Global warming: new worrying evidence

Last summer, Pakistan suffered from the effects of global warming. What were described as “biblical floods” hit the country’s south and killed thousands of people and tens of thousands of animals. The floods followed unprecedented rains and also unexpectedly large amounts of water that flowed down the Indus River. The Indus received more water than it could handle because of the melting of the ice in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush Mountains. A warmer than normal air carried more water and deposited it as rain in lower Sindh including the normally dry megacity of Karachi. The country should expect more of the same this summer and the summers that follow. It has to prepare itself to handle these crises — a subject I will get back to later in this article.

The year 2023 has started with unprecedented rain and floods in the state of California on the United States’ west coast. For several years in the past, dry and hot air had brought fires to the state’s forests destroying hundreds of thousands of acres that had been covered by dense forests for centuries. “California once wished for rain. Now floods devastate its towns,” headlined The Washington Post in a story it carried on the front page of its issue of January 11. Drought that lasted for half a decade was the worst in 1,200 years and caused farm fields to wither. “Now, the water that California so desperately wanted is pummeling them like a curse. It’s surging over riverbanks and rushing through, toppling drought stressed trees, turning scorched mountain-sides into avalanches of mud.” The newspapers in the West had used the same kind of language to describe floods and rains in Pakistan in the summer of 2022.

These abnormal weather events occurring in places that are tens of thousands of miles apart will no longer be rare but are likely to become the norm. This was predicted by several sweeping record-based studies released in the last few days by international agencies. An analysis released by the European Earth monitoring agency Copernicus showed that the last seven years in the Continent were history’s hottest with 2021 coming in as the fifth hottest. The same conclusions were reached by NASA which found that the past 12 months were the hottest on record, with the planet warming by 1.1 degrees centigrade above the pre-industrial level. Bill Nelson, the Agency’s head, said that “science leaves no room for doubt: climate change is the existential threat of our time. Eight of the top 10 warmest years on the planet occurred in the last decade, an indisputable fact that underscores the need for bold cation to safeguard the future of our country — and of humanity.”

Normally, climate analysts focus their attention on Africa and South Asia — the two regions most likely to bear the brunt of the adverse consequences of global warming. But now they have begun to worry about Europe and North America as well. In 2021, Europe suffered its hottest summer on record, when temperature hit 48.8 degrees centigrade in Sicily — this temperature was almost the same as that in Jacobabad, the hottest city in Pakistan — which produced devastating wild fires that ripped through Italy, Greece and Turkey. This was coupled with catastrophic floods which swept through Germany and Belgium. Even Canada was not spared. Temperature of 49.6 degrees Celsius was recorded in Lytton. The country’s official meteorological agency recorded 2021 as its hottest year in history, when average temperatures hit 10.7 degrees centigrade, a full one degree above the normal.

What should be of particular worry for Pakistan is the faster melting of glaciers that feed its rivers in the summer months and conserve water as ice in winters. According to a study published on January 7, 2023 in the journal Science, nearly half of all glaciers will melt by the end of this century. The planet has been gradually losing glacier ice since the peak of the last major ice age, some 20,000 years ago. Three degrees centigrade of warming, the researchers found, would translate into loss of over 70% of global glaciers and result in about 5 inches of global-sea-level rise.

The study identified four areas where glaciers affect the weather systems. In addition to the two poles, the Arctic and the Antarctic, there are large expanses of ice in Greenland and the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountains. The last is sometimes referred to as the third pole considering the amount of ice it holds and the age of the ice. Most glaciers cover a small area. Roughly 80% of the world’s glaciers are less than one square kilometer. According to David Rounce who led the study published by the journal Science, most glaciers are very small. “When you think about future changes in a warming climate, they are very challenged in order to survive,” he wrote. Some 104,000 of the world’s more than 215,000 mountain glaciers and ice caps will melt by the end of this century, producing floods in the rivers they feed and raising sea levels equivalent to a little less than 4 inches.

This brings me to public policy aimed at controlling the adverse effects of global warming. There are lessons policymakers in Islamabad could learn from the measures adopted by Bangladesh. The country is prone to climate disasters which include cyclones, sea-rise and floods. The steps the country has taken fall into three categories: infrastructure adjustments; early warning systems; and efficient channels for financial relief. All these measures have saved many lives. In 1970, when Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan, 300,000 to 500,000 people died in a massive cyclone that hit the coastal areas. A similar one in 2020 killed only about 30.

Pakistan has also created institutions to predict and manage natural disasters. It improved its early-warning systems after flash floods killed more than 2,000 people in 2010 which may have helped reduce the death toll from the floods that hit the country in the summer of 2022. However, while it has developed institutions that transfer government finance to the people in need, it has to link them to those who are not necessarily poor but can be seriously hurt by natural disasters. Pakistan has to start planning to deal with the melting of ice in the large glaciers that sit on top of the mountain ranges in the east and northeast of the country. While the country has considerable experience in managing floods, it does little to store the water that flows down the many rivers that originate in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush ranges. As I have written in an earlier article, the suggestion made by the World Bank some years ago to build a cascade of storages in the Indus after the river has left the mountains and entered the planes will save water that will be needed when the flow declines because of ice-melt. These will cost a great deal of money but can be financed by the large amounts that are planned to be given to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank to deal with the disasters that are going to hit the developing world because of global warming.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 16^th, 2023.

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