more people living in the wrong places, doing the wrong things."
NEW YORK – Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.
The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.
The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They'll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship.
"There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott.
He said modelers of climate systems are "very keen" to develop supercomputer modeling that would enable more detailed linking of cause and effect as a warming world shifts jet streams and other atmospheric currents. Those changes can wreak weather havoc.
The U.N.'s network of climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends "have already been observed," in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example.
Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day's weather.
Stott and NASA's Gavin Schmidt at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it's better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for a heat wave, for example. "That is exactly what's happening," Schmidt said, "a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes."
The WMO did point out, however, that this summer's events fit the international scientists' projections of "more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming."
In fact, in key cases they're a perfect fit:
RUSSIA
It's been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia with Moscow temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees C) for the first time. The drought there has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing western Russia with a toxic smog. Moscow's death rate has doubled to 700 people a day. The drought reduced the wheat harvest by more than one-third.
The 2007 IPCC report predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses.
PAKISTAN
The heaviest monsoon rains on record — 12 inches (300 millimeters) in one 36-hour period — have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside. It's left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected, and killed 1,500. The government calls it the worst natural disaster in the nation's history.
A warmer atmosphere can hold — and discharge — more water. The 2007 IPCC report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia's monsoon region.
CHINA
China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, the WMO says, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed at least 1,117 people and left more than 600 missing, feared swept away or buried beneath mud and debris.
The IPCC reported in 2007 that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 percent since 1961, and floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the 1950s. It predicted still more frequent flooding this century.
ARCTIC
Researchers last week spotted a 100-square-mile (260-square-kilometer) chunk of ice calved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland's far northwest. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation.
The huge iceberg appeared just five months after an international scientific team published a report saying ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is expanding up its northwest coast from the south.
Changes in the ice sheet "are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated," said one of the scientists, NASA's Isabella Velicogna.
In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.
The melting of land ice into the oceans is causing about 60 percent of the accelerating rise in sea levels worldwide, with thermal expansion from warming waters causing the rest. The WMO'S World Climate Research Program says seas are rising by 1.34 inches (3.4 millimeters) per decade, about twice the 20th century's average.
Worldwide temperature readings, meanwhile, show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year in 150 years of global climate record keeping. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures in 2010, more than in any other year.
Scientists blame the warming on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pouring into the atmosphere from power plants, cars and trucks, furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning industrial and residential sources.
Experts are growing ever more vocal in urging sharp cutbacks in emissions, to protect the climate that has nurtured modern civilization.
"Reducing emissions is something everyone is capable of," Nanjing-based climatologist Tao Li told an academic journal in China, now the world's No. 1 emitter, ahead of the U.S.
But not everyone is willing to act.
The U.S. remains the only major industrialized nation not to have legislated caps on carbon emissions, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week withdrew climate legislation in the face of resistance from Republicans and some Democrats.
The U.S. inaction, dating back to the 1990s, is a key reason global talks have bogged down for a pact to succeed the expiring Kyoto Protocol. That is the relatively weak accord on emissions cuts adhered to by all other industrialized states.
Governments around the world, especially in poorer nations that will be hard-hit, are scrambling to find ways and money to adapt to shifts in climate and rising seas.
The meetings of climatologists in the coming weeks in Paris, Britain and Colorado will be one step toward adaptation, seeking ways to identify trends in extreme events and better means of forecasting them.
A U.N. specialist in natural disasters says much more needs to be done.
Salvano Briceno of the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction pointed to aggravating factors in the latest climate catastrophes: China's failure to stem deforestation, contributing to its deadly mudslides; Russia's poor forest management, feeding fires; and the settling of poor Pakistanis on flood plains and dry riverbeds in the densely populated country, squatters' turf that suddenly turned into torrents.
"The IPCC has already identified the influence of climate change in these disasters. That's clear," Briceno said. "But the main trend we need to look at is increasing vulnerability, the fact we have more people living in the wrong places, doing the wrong things."
Kllüx- Pontos : 11230
Re: Verão Catastrófico
por Kllüx Qui Ago 12, 2010 8:04 am
As inundações, incêndios, derretimento do gelo e calor febril: De
fumaça sufocou Moscou para o Paquistão e ensopados de água do Alto
Árctico, o planeta parece ter uma ruptura de verão. Não
é apenas um presságio do que está por vir, dizem os cientistas, mas um
sinal das alterações climáticas preocupantes já em curso.
Os
cataclismos relacionadas com o clima de julho e agosto os padrões de
ajuste previsto pelos cientistas do clima, com sede em Genebra a
Organização Meteorológica Mundial afirma - embora os cientistas sempre
tímido de desastres amarrando individual diretamente ao aquecimento
global.
Os
especialistas agora vê a necessidade urgente de melhores formas de
previsão de eventos extremos como ondas de calor da Rússia e incêndios
florestais eo dilúvio registro Paquistão devastador. Eles
vão discutir tais ferramentas em reuniões este mês e no próximo na
Europa e América, no âmbito das Nações Unidas, E.U. e patrocínio do
governo britânico.
"Não
há tempo a perder", porque as sociedades devem estar equipados para
lidar com o aquecimento global, diz governo britânico climatologista
Peter Stott.
Ele
disse que os modeladores de sistemas climáticas são "muito forte" para
desenvolver modelagem supercomputador que permitirá mais detalhada
ligação de causa e efeito, como o aquecimento do jato mundo muda
córregos e outras correntes atmosféricas. Essas mudanças podem causar estragos do tempo.
A
rede da ONU de cientistas do clima - o Painel Intergovernamental sobre
Mudança Climática (IPCC) - há muito previu que o aumento da temperatura
global produziria mais freqüentes e intensas ondas de calor e chuvas
mais intensas. Na sua última avaliação, em 2007, o grupo vencedor do Prêmio Nobel foi além disso. Ele disse que essas tendências "já foram observados", em um aumento das ondas de calor, desde 1950, por exemplo.
Ainda
assim, os climatologistas geralmente abster-se de culpar o aquecimento
para a seca ou a inundações, uma vez que muitos outros fatores também
afetam o clima do dia.
Stott
e Gavin Schmidt da NASA, do Instituto Goddard de Estudos Espaciais, em
Nova York, disse que é melhor pensar em termos de probabilidades: o
aquecimento pode dobrar as chances de uma onda de calor, por exemplo. "Isso é exatamente o que está acontecendo", disse Schmidt, "muito mais quente e menos extremos de frio extremos."
A
OMM que apontam, no entanto, que os acontecimentos deste Verão se
encaixam as projeções dos cientistas internacionais de "mais frequentes e
mais intensos os fenómenos meteorológicos extremos devido ao
aquecimento global."
De fato, em casos essenciais são uma combinação perfeita:
RÚSSIA
Foi
o verão mais quente já registrado na Rússia, com temperaturas de
Moscovo cobertura de 100 graus Fahrenheit (37,8 graus C) pela primeira
vez. A
seca que provocou centenas de incêndios nas florestas e secar os
pântanos de turfa, cobrindo Rússia ocidental, com uma fumaça tóxica. taxa de Moscou morte dobrou para 700 pessoas por dia. A seca reduziu a safra de trigo em mais de um terço.
O
relatório de 2007 do IPCC previu uma duplicação das secas desastrosas
na Rússia neste século, e já prevendo estudos incêndios catastróficos
durante anos de seca. Ele também afirmou que a Rússia sofrerá perdas grandes culturas.
PAQUISTÃO
As
chuvas de monção mais pesado já registrado - de 12 polegadas (300
milímetros) em um período de 36 horas - enviaram rios furiosos sobre
áreas enormes de campo. É deixou 14 milhões de paquistaneses desabrigados ou afetados, e matou 1.500. O governo chama o pior desastre natural na história da nação.
Uma atmosfera mais quente pode conter - e descarga - mais água. O
relatório de 2007 do IPCC diz chuvas têm crescido mais pesados durante
40 anos sobre o norte do Paquistão e previu uma maior enchente deste
século no sul da região de monções da Ásia.
CHINA
China está testemunhando as piores inundações em décadas, a OMM, especialmente na província noroeste de Gansu. Lá,
inundações e deslizamentos de terra na semana passada mataram pelo
menos 1.117 pessoas e deixou mais de 600 desaparecidos, temia varrido ou
enterrados debaixo de lama e detritos.
O
IPCC informou em 2007 que as chuvas aumentaram no noroeste da China em
até 33 por cento desde 1961, e inundações em todo o país aumentou sete
vezes desde 1950. Ele previu ainda mais freqüentes as inundações deste século.
ARCTIC
Pesquisadores
na semana passada viu um pedaço de 100 milhas quadradas (260
quilômetros quadrados) de gelo parido fora da grande geleira de
Petermann no extremo noroeste da Groenlândia. Era a ilha de gelo mais maciça a romper no Ártico em meio século de observação.
A
enorme iceberg apareceu apenas cinco meses depois de uma equipe
científica internacional publicou um relatório dizendo que a perda de
gelo da Groenlândia está se expandindo até a costa noroeste do sul.
Alterações
na folha de gelo "estão acontecendo rapidamente, e nós estamos
definitivamente perdendo massa de gelo mais do que havíamos previsto",
disse um dos cientistas da NASA Isabella Velicogna.
No Oceano Ártico em si, o derretimento do verão da calota de gelo enormes atingiu proporções sem precedentes. Os
dados de satélite mostram que a área do oceano coberto de gelo no mês
passado foi a segunda mais baixa já registrada em julho.
O
derretimento do gelo terrestre para os oceanos está causando cerca de
60 por cento do aumento acelerado do nível do mar no mundo inteiro, com a
expansão térmica das águas causando o aquecimento do resto. A
OMM Programa Mundial de Pesquisa Climática diz que os mares estão
subindo de 1,34 polegadas (3,4 milímetros) por década, a média de cerca
de duas vezes o século 20.
leituras
de temperatura no mundo, entretanto, revelam que em janeiro-junho foi a
metade mais quente antes de um ano, em 150 anos de registro climático
global manutenção. Os meteorologistas dizem que 17 países registraram as temperaturas em tempo de alta em 2010, mais do que em qualquer outro ano.
Os
cientistas culpam o aquecimento de dióxido de carbono e outros gases
que aprisionam o calor que despeja na atmosfera por usinas, automóveis e
caminhões, fornos e outros combustíveis fósseis queimando fontes
industriais e residenciais.
Peritos
estão a crescer cada vez mais vocal em incitar cortes afiados nas
emissões, para proteger o clima que tem alimentado a civilização
moderna.
"Reduzir
as emissões é algo que todos são capazes de," baseados em Nanjing
climatologista Tao Li disse a um jornal acadêmico na China, agora o
mundo No. 1 emissor, antes de os E.U.
Mas nem todos estão dispostos a agir.
Os
E.U. continua a ser o único grande país industrializado a não ter
limites legislou sobre as emissões de carbono, após o Senado Majority
Leader Harry Reid retirou na semana passada a legislação climáticas em
face da resistência de republicanos e alguns democratas.
A
inacção E.U., que remonta à década de 1990, é uma das principais razões
negociações globais têm esbarrado em um pacto para suceder o Protocolo
de Kyoto expira. Essa é a acordo relativamente fraco sobre as emissões de cortes com a adesão de todos os outros estados industrializados.
Governos
ao redor do mundo, especialmente nas nações mais pobres, que será
assolado, estão lutando para encontrar meios e dinheiro para se
adaptarem às mudanças climáticas e elevação dos oceanos.
As
reuniões de climatologistas nas próximas semanas, em Paris, Inglaterra e
Colorado será um passo em direção à adaptação, buscando meios para
identificar tendências em eventos extremos e melhores meios de as
prevenir.
Um especialista das Nações Unidas em catástrofes naturais, diz muito mais precisa ser feito.
Salvano
Briceno Internacional da ONU para a Redução de Desastres apontou
agravantes no catástrofes recentes do clima: fracasso da China para
conter o desmatamento, contribuindo para o seu deslizamentos de terra
mortíferos, gestão da Rússia mata pobre, alimentando os incêndios, ea
fixação dos paquistaneses pobres em inundação planícies e leitos secos de rios no país densamente povoado, relva posseiros "que, de repente se transformou em torrents.
"O IPCC já identificou a influência das alterações climáticas nestas catástrofes. Isso está claro", disse Briceño. "Mas
a tendência principal que nós precisamos de olhar para o aumento da
vulnerabilidade, o fato de que temos mais pessoas vivendo nos lugares
errados, fazendo as coisas erradas."
Kllüx- Pontos : 11230
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