Читать книгу The Atlas of Climate Change - Professor Kirstin Dow - Страница 20

Signs of Change

Part 1

In 2010 and 2011, floods in Pakistan, Australia, and China; heat waves and forest fires in Russia and in the USA; drought in the Amazon, and record-breaking temperatures around the world illustrated that the climate is already dangerous. The global average temperature in 2010 tied for the warmest year on record. The minimum extent of Arctic sea ice was the third-lowest measured. This first decade of this new millennium was itself the warmest observed. While there are uncertain elements in our knowledge of climate change, and this knowledge is sketchier in some areas than others, the big picture is becoming increasingly clear. The issue is also becoming increasingly urgent. Many of the record-breaking events were accompanied by vast human tragedies. The science that underpins the big picture draws on tens of thousands of data sets and millions of individual observations. These data track a diversity of physical and biological indicators such as the timing of budburst and flowering in plants and trees, of changes to ice melt on rivers and lakes, and of alterations in the ranges of mammals, birds, and insects. On mountains and at the poles, glaciers are thinning and retreating, ice sheets are breaking up. In many parts of the world, shifting patterns of rainfall intensity and of temperature are affecting people’s lives and livelihoods. The oceans are warming, and the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is driving an increase in ocean acidity, threatening corals and small organisms at the base of the food chain, and, therefore, the survival of entire ecosystems. Of course, many uncertainties limit our current understanding of the rate, magnitude, and patterns of change. But, despite the uncertainties, the era of human-induced climate-change impacts has begun. The world has moved from warning signs and hints of climate change, to monitoring the increasing scale of impacts and bearing the consequences.

Climate change has a taste, it tastes of salt. Atiq Rahman UNEP Champion of the Earth 2008, Director, Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies

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