During the past weekend, USA and China as world’s largest polluters ratified the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. They were resisting this move for a long time, but the survival of the planet Earth and the human kind came into question. Majority of experts welcomed this historical event, but they expressed fear that it came a little bit too late.
Temperature on the planet Earth increases year after year. This is best evidenced by the changes in the warmth of the seas, change of climate, extreme weather conditions and unusual weather occurrences.
According to Milica Đorđević from the Hydrometeorological Institute of RS, different attitudes about the growth of temperature appear because different periods are addressed. The period from 1961 until 1990 is usually taken as the comparison period, but if even farther past is taken into consideration, the situation with temperature is even less favorable.
“The temperature certainly grows and the idea is to stop the growth at two degrees in relation to the industrial age. Globally, the temperature increased by one degree. In the period from 1961 until 1990 and from 1981 until 2010, the growth of temperature by 0.4 to one degree was recorded in BiH. However, if we look at the past 15 years, especially Banja Luka, Sarajevo and parts of Herzegovina, the temperature increased by over two degrees,” Đorđević warned.
People also noticed that seasons are not as they used to be. Simultaneously with the growth of temperature, there is increasingly often occurrence of extremes, causing the change in standard climate regime. Winters are milder, and then an extreme situation happens, like the one in 2012 when the snow cover in BiH was over three meters high at places. Minimum, average and maximum temperature have increased alike.
“We also have extremes in the summer. It was not usual here to have the temperature higher than 40 degrees and now that is normal, so we have 43 degrees in Bijeljina. The number of cold days decreases, and then frost comes and disrupts everything. This affects agriculture the most. Mediterranean climate increasingly prevails and it is colder as you go towards the north, but there are still remains of the continental climate, and that makes it very difficult for agriculture to adjust,” Đorđević said.
Over the past 15 years, BiH experienced the biggest floods and the biggest droughts. Đorđević reminded that amount of precipitation in 2010 broke all records and that this is a very rare occurrence. However, the year 2014 came and the situation was even worse. Droughts occurred in 2007, 2012 and 2015.
BiH signed the Parisian Agreement in April this year, but it is still to be seen what are its obligations and whether BiH is up to the task.
(Source: klix.ba)
