Extreme weather worries

The eastern parts of the US, including Baltimore, New York and Washington, are just about recovering from a mighty blizzard that took lives and endangered people for days. Hurricane force winds and flooding have also posed impediments to normal life even as snow records are being rewritten. Scores of people have died in Taiwan from hypothermia while China renewed over the weekend its orange warning, its second highest alert. Hong Kong is shivering from unprecedented cold while Nago city in Japan has experienced snowfall for the first time since 1966. Thousands of flights have been cancelled in the southern South Korean island of Jeju even as the mountainous parts of northern India are experiencing a cold snap peppered with fog. Cold weather is not new to January, but such extreme weather events are increasing by the year, suggesting that climate patterns have changed for the worse, whether in hot or cold parts of the year.

The year 2015 was the warmest on record, according to Nasa. Climate change deniers may be sceptical but scientists explain that global patterns of extreme weather events, like heat waves in Europe, heavy rainfall in Asia and drought in Australia, Africa and California, in the last few years relate to global warming and climate change. The global warming trend is linked to such extreme cold events too as hotter air can hold more moisture and so, when a storm gathers, it can unleash huge amounts of snow. Shrinking winter ice cover leads to even more moisture in the air and more snowstorms. We probably know the causes, but the solution to stabilise the global climate remains unclear.