Saturday, February 28, 2009

South Asia monsoons to be affected

Yet another proof displaying the imminent effects of climate change has come up with the study findings of Purdue University research group. Indicating the effects of climate change, the group has mentioned that the climate change could vert possibly be causing much less summer rainfall, due to its influence on entire monsoon dynamics.

Undoubtly, less rainfall would mean a big trouble to rain dependant agriculture sector of South Asian countries like India. And not to forget, the indirect influence on the ever declining economy of the country. Large part of India and China falls under the affected area, which means almost half of the world's population. One can easily understand the wide impact the less rains may have on this part of the world.

Noah Diffenbaugh, whose research group led the study, also displayed the concerns while stating that the summer monsoons are responsible for approximately 75% of the total annual rainfall in major parts of the region and produce almost 90% of India's water supply.

Full story can be read on USAToday.

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1 comment:

praveen panwar said...

Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) was a Swedish scientist that was the first to claim in 1896 that fossil fuel combustion may eventually result in enhanced global warming. He proposed a relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature. He found that the average surface temperature of the earth is about 15oC because of the infrared absorption capacity of water vapor and carbon dioxide. This is called the natural greenhouse effect. Arrhenius suggested a doubling of the CO2 concentration would lead to a 5oC temperature rise.

After the discoveries of Arrhenius and Chamberlin the topic was forgotten for a very long time. At that time it was thought than human influences were insignificant compared to natural forces, such as solar activity and ocean circulation. It was also believed that the oceans were such great carbon sinks that they would automatically cancel out our pollution. Water vapor was seen as a much more influential greenhouse gas.
In the 1940's there were developments in infrared spectroscopy for measuring long-wave radiation. At that time it was proven that increasing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide resulted in more absorption of infrared radiation. It was also discovered that water vapor absorbed totally different types of radiation than carbon dioxide. Gilbert Plass summarized these results in 1955. He concluded that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would intercept infrared radiation that is otherwise lost to space, warming the earth.

In the late 1950's and early 1960's Charles Keeling used the most modern technologies available to produce concentration curves for atmospheric CO2 in Antarctica and Mauna Loa. These curves have become one of the major icons of global warming. The curves showed a downward trend of global annual temperature from the 1940's to the 1970's. At the same time ocean sediment research showed that there had been no less than 32 cold-warm cycles in the last 2,5 million years, rather than only 4. Therefore, fear began to develop that a new ice age might be near. The media and many scientists ignored scientific data of the 1950's and 1960's in favor of global cooling.
In 1988 it was finally acknowledged that climate was warmer than any period since 1880. The greenhouse effect theory was named and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded by the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Meteorological Organization. This organization tries to predict the impact of the greenhouse effect according to existing climate models and literature information. The Panel consists of more than 2500 scientific and technical experts from more than 60 countries all over the world. The scientists are from widely divergent research fields including climatology, ecology, economics, medicine, and oceanography. The IPCC is referred to as the largest peer-reviewed scientific cooperation project in history. The IPCC released climate change reports in 1992 and 1996, and the latest revised version in 2001.
In 1998 the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan. It requires participating countries to reduce their anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs, and SF6) by at least 5% below 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012. The Kyoto Protocol was eventually signed in Bonn in 2001 by 186 countries. Several countries such as the United States and Australia have retreated.
From 1998 onwards the terminology on the greenhouse effect started to change as a result of media influences. The greenhouse effect as a term was used fewer and fewer and people started to refer to the theory as either global warming or climate change.

These are some very small facts and the threat of climate change is highly dangerous.