news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

The signs have never been clearer.

one

On August 7, the Central Meteorological Observatory issued a high temperature warning, and the orange alert involved 18 provinces and cities, covering China from east to west.

The scorching summer is still going on, and in July just past, scorching sun, heavy rain and floods took turns testing China.

The bridges in Shaanxi were broken, the dikes of Dongting Lake burst, and the floodwaters in Pingjiang, Hunan flooded the county town. Heavy rains poured down on the Jiaodong Peninsula, and a tornado swirled in Heze, with flying sand and rocks, dark skies, and daytime as dark as night.

Extreme weather is frequently trending on the Internet, and reading news from all over the world,We will find that we have entered an extremely hot era.

As early as April this year, a heat wave swept across Asia, breaking the highest temperature records in 17 countries, which climatologists called "Unprecedented terrible weather”。

Fruits in Laos burst due to the sun, farmland in Myanmar was barren, many schools in the Philippines were closed, and ammunition exploded at a military base in Cambodia due to high temperatures.

The weather station in northwestern Thailand recorded a temperature of 45.4°C in April. Soon after, the temperature in Bangkok reached 52.3°C. Neighboring Bangladesh announced that it had welcomed its hottest day in 58 years.Some of the country's roads have melted.

In India, from March to May, there were 25,000 cases of heat stroke and 211 deaths.The Minister of Transport fainted during the campaign, and national campaign events were forced to move to late night and early morning hours.

In the last week of May, the temperature in 37 cities in India exceeded 45 degrees Celsius. Scholars said on TV, "Heat waves have reached the limit of human endurance”。

Water and fire spread violently. The UAE welcomed the heaviest rainfall in 75 years. The Middle East was full of floods. Heavy rains swept across the continent. The water levels of many rivers in Europe, such as the Danube and Neckar, rose. France's corn production dropped sharply by 25%.

The ancient city of Athens, Greece, is closed, ambulances are parked at all national attractions, and 16 cities in Italy are under high temperature alert.They called the heat wave "Charon," the mythical ferryman of the underworld.

Across the ocean, wildfires raged in California, with thick smoke turning the sky red. As the fires were about to stop, a hurricane arrived, and 121 counties in Texas entered a state of disaster, with 2.7 million households without power.

We have entered an era of global boiling, the UN Secretary-General warned last summer. This year, he said:

The signs that our climate is collapsing have never been clearer.

There are more and more abnormal signs. In April this year, Guangzhou's rainfall was equivalent to that of Beijing in a year, exceeding that of Cherrapunji, the "world's rainiest place" during the same period. Guangzhou netizens complained that "Guangzhou has more rain than the tropical rain forest”。

In Henan, people once prayed for rain as drought spread everywhere. However, drought suddenly turned into floods, and the ensuing heavy rains destroyed farmland. "The seedlings that were watered three times with great difficulty were finally drowned by a flood."

The Nanyang Basin was flooded, Zhoukou stopped operations and production, Shangqiu residents waded through the water to work and called themselves hippos, rain flooded the residential area in Yongcheng, and people opened the elevator door to see the rolling torrent.

It rained heavily at Lingyin Temple in Hangzhou, but a week later, the sun was shining brightly and the surface temperature of the Broken Bridge in West Lake reached 50°C. On that day, Zhejiang issued 35 red high temperature warnings, setting a record this year.

A young netizen lamented that there were too many once-in-a-century events in the news.At the age of twenty, I have witnessed three once-in-a-century events”。

This is just the beginning. A report from the World Meteorological Organization shows that we will experience unprecedented high temperatures in the next five years.

EU data shows that from June last year to May this year, 12 months,Every month is the hottest on record.

Herrera, a meteorologist who has been tracking temperature changes for a long time, wrote on social media:

"We are seeing something that has not been seen in meteorology for three centuries."

two

Behind the anomalies, all the anomalies point to global warming.

In the first 20 years of the new century, heavy rain events increased by 134%, high temperature events increased by 232%, many 50-year events became 5-year events, and the world is warming continuously.

Scientists say that for every 1°C rise in global temperature, the intensity of extreme precipitation increases by 7%.Extreme climate events that occur once every fifty years will increase ninefold in frequency.

In 2015, the Paris Agreement set a goal: to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of this century.

However, in less than 100 years, in 2023, global warming has reached 1.3℃, and scientists predict that around 2030, global warming will exceed 1.5℃.

The world's climate will rapidly climb to a critical warming threshold in the next five years, the United Nations weather agency has said in disappointment.

Scholars say that once the threshold is crossed, the temperature will continue to rise, and the rate of increase will be faster than in the past 100,000 years. The earth will become a pressure cooker, and humans will enter a self-made "hot earth era."

All visions are self-created. At the turn of the millennium, Nobel Prize winner Crutzen proposed the idea thatAnthropocene"concept.

