NASA predicts more extreme and worrying weather events

Polar Bear Miniature Figures Merkel Climate Change

New York (Parliament Politics Magazine) – According to NASA, 2021 was the sixth hottest year in the history of data keeping, since 1880s. On Thursday, experts warned that the extreme weathers, heatwaves that we have been facing the past couple of years can actually aggravate, but “we can stop making it worse”.  Expect more heatwaves, unpredictable rainfall, and flooding. Essentially, erratic weather patterns and natural disasters will become only more common here on.

In conversation with Global News, Gavin Schmidt, the Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said that while global warming will continue to negatively impact weather patterns across the globe owing to a degree Celsius rise in Earth’s temperature, “we can stop making it worse”.

According to Schmidt, humanity has reached a no-return point in global warming “a plateau of warming that’s actually part of an ongoing continued warming”. This is mainly due to the increases in greenhouse gases, !notably carbon dioxide and methane”, he argued.

He suggested that governments should start immediately keeping under control gasses emmissions so that we can be more “control of our destiny”. “All of these things are now being more and more strongly tied to the fact that we have warmed the planet by more than a degree Celsius over the last 100 years,” he added.The annual report by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that the global temperature  in 2021 was 1.1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. According to NASA administrator Bill Nelson, the oceans are “Storing a heck of a lot of heat”, adding that if it weren’t for oceans’ storage capacity, “the atmosphere would’ve warmed a lot more rapidly.

 

References

Al-Hakim, A. (2022, January 14). NASA predicts more extreme weather events but ‘we can stop making it worse.’ Global News.

Milman, O. (2022, January 13). Nearly quarter of world’s population had record hot year in 2021, data shows. The Guardian.

Eleni Kyriakou

Eleni is a journalist and analyst at Parliament Magazine focusing on European News and current affairs. She worked as Press and Communication Office – Greek Embassy in Lisbon and Quattro Books Publications, Canada. She is Multilingual with a good grip of cultures, eye in detail, communicative, effective. She holds Master in degree from York University.