Climate Change Impacts Inventory

In an ominous sign of climate change hitting home, India has seen accelerated warming in the past few decades and the temperature-rise pattern is now increasingly in line with global warming trends. The most up-to-date study of temperatures in India, from 1901 to 2007, has found that while it’s getting warmer across regions and seasons, night temperatures have been rising significantly in almost all parts of the country. The rise in night temperatures — 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade since 1970, according to the study — could have potentially adverse impact on yields of cereal crops like rice. The paper also finds that warming has been highest in post-monsoon and winter months (October to February).

‘‘Until the late 1980s, minimum (or night) temperatures were trendless in India. India was an odd dot in the global map as most regions worldwide were seeing a rise in night temperatures in sync with growing levels of greenhouse gases. Our analysis shows the global trend has caught up with India,’’ said K Krishna Kumar, senior scientist and programme manager at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, and one of the authors.

The rising night temperatures are a major cause of worry. Said Jagdish K Ladha, principal scientist in the India chapter of International Rice Research Institute, ‘‘Minimum temperatures have a link with rice fertility. At higher than normal night temperatures, rice grains aren’t properly filled up, leading to a drop in yield.’’

undra fire burned 1,000 square miles of an area near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, three years ago that showed no prior evidence of burning going back thousands of years. Inuits, indigenous people of the Arctic, "never had a word in their language for thunderstorms," said Bob Corell, of the Arlington, Va.-based Global Environment & Technology Foundation. "And a thunderstorm was most likely to blame for that fire."

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States

"Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States," says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting."

If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even. Instead, for the period from January 1, 2000, to September 30, 2009, the continental United States set 291,237 record highs and 142,420 record lows, as the country experienced unusually mild winter weather and intense summer heat waves. A record daily high means that temperatures were warmer on a given day than on that same date throughout a weather station's history.

This study evaluated the association between temperature variation and emergency admissions for stroke in Brisbane, Australia, over a 10-year period. For people under age 65, the risk of primary intracerebral hemorrhage in summer rose significantly-15% and 12%, respectively-for 1°C (1.8°F) increases in daily high and low temperature, after controlling for potential confounding effects of humidity and air pollutants.