From the end of the Ice Age to the mid-20th century, it was the Holocene, which was dominated by nature. After the Holocene, it was the Anthropocene.Human activities dominate Earth's geology。

We conquered wilderness with trains, crossed oceans with ferries, cut down trees, and reclaimed land from the sea. The actions of countless individuals ultimately changed the global climate. After the Industrial Revolution, the global warming rate was much faster than in the previous million years.

Scholars calculated that over the past 50 years, the greenhouse heat caused by global warming is equivalent to the explosion of about 25 billion atomic bombs, and this year it has accelerated to an increase of 3 to 6 atomic bombs per second.

On June 25 this year, the Davos Forum released a report:Extreme weather is the most pressing risk facing the world over the next decade.

A researcher from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in an interview: China's complex terrain makes it more vulnerable to warming.

According to popular science speculation,Flood control and drought resistance rotate alternately, high temperatures and heavy rains switch unpredictably, sudden changes in temperature are the norm, and "unexpected" climate will continue to occur.

Scholars interviewed gave an example, if the global temperature rises by 2°C, the number of days in Shanghai with temperatures above 40°C in summer will increase tenfold, Tianjin will be at risk of flooding, and people should not think about moving to the north. Typhoons have visited Harbin three times in 2020.

A changing climate will permanently alter our lives.

Continuous rainfall caused floods, resulting in poor crop yields, which in turn led to rising prices; high temperatures consumed energy, and power generation required fossil energy, which accelerated global warming and created a vicious cycle.

At higher dimensions, glaciers release viruses, ultraviolet radiation increases, sea levels rise and species become extinct, and more than half of the world's population will be threatened by "climate diseases."

Wei Ke, a scholar from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that we have already passed the "climate tipping point".Future temperature rise is inevitable, and those born in the 1980s and 1990s will face severe challenges in their later years.

three

In this scorching summer, climate doctor Rabi said that the current temperature level on Earth may not have appeared in 120,000 years, and "it's time to act."

Humanity's actions to combat climate change can be traced back 56 years.

In 1968, scientist Fuller proposed the "Dome Project", which was to cover the central city area of ​​Manhattan with a dome with a diameter of 2 miles, artificially regulate wind, light, and heat, and create a custom climate.

He has seen far ahead:

"For every gallon of oil produced, nature has to pay a metabolic cost equivalent to more than $1 million."

Dome plans were once popular. Houston proposed the Houston Dome, the UK designed the Garden of Eden in Cornwall, and Russia planned to build a dome city in a huge diamond mine in Siberia.

These plans ultimately remained on paper, and the most likely dome city to be realized is the City of the Future announced by Saudi Arabia in 2021.

The future city is a straight line, 170 kilometers long, with an investment of nearly $200 billion. Two parallel mirrored buildings span the coast, desert and mountains, blocking all wind, sand and rain.

In addition to these grand plans, some people are also promoting tiny "doomsday bunkers".

In the 1970s, architect Reynolds built the first "Earth Boat" in New Mexico using more than 70,000 discarded bottles and cans. This environmentally friendly house is self-sufficient without urban water and electricity.

Since then, Earthship has been promoted everywhere, and environmentalists have built natural communities in America, Europe, Asia and other places.

Reynolds was ridiculed, but his ideas gradually gained acceptance. He said that the Earthship did not have any complex technology, but simply borrowed from the natural cycle:

If human beings are not greedy, they can live long.

However, whether it is a dome city that can accommodate a million people or an earth ship scattered across the countries, it is ultimately a drop in the bucket.The real dome is still the sky above our heads.。

Scientists have calculated and used existing technology to reverse the future, but all have failed.

Simulating volcanic eruptions can resist solar radiation, but the ozone layer will be damaged; fertilizing the sea to allow phytoplankton to grow, but the ecology will deteriorate later; planting trees and greening are good, but one trillion trees cannot absorb the current carbon emissions, and there is not enough space.

The scientists finally concluded that the most efficient, ideal and almost side-effect-free transformation for humans is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

In his speech in July, the UN Secretary-General continued to call for carbon reduction, saying that now is the right time.We urgently need an exit on the highway to climate hell”。

Carbon reduction requires the joint efforts of everyone.

In a BBC documentary, scientists called for reducing the purchase of useless goods, buying durable goods as much as possible, not wasting food, and avoiding air transport, which produces 100 times more carbon than sea transport.

All small actions will eventually change the destiny of mankind.

The gray-haired scientist said that in the 4.5 billion years since the Earth was born, it has experienced continental drift, planetary collisions, and repeated ice ages, while humans have only been on Earth for 100,000 years. "The Earth will not disappear, but we will."

At the end of the documentary, he made a final appeal: If we do not take strong action within ten years, we will face irreversible damage to nature and the collapse of the planet.

He said: We are running out of time, but there is still hope.