Why climate talk should be a daily thing

There was a time when northern China was largely associated with cold weather — winters were long and dreaded, and summers were brief and bearable.

Heat and humidity were issues that residents of the country’s southern and coastal areas had to deal with, not people living in Beijing, for instance.

But every passing summer in the capital has felt warmer than the previous in recent years.

Until last week’s rain in Beijing and a sudden temperature drop in Heilongjiang province, this summer has been hot in the north.

Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei province and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region witnessed daytime temperatures of higher than 35 C in May. The provinces of Jilin and Liaoning in the north- east experienced similar days that month. In the northwest, the city of Turpan, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, recorded consistently hot weather in June.

Heat waves swept other parts of China last month as well.

Shanghai issued an orange alert as temperatures rose to 40 C. Photos in the papers of July 18 showed an employee at a Chongqing zoo placing large ice cubes beside a giant panda to cool the place. A friend who recently visited the Chengdu sanctuary in Sichuan province said some of the pandas there were being kept in air-conditioned enclosures.

In 2013, the Chinese summer was symbolized by the image of a boy trying to “cook” an egg and some shrimp in a pan over a manhole cover in Jinan, Shandong province. That year media reported many heatrelated deaths in China.

As the Earth’s temperature rises on land and water, people will need to pay more attention in their daily lives to climate change, or global warming as it is commonly called. It affects the overall balance of energy in nature by altering surface and sea temperatures, precipitation, and atmospheric and oceanic circulations on massive time scales.

Both man-made and natural reasons are behind climate change. Our role has been significant since the Industrial Revolution. Greenhouse gases — emitted from cars and household appliances (not just factories) — slow the process by which the planet can reflect a part of the sun’s absorbed heat back to space.

To write a ground report on the fallout from climate change, I undertook a trek to the Mingyong glacier in June. Perched at more than 3,000 meters above sea level in Southwest China’s Yunnan province, it is considered to be the lowest-lying of the country’s more than 48,000 glaciers.

An expert from Yunnan University said the glacier had receded by some 300 meters and similarly thinned between 1975 and 2009.

Other scientists in Beijing told me many glaciers in China and “high-mountain Asia” are melting, and the situation could lead to a shortage of water for irrigation and drinking later.

Are these glaciers sensitive to climate change? Yes, they said, like glaciers elsewhere.

Globally, climate change could make countries like the Maldives sink.

The average annual global temperature had risen by 0.99 C by last year.

Sixteen of the 17 warmest years in a 136-year record have occurred since 2001, according to the NASA website.

Whether human-induced or through natural causes, climate change is real and here. Adding carbon footprints is not the way forward.