It seems global warming has started making its impact already. It is not a distant reality anymore. According to the National Weather Service, Iowa, Kansas and Wisconsin have experienced extreme weather conditions that killed 24 people and led to the evacuation of about 40,000. Iowa received 15 inches of rainfall that actually happens to be double the usual amount. A government agency researching climate change attributes this to a rise in worldwide temperatures.
The US Climate Change Science Program, initiated by President Bush in 2002, reports that North America is going to experience elevated temperatures, heavier rainfalls and more intense storms owing to global warming. Thomas Carl, director of National Climatic Data Centre, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (co-chairman of the report) recalls Midwest, North East and Mid Atlantic experiencing severe rainfall owing to global warming in the last decade and feels the condition might be the same in North America.
Garry Meehl( senior scientist National Centre for Atmospheric Research) predicts future hurricanes with stronger winds and more severe precipitation. Greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels in power plants and automobiles are found to raise the global temperatures resulting in more atmospheric water vapor and eventually heavier rainfall. The sea surface temperatures also rise, owing to the presence of green house gases, resulting in hurricanes.
Flood damage has a lot of adverse impacts and one immediate impact is the rising of the price of corn. The flood damage is estimated to be more than $2.7 million according to economics professors Mark Burton (University of Tennessee) and Michael Hicks (Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana). Eberhard Fauz, who heads climate risk analysis at Munich Re opines that global warming will have effect on precipitation events other than tropical storms and that such events might actually get worse in time to come.
Since greenhouse gases seem to be the main culprit in global warming it is high time strong measures are taken globally to check the emission of these gases beyond a permissible limit.
via: Bloomberg