Significant climate change events you should know about (In the last decade)
You may have noticed that in the last decade, alot more people have woken up to the grim reality that climate change is here, it’s happening now and is getting much worse–at a faster rate than ever before.
Carbon emissions have made it certain that change is no longer gradual, but sudden and extreme. The earth’s temperatures have been at their highest in the last ten years and that’s our biggest concern.
Extreme heat events like wildfires have destroyed acres of land in a flash. Hurricanes like Sandy, Maria and Harvey have left behind devastating effects most places are yet to heal from. The speed at which the polar ice caps are melting has increased drastically in the last decade, increasing our ocean’s temperatures too.
I think this really explains our collective and increasing anxiety–we’re really facing some uncontrollable hard truths about our future and it’s happening NOW.
With milder winters come a whole host of unsettling, ecosystem-reshaping changes. Earlier springs cause a mismatch between pollinators and plant flowering times. More rain and less snow, and earlier-melting snow, affect water availability through the summer and fall. Unfrozen lakes, thawing permafrost, and open water appear where there should be ice.
But even then, the apparent and more alarming evidence of climate change exists in our oceans.
The ocean has sucked up over 90 percent of all the extra heat trapped by human-caused climate change, and that signal is already evident in its surface temperatures. Marine heat waves, like the heat waves we feel on land, and bigger changes—ones that could affect weather patterns around the entire planet—may be coming sooner than we think.
The Arctic experienced about 1.8 F degrees (1 degree C) of warming in the past decade alone—compared to just under 1 degree C for the planet at large over the past 50 years.
And its ice and frozen landscapes are responding just as significantly as scientists predicted they would.
We’ve researched a list of significant ways our climate has changed in the last decade, that we thought we should all know about:
- Carbon Emissions from fossil fuels grew by 10%
While global emissions growth plateaued between 2014 and 2016, it was short-lived: Emissions from fossil fuels grew 1.5% in 2017, 2.1% in 2018 and are projected to grow another 0.6% in 2019.
- Global average temperature has increased
In 2010, global average temperature was 0.88˚C (1.6˚F) above pre-industrial levels. Temperature increase in 2019 is shaping up to be about 1.1 degrees C (2˚F) above pre-industrial levels.
- Concentrations of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Exceeded 400 Parts Per Million (PPM)
Temperatures increase as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises. Not too long ago, the idea of surpassing 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, a symbolic threshold which Earth has not experienced for millions of years, felt quite far off.
- Sea rose more than 1.6 inches
Global mean sea level rise was roughly 3.3 millimeters (mm) per year (0.13 inch/yr) between 1993 and the present. This trend accelerated significantly this past decade: Between 2010 and 2018, sea level rise grew to about 4.4 mm/yr (0.17 inch/yr), rising almost 2 inches overall in the past decade. In 2018, global mean sea level was the highest in the satellite record.
- Ice reached record lows
Sea ice extent is the smallest in September every year. The rate of September sea ice decline has been 13% per decade relative to the 1981-2010 average. During this past decade, Arctic sea ice minimum reached its lowest level since at least 1979, the year record-keeping began. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have also been losing mass, with an acceleration of loss in just the last decade
- Extreme weather became more frequent and severe
This past decade has been marked by devastating extreme events, including heat waves on land and in the ocean, record rainfall and flooding, massive fires and heat-charged hurricanes. Communities around the world are already living with the impacts of just 1 degrees C (1.8 degrees F) of warming; our climate will only become deadlier and more devastating with every additional fraction of a degree of temperature rise.
Ok now it’s time to take a breath.
Our belief is that quite often, we are bombarded with so much news and information from around the world, that we tend to tune out. Knowing about these significant events is not to hamper your mood (I know it all sucks), but rather, spark something in you that will help develop more conscious efforts towards saving our planet.
Honestly, it looks different for all of us. Some of us will be able to do a little, and some of us will contribute alot more. Infact, I’ll even go far enough to say that the more privileged and powerful we are, the more we can probably do. Whether you’re an individual or a corporate giant reading this–lets join hands to do our part, shall we?