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The Earth is warming … 2020 seen as a natural disaster
Australia, western US, wildfires continue for months and Asia is a water crisis
Grasshoppers attacked in the Middle East … Siberia reaches 38 degrees Celsius in June
The fifth anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement … “Execute countermeasures such as standing up to the crown”
Greg Slade, 42, who worked as a wildlife recreation forest manager on Kangaroo Island in South Australia, vividly remembers the day a wildfire struck the forest in January. After evacuating dozens of employees and visitors, it took him 12 hours to reach safety along the burning highway. He soon left Kangaroo Island and found a new job on East Fraser Island in October. He again faced a wildfire on Fraser Island.
On the 18th (local time), the exploration magazine ‘National Geographic’ reported that a forest fire continued for about eight weeks from mid-October on Fraser Island, which was registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the 18th ( local time). Reported. It started with the flame of a campfire on the beach, but experts feared it was unusual for a forest fire to last two months. Prior to Australia, 15,000 fires raged across the country from September last year to February this year, killing 33 people and burning 3,000 buildings. Research has reported that 3 billion wild animals were harmed, including 60,000 koalas killed.
Experts believe that the hot and dry weather of summer causes the land and forests to dry out, causing wildfires to occur more frequently and last longer. And climate change is supposed to be on the back burner. November this year was the hottest month in the history of meteorological observations in Australia. “We know that climate change is part of the burning scene on Fraser Island,” Rich Merzian, the Australian Research Institute’s climate and energy manager, told Reuters on the 11th. Climate change is making the situation worse ”.
It’s not just the Australian bushfires. The world has suffered from natural disasters caused by climate change. It was a year in which the climate change crisis threatened the ecosystem and our lives. The New York Times said in an interactive article on this year’s climate problem on the 17th, “2020 was a year of crisis. It was climate change that penetrated the corona 19 pandemic, economic turmoil, social turmoil and all of this. “
A symbolic scenario of the climate crisis in the United States has also been observed. On September 9, the skies over San Francisco, California, were dark orange due to the wildfire. The New York Times said, “The nuclear winter seems to have come,” and CNN said, “It’s just a preview of what climate change will bring.” More than 100 large wildfires occurred in the western United States, including California, Oregon and Washington, killing about 30 people and burning more than 20% of the area of South Korea.
The water crisis continued in Asia. Large-scale flooding occurred in Jakarta, Indonesia at the beginning of the year, and Bangladesh in the summer. In Korea, the longest rainy season lasted from June to August (54 days), and in southern China during the same period, it rained heavily, causing the displacement of more than 50 million people.
In Central and South America, 30 hurricanes, a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean, occurred in June and November, the highest in history. In particular, floods and landslides caused by hurricanes ‘Eta’ and ‘Yota’ in November killed more than 200 people and displaced 500,000 people in Central America, including Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. .
Eastern Europe, which is the ‘Grain Land of Europe’, suffered a great deal of damage from drought this spring, and the Middle East and North Africa suffered severe damage from incursions of desert locusts throughout the year. A warning sound was heard saying “the threat to food security caused by climate change”.
Experts worry that climate change is causing natural disasters to occur more frequently and become more intense. According to data released in October by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), the number of “ climate-related disasters ” worldwide between 2000 and 2019 was 6681, an increase 82.7% of the 3,656 cases in the previous 20 years (1980-1999). did.
A warning “signal” that the earth is heating up was also detected. In Verkhoyansk in the Sakha Republic of Russia in northeastern Siberia, a ‘symbol of extremes’, the hottest temperature reached 38 degrees on June 20. In July, an algae phenomenon, which is evidence of melting glaciers, occurred in the Alps of northern Italy, and a ‘pink glacier’ was observed. Methane gas, which has a warming effect 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide, is being released from the seabed of the Russian Arctic Ocean in a concentration 400 times higher than usual, Russian researchers announced in October. The Guardian reported that “the warm currents of the Atlantic Ocean formed by the effects of climate change are likely to be the cause of methane gas emissions.”
As the crisis draws near, warnings and voices of self-reliance came from across the country and the international community that the pace of response was slow. This year marks the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement. In December 2015, 195 countries pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that the global average temperature by 2100 does not exceed 2 degrees Celsius or more than 1.5 degrees before the Industrial Revolution. Consequently, each country has set carbon neutral targets for 2030 and 2050-2060. The international environmental group ‘Climate Action Tracking’ predicted that the global average temperature will rise 2.1 degrees from the pre-industrial level if the carbon neutral target is implemented as promised by the governments of each country on day 1.
Former French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who spearheaded the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement, said in an interview with Reuters on the 12th: “The political will of each government is insufficient to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. “You have to run it.” “There is no vaccine for climate change,” he said.
UN Secretary General Antony Gutechs said in a video conference at Columbia University in the United States on the 2nd: “Humanity is at war with nature.” “Achieving peace with nature is the most important task of the 21st century, and for anyone, anywhere, it should be our highest priority,” he said. He said countries should activate “green change” in policies, such as stop investment in fossil fuels and impose environmental taxes He said: “Our actions today can lead to the destruction of future generations.”
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg said in an interview with The Guardian on the 10th that 2030 or 2050, when each country has set its greenhouse gas reduction targets, is too far away and that a binding annual greenhouse gas reduction plan must be implemented. greenhouse gases. “We always say, ‘We’re not good enough, but it’s still better than doing nothing.’ But there is no time. “