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From The Newspaper (12) 　Environment (2)

December 8, 2022

Most newspaper articles are about disasters. Especially this year, a lot of disasters have happened all over the world. Intensive high temperatures in Spain and England, continuous heavy rains and floods in Pakistan, severe droughts in China, and tenacious mountain fires in the US and Australia. And every time, the reason for the disasters are said to be 'Global Warming'. And the reason for Global Warming is said to be 'CO2 Emission'. Maybe the first appearance of Global Warming in a shocking way was Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth'. In the movie, he explained how CO2 had increased and how it had affected global heating with a lot of graphs, panels, and pictures. He could remember the scene where Mr. Gore showed a graph of CO2 emissions every year. The line went up straight in a zigzag. He said that the zigzag's cycle is one year, the tops are winters, the bottoms are summers, people use gas and emit more CO2 in winters. He checked on the internet. The movie was released in 2006. Al Gore received a Nobel Peace Prize, but the issue didn't become a big movement. Maybe the majority of people thought that in the long history of the earth, there must have been uncountable times of the earth's temperature going up and going down, so this will settle down soon. But, recently repeated abnormal weather patterns and following disasters have made more people upset. He has heard about the 'Tipping Point' theory. In this theory, some specialists believe that if the average temperature goes up higher than the 'Tipping Point', the temperature won't go down under that point ever again, even if we do everything possible. He didn't know whether this theory is correct, but maybe some drastic activists believe this idea and are throwing paints on famous paintings, saying if the earth is on the verge of the end, how can people feel like looking at those paintings? Recently COP27 was held in Egypt. '27' is the number of times this annual event has happened in which each country's representatives gather and talk about global climate change. In this year's event, the Secretary General of the UN made a closing speech which sounded like the "tipping point" is approaching. Recently, he watched an interesting TV program. The subtitle read, "Are current disasters really because of Global Warming?" In the program, a specialist who is researching the relationship between climates and human lives said that he would use the word, 'extreme climate' rather than 'abnormal climate', because if somebody says what 'normal' is, you can't focus on the point. He wanted to focus only on numbers as proof. The program introduced a recent study about the relationships between disasters and climates. The study's lead scientist and her team made a model of two earths: the present earth and the earth 150 years ago. The present earth has additional CO2, as well as deforestation of the rainforests, etc. The earth 150 years ago didn't have those. Then, they made 100 different earths for the present earth and the earth 150 years ago, depending on four different factors: wind directions, temperatures, air pressures, and steam in the air/clouds. Using supercomputers, they analyzed and simulated the weathers in 100 different conditions for each. The results were clear.   The specialist on TV explained about the first graph which was of a town in Saitama prefecture that had a record of 40℃ in June for the first time this year. On the graph, there were two similar mountains: the graph on the right showed the distribution of the temperatures in Saitama in June this year. The graph on the left showed the same situation 150 years ago. The horizontal line showed the temperatures; the vertical line, which has '0%', '20%', and '40%' markers along the bottom, showed percent of the distribution from each 100 different earth patterns. The tops of the two mountains are situated at about 40%, which means the most probable temperatures happen by 40%. He wrote the line of 40℃ on the right mountain's right slope, which showed 20%. He explained that the Saitama's record can happen by 20% in the current situation. The mountain on the left is located rather far from the line, which means in the scenario of the earth 150 years ago, it could happen 0%. He said that the possibility of 40℃ in June in Saitama increased 2.5 times in 150 years. The next graph showed the possibility of heavy rain, using the same scenario as the Western Japan Heavy Rain in 2018. In this disaster, in one town, about 250 people died and 4,600 houses were destroyed. He explained that the frequency of heavy rain will occur once every 25 years on the present earth scenario, while it would have occurred only once every 80 years on the scenario of the earth 150 years ago. Risks have increased 3.3 times in this 150 years.

No.499



*deforestation :森林破壊
*rainforest :熱帯雨林
*distribution :分布