In May 2021, Queensland experienced a mixed of hail, lightning and flooding, which surprised many. In June, following a torrential rainfall, a landslide was triggered which swept through the Izusan neighbourhood of Atami, Japan. In the same month, extraordinary rainfall led to Penang flash floods, which left several areas along Penang’s northern coast with muddy trails in their house and in. immediate need of government assistance.
All these natural catastrophes that we have witness so far prove only one thing, climate change is real, and it’s going to be worse in the following years to come. All that is happening right now, is probably just the tip of the iceberg. If we do not take any actions to conserve our environment now, the results might be consequential.
Following the deadly floods that occurred recently in Germany, leaving over 100 people dead and many fear missing, scientists have warned that the extreme weather events are likely to become much more familiar in the future. According to DW, Andreas Fink from the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology said that extreme rainfall is going to be more frequent in a warmer world. “For every increase in temperature of one degree Celsius, the atmosphere can absorb about 7% more moisture. The additional moisture caused by global warming will lead to higher amounts of precipitation in the long term, especially when there is heavy rainfall,” Dr. Sebastian Sippel from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich told DW.
All these events point to the blunders caused by human. There is no doubt that human-made climate change is heating up the atmosphere. As Dr. Carl Friedrich Schleussner from the geography department of Humboldt University in Berlin said in a statement: “In 2021, it is not a question of whether climate change played a role but simply how much.”
There has been record breaking temperatures in countries across the world have dominated the headlines in recent years. Last month, Canadian recorded a record temperature of 49.6C in Lytton, British Columbia. According to Financial Times, Paraguay and Chile have both recorded all-time heat and cold this century while the UAE registered a record high 51.8C in July 2017 and a record low of minus 2C in January of this year. These fluctuating temperatures experienced by these regions poses a warning that climate change is more than just rising temperature or a dip in the thermometers. These extreme weather temperatures are usually accompanied by natural disasters, such as what we are witnessing all over the world now. Landslides, hail storms, bushfires, floods are all the after-effects of significant climate change.
While many of us just put the words “protecting the climate” in our mouth, many of us failed to properly practise it in real life. Because, everyday objects that we used on a day-to-day basis will, in one way or another affect the environment, and there is no going around it. However, we can try to play our role in conserving the environment by starting small. Who knows, we might not be able to save the planet, but we might be able to prolong it
