El Niño events have been occurring for thousands of years.
By Rakesh Agrawal
Not just in India, but in six countries on South Asia, millions of commoners eagerly await in the early June every year for the rains as their very lives depend on the nectar falling from the sky. So are the scientists, weathermen and policymakers and all eyes are on the weathermen for its ‘correct’ forecast.
This year too, when the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the official weather forecasting agency, predicted a normal to normal plus monsoon this year, confirming the forecast of Skymet, a private agency that predicted that India’s monsoon rainfall is expected to be ‘above average,’ all took a sign of relief.
But, the monsoon got delayed by almost ten days and it hit the Kerala coast on June 8 and question being asked in the scientific circle that could it be the impact of El Nino that is pushing our planet towards a climate change as pointed out by Maddie Stone; see: El Niño Has Pushed Our Planet Past a Major Climate Milestone.
El Niño, a Spanish word, meaning little child, is the warm ocean water that originates in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific region, near the Pacific coast of South America. El Niño is accompanied by high air pressure in the western Pacific and low air pressure in the eastern Pacific.
El Niño events are not new and have been occurring for thousands of years, but as its record of a comparative recent origin, 30 El Niño events since 1900 and more significant El Niño events have been observed in 2002–03, 2004–05, 2006–07, 2009–10 and in last year.
Now, the question is this that: could the delay in the onset of the monsoon be also because of this phenomenon?
In 2015-2016, it was so severe that was termed as the monster that is finally gone, but Stone says that scientists are still understanding its impacts on the planet; some of them could be the charging up the global carbon cycle and pushing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels above 400 parts per million (ppm) for an entire year, something that is unparallel in human history.
Ever since humans put their feet on the planet earth, they are constantly adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which got accentuated to the unprecedented height since the onset of industrial revolution, based on the burning of fossil fuels.
This increase in the carbon dioxide level has been carefully chronicled at the Mauna Loa Climate Observatory since 1958 and during these years, the carbon dioxide concentration in the Observatory was monitored and was found that the carbon levels climb by approximately 2.1 ppm annually, because of the 10 billion-odd tons of fossil carbon our cars and factories spew skyward each year.
High carbon dioxide level means more carbon concentrations in the atmosphere and it was notices in the Observatory that it raised by 3.76 ppm between February 2015 and February 2016; making it the single largest jump in the recorded history. The scientists believe that this increase is the result of a combination of warm and dry tropics, accelerating soil carbon decomposition, and, causing large, drought-fueled fires in its forests and fields.
As a result, the atmospheric carbon dioxide level that has crossed the 400 ppm mark as a study in Nature Climate Change finds that 2016 is now on track for an atmospheric average of 404.45 plus or minus 0.53 ppm. (See: Freedman, Andrew, ‘Carbon Dioxide Passes 400 PPM Milestone,’ http://www.climatecentral.org/news/carbon-dioxide-passes-400ppm-milestone-for-first-time-in-modern-human-histo
That could be the bad news for the Indian farmers as El Niño events have adversely affected the monsoon previously.