TIPPING POINT - 6 MONTHS RAIN IN 38 HOURS

The harsh summer of 2021 is breaking records with each passing day. 

After British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Germany, China, Turkey, Greece, California and Maharashtra, August 2 and 3 saw Shivpuri district in Madhya Pradesh’s Gwalior division fall prey to the fury of climate change.

Shivpuri is usually known for water scarcity during the summer. But on August 2-3, within a span of 38 hours, the entire district received record rainfall of 454.57 millimetres (mm), according to the India Meteorological Department.

This is 55 per cent of the total rainfall the district receives in a year. The district has recorded 896.3 per cent rainfall this monsoon. The average rainfall in this region is 816 mm.

“I am 42 years old. But I am witnessing such heavy rainfall in this area for the first time in my life. Even elderly people cannot recall witnessing such heavy rainfall,” Ajay Yadav, a social worker from the Pohri block in Shivpuri, told this reporter.

Yadav was, in fact, working to deepen local ponds in Shivpuri just before the deluge struck to tackle water scarcity.

The rainfall has caused various rivers in the district including the Sindh, Kuno, Parvati and Mahuar to rise. The floods, in turn, have led to apocalyptic scenes in the area.

More than 10,000 people are trapped in Shivpuri. Of these, 8,000 have been rescued, while efforts to rescue some 2,000 are still on. To this end, the Indian Army’s help is also being taken - link - Rakesh Kumar Malviya - link

TIPPING POINTS - THEY'RE ALREADY HERE

Several key metrices of planet Earth have already crossed the tipping points, according to a new study part of a project signed by over 13,900 scientists from 153 countries.

The west Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, warm-water coral reefs and the Amazon rainforest were particularly highlighted in the analysis for the record deterioration of their conditions.

In 2019, more than 11,000 scientist signatories talked about the need for declaring a climate emergency. They emphasised that conservation endeavours have to be scaled up immensely to avoid unprecedented suffering due to the climate crisis.

Now, as many as 18 of the 31 vital signs / variables that the researchers tracked reached new most-dangerous levels, according to the paper published July 28, 2021 in the journal Bioscience.

Ruminant world livestock numbers soared past 4 billion for the first time and exceeded mass of all humans and wild animals combined, the authors observed. This rise in numbers means a rise in deforestation as forests are cut to make way for agricultural land and livestock ranches.

Annual forest loss at the Brazilian Amazon reached a 12-year-high of 1.11 million hectares destroyed between 2019 and 2020. Forest degradation due to fires, drought, logging and fragmentation has transformed the region to act as a carbon source rather than a carbon sink, according to a paper published in Nature in April this year.

The global emissions-weighted average price per tonne of carbon dioxide has remained too low ($15.49 as of 2020). This will need to increase several times to be highly effective in curbing fossil fuel use, according to the new study - Down to Earth - link - Susan Chacko - link

TIPPING POINT - FIRES ACROSS TURKEY

Tourists staying at the Turkish holiday resort of Bodrum were evacuated and told to wait for rescue boats on Saturday evening as fresh wildfires erupted nearby, according to local media.

Panicked holidaymakers reportedly rushed to the seashore following the evacuation of several hotels in the coastal city.

Fires across Turkey have been raging since Wednesday, burning down forests and some settlements, and encroaching on villages and tourist destinations. Satellite images show smoke billowing across huge areas of land.

Two forest workers died on Saturday, the country's health minister said, taking the total death toll from the blazes to six, while hundreds more have been injured or suffered health problems.

In the Aegean resort of Bodrum, coast guard units led the rescue operation and authorities asked private boats and yachts to assist the efforts - Sky News link - Sky News Turkey - link

TIPPING POINT - FLASH FLOODS

Londoners like to remind visitors that, despite their city’s reputation for dreary weather, rain is in fact less common than in some sunnier climes. 

Rome gets more total precipitation each year; New York City gets almost twice as much, and has far more rainy days. In general, Britain’s capital is grey but fairly dry, with predictable and moderate weather.

That may be changing:-

On July 25th parts of the city saw over 5cm of rain in just a few hours, an amount that would normally take an entire month to fall. The result was flash flooding.

In east London two hospitals told patients to stay away; one, Whipps Cross, had to evacuate around 100 patients after a power cut.

Hundreds of cars were stranded on roads that suddenly became rivers, while a dozen Tube stations were forced to close. Pudding Mill Lane station, on the Docklands Light Railway, looked like a swimming pool, with several feet of water washing around the ticket barriers.

Even in areas far from rivers and flood plains, such as Hampstead, a pretty suburb of north London, shopkeepers had to bail out rain water into the streets - The Economist - link

TIPPING POINT - TYPHOONS

Many residents of Shanghai stayed home last Monday as Typhoon In-fa continued to lash the city after making landfall at the nearby island-city of Zhoushan on Sunday morning.

Over the next 24 hours, the storm moved north before it hit the mainland city of Pinghu, which is quite close to Shanghai, on Monday morning, according to China’s National Meteorological Centre.

The meteorological authority said the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, as well as Shanghai municipality, all in eastern China, will be continually affected by heavy winds and torrential rains over the next couple of days - link

“The Greatest Threat to Our Planet Is the Belief That Someone Else Will Save It” - link

TIPPING POINT - FLOODS

Scientists have long predicted climate disruption will lead to more extreme weather, such as heatwaves, droughts and floods. 

Human emissions from engine exhaust fumes, forest burning and other activities are heating the planet. As the atmosphere gets warmer it holds more moisture which brings more rain.

All the places that recently experienced flooding – Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, London, Edinburgh, Tokyo and elsewhere – might have had heavy summer rain even without the climate crisis, but the deluges were unlikely to have been as intense.

But there have always been floods and heatwaves. What is the evidence that humans are making them worse?

First, more records are being broken more often; the world’s seven hottest years in recorded history have all come since 2014. Second, scientists can now use statistical analysis and computer models to calculate how much more likely particular weather events have become as a result of the extra stress that humans have put on the climate system. 

For example, human emissions made the deadly “heat dome” in Canada and North America last month at least 150 times more likely and the prolonged heatwave in Siberia last year more than 600 times more probable - link

“The Greatest Threat to Our Planet Is the Belief That Someone Else Will Save It” - link

TIPPING POINT - DROUGHT

TULELAKE, Calif.—Joey Gentry hesitates before she drives through the fields of alfalfa and wheat that line the roads in the Klamath Basin. 

“Because I’m good and brown,” said Gentry, a member of the Klamath Tribes and a tribal and racial justice activist. ”It’s not safe for Natives to be out in farmland during a drought year.”

Like much of the American West, this dry, hilly, high-elevation landscape straddling the California-Oregon border is experiencing a summer of extreme drought. But when the federal government announced in May that, for the first time ever, it would cut irrigation water to about 180,000 acres of agriculture in the basin, tensions ignited between farmers and the Klamath tribes.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation made the cuts to preserve two endangered species of suckerfish sacred to the Klamath Tribes, as well as protected coho and chinook salmon that travel along the Klamath River to reach spawning habitat. After meeting the needs of the fish, the bureau determined, there would not be enough water left over for most irrigators in the basin - link

“The Greatest Threat to Our Planet Is the Belief That Someone Else Will Save It” - link