The Earth continues to register increasingly warmer temperatures and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned of the serious consequences of their increase.
2022 was the sixth year with the highest temperatures since 1880, according to a report prepared by scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States (NOAA).
The warming, in data
The worst came in 2023, when record numbers were recorded and, according to experts, that opened the door to an increase in floods, forest fires, thaws of glaciers and intense and abundant heat waves in the future.
“We continue in this serious trend of temperature increases. And another important fact is that the last nine years have been the warmest since we started taking measurements,” said Carlos del Castillo, head of the Ocean Ecology Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in statements to the Voice of Americaconvinced that “the problem is that the trend is inexorably one of increasing temperature throughout this cycle.”
However, the increase in temperatures across the planet is not occurring equally; there are places where this warming is even more accentuated. “For example, in the Arctic, in the hemispheres, in the highest latitudes towards the north, the change can be up to four times more. And in some places it is a little less than average, and that is due to patterns of ocean currents and winds, among other things,” said the expert.
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The United Nations designates April 22 as the International Earth Day with the aim of raising awareness about global climate problems, derived from global warming, climate change and other meteorological phenomena that are generally the result of human activities.
From the international organization they emphasize that “climate change, human alterations in nature and acts that damage biodiversity, such as deforestation, change in land use, intensive agriculture and livestock farming, or illegal trafficking of species, can intensify the destruction of the planet.
2023, the hottest so far
The committee of experts that are part of the agency dependent on the United Nations has also shown that the average temperature of the year is 1.4 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era, just one tenth of a degree below what had been previously estimated. set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
And the scenario is even more worrying for next year since, according to statements by the Secretary General of the WMO, the target temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius could be exceeded due to the El Niño phenomenon, marked by the warming of the Pacific Ocean.
“It is practically certain that during the next four years we will reach this 1.5, at least seasonally” said Petteri Taalas in an interview collected by the agency The Associated Pressand then assure that “in the next decade or so we will be there permanently.”
Furthermore, Del Castillo indicated that “temperature increases on the planet have very negative effects” and its consequences are already being seen today. “We are experiencing increases in extreme weather events, in places that are dry they are getting drier, places where it rains a lot are raining much more and hurricanes are intensifying,” he explained.
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NASA’s tools to control climate change
To this end, NASA has put a “large amount of resources and work into trying to understand how our planet works and is changing” as a result of the “increase and intensity of meteorological events, such as torrential rains, the most extreme snowfalls, , drier droughts and longer heat waves.”
The US aerospace agency has sufficient resources to be able to monitor some of these phenomena, so that it can be seen, with scientific data, what the scope of this situation is.
“NASA is a space agency and precisely for that reason, from the great advantage of being in space, we can observe the entire planet. “We have a fleet of satellites that are dedicated to looking at various aspects of planet Earth,” del Castillo said.
To become aware of this situation, said the NASA expert, “we must think of the planet as if it were a super organism,” that is, it changes according to certain factors and circumstances. “Just like we have different organs, planet Earth has its atmosphere, its oceans, the polar caps, and all these systems interact. In order to understand how it works, we have to look at all these aspects and it is best to look at them at the same time.”
With satellites deployed in space, “we can have observations of how the planet is developing and we also have scientists who go to the field, to the sea and to the forests and take measurements and then do laboratory work” and “numerical models that are They are used not only to predict the future, but to understand the present.”
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