BioSPEAR: Extreme weather phenomena are now hardly shocking

In February 2020, Sydney had barely begun recovering from the Australian bushfires 2019-2020 that wiped out millions of animals in the country, gutted the homes of thousands of people and devastated large swathes of the country. Over the past few days, Sydney has been experiencing a diametrically-opposite weather shock: deluge from record downpour over just a few days.

Such extreme weather phenomena are now hardly shocking: biting cold/heat waves, flash floods, wildfires that destroy millions of hectares of forests, etc. But, if this still fails to wake goverments up to the need for unprecedented climate action, there is little that can prevent extreme warming by the turn of the century.

And, if that is not enough, a just published ‘state of the planet’ study says that human action is now a significant threat to the resilience and stability of the biosphere, where all life exists. European researchers, publishing in the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, say that, since the 1950s, human action has altered the biosphere significantly, with humans and the mammals they domesticate/consume making up 96% of the total mammalian weight of the planet.

This kind of erosion of diversity and its consequence on the biosphere are likely irreversible. Nearly 3 billion of the world’s population, in the next five decades, will be forced to live in climate conditions that are well outside what has served human existence over the past six millenia, fear scientists. Against such a backdrop, most nations’ calibration of action seems sloth-like; for perspective, the present dispensation in Australia seems to be wary of committing to fast action on moving away from coal, a major resource for the country.