How to deal with the continued warming of global climate?

Worldwide, extreme weather trends are increasing and intensifying. The “driving force” behind this is widely considered to be global warming.

The World Meteorological Organization recently issued a bulletin stating that 2017 is likely to be the third warmest year for global sea and land temperatures since meteorological records began, and will become the hottest year among all years not affected by El Ni?o events. Zhou Bing said that global warming has begun since the late 1970s, and this trend has intensified since this century. The earth continues to heat up, opening a "Pandora's box" full of extreme weather. More and more extreme weather and climate events will occur, which will have a huge impact on the economy and society.

In 2017, there were many extreme weather and climate events around the world: Atlantic hurricanes hit North America and the Caribbean one after another, the strongest hurricane in history "Irma" swept across the United States and other places, and the West Coast of the United States suffered a "hell heat wave" New Delhi suffered severe air pollution, the Thomas wildfire in Southern California was the largest in history, and so on. "This means that global warming has led to frequent extreme weather and climate events, with increasing impacts and risks," Zhou Bing said.

Global warming provides huge kinetic energy to the atmosphere and oceans, making the climate more extreme - dry ones get drier, and wet ones get wetter. Song Lianchun said that as the climate warms, instability increases, and the moisture content and "water-holding" capacity of the atmosphere increase. The original atmosphere could be saturated with a little water vapor, causing precipitation, but now the atmosphere is more capable of "holding rain" and requires more water vapor until it can no longer hold it for precipitation to form. This results in either no precipitation or heavy precipitation.

In addition, the process of urbanization has changed the characteristics of the earth's underlying surface, making urban meteorological disasters more likely to occur and increasing the risk. "With economic and social development, population growth and structural changes, and increasing urbanization levels, the risks of disasters such as high temperatures, floods, and droughts faced by our country will intensify, the pressure on environmental protection will also increase significantly, and the situation of disaster prevention and reduction will become more severe." Zhou Bing explain.

Will scenes from disaster movies such as "The Day After Tomorrow" come true? Faced with the current situation of increasing extreme weather, how should we defend ourselves?

“The scenes in disaster movies are illusory and exaggerated. However, the disasters caused by extreme weather and climate events to humans are indeed huge and realistic. Tornadoes make houses move, floods push cars up trees, Sandstorms cause daytime to become nightlike, barrier lakes form instantly, and the ecological environment is poor, etc. "Zhou Bing pointed out that in the 20 years from 1980 to 2000, global economic losses caused by extreme weather and climate events reached 71.8 billion U.S. dollars, and from 2001 to 2001. In the short 10 years since 2011, the economic losses caused by extreme weather have quickly exceeded the total amount in the past 20 years, reaching more than 100 billion US dollars. In 2017, Atlantic Hurricane Harvey alone caused more than 180 billion U.S. dollars in economic losses to the United States, the highest in U.S. history.