(Tiper Stock Exchange) – Unfortunately, the impact of climate change on the health of the world’s glaciers has become increasingly evident in recent years that melted in 2022 at a dramatic speed and their preservation is in fact a lost cause: the alarm is sounded by the UN, while several indicators of climate change have reached record levels.
“The game is already lost for the glaciers because the CO2 concentration is already too high”said Petteri Taalas, head of the World Meteorological Organization which released the annual state of the climate report. According to the WMO, “Antarctic sea ice has reached its lowest level on record and the melting of some European glaciers has literally broken records”.
The global mean temperature in 2022 was 1.15 degrees above the 1850-1900 average, and the years 2015 to 2022 were the eight warmest years since the instrumental record began in 1850. In addition, according to the latest WMO’s annual report coming on the eve of Earth Day 2023, melting glaciers and sea level rise – which hit record highs again in 2022 – will continue for thousands of years.
Recently, alarming data has also come from a study conducted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, led by climatologist Dennis Höning, which predicted that the release of 1,000 giga-tons of CO2 into the atmosphere would have a devastating impact on the ice sheet of Greenland. The results are alarming: as mentioned, the release of 1,000 giga-tons of carbon would completely melt the southern region of the ice cap Greenland. If polluting emissions were to increase by giga-tons, the entire ice sheet would disappear permanently.
(Photo: Edward Weston CC BY-SA 3.0)