Asian Continent hit hardest by Global climate change and faces extreme weather: UN weather agency..

Asian Continent remained the world’s most Climate-affected region in 2023 due to weather, climate change and water-related disasters, as storms and floods hit the continent, the hardest around the Globe. According to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an Agency under United Nations Charter. Following close on the heels of the study of climate change in Europe, published by WMO on Monday, the State of the Climate in Asia 2023 report highlighted the accelerating rate of Global Warming changes across several indicators such as surface temperature, glacier retreat, sea level rise and more. “The report’s conclusions are surprising. Many countries in the Asian Region are experienced worst year on record in 2023, along with a barrage of extreme climