White to grey

We have written about the loss of Arctic ice. Distant as it seems, the repercussions can be felt far away from the poles! In fact, the loss of Arctic ice is massively compounding the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, ice scientist Professor Peter Wadhams told BBC Newsnight. The absorption of heat by the melt water has the effect “equivalent of about 20 years of additional CO2 being added by man”.

Thirty years ago there was about eight million square kilometres of ice left in the Arctic in the summer, and by 2007 that had halved, it had gone down to about four million, and this year it has gone down below that. Yes, climate change.

However, the U.N. climate talks featuring delegates from 190 nations, that have been ongoing for the last week in Bangkok, Thailand, and which conclude today, have produced nothing much to write about!

Last December at the Durban COP talks, the world's nations agreed that they would sign a legally-binding pact to cut emissions and help developing nations adapt to climate change, from 2020. Part of this agreement included a promise to deepen existing promises to cut emissions by the end of the decade. At the summit, the U.N. released a report showing that several rich nations will not even meet their existing pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade, made at Copenhagen in 2009. These nations include Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and the US.

Not a single country has made a fresh commitment, and US negotiators stunned delegates by calling for a new treaty to be ‘flexible’ and ‘dynamic’ rather than legally binding, representing a complete U-turn on its previous position.

With the present level of commitments to reduce emissions, the world is still on for at least a 3°C temperature rise, which would have catastrophic repercussions.
India is experiencing its fourth drought in a dozen years, raising concerns about the reliability of the country’s primary source of fresh water, the monsoon rains that typically fall from June to October. Studies using 130 years of data show big changes in rainfall in recent decades, according to <http://bit.ly/Qgblr2>B. N. Goswami, director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. Climate models suggest that while overall rainfall should increase in the coming decades, the region can expect longer dry spells and more intense downpours ­ forces that would seem to cancel each other out but in fact pose new threats. Heavy rains are normally short duration, and therefore the water runs off, while weak rains are important for recharging groundwater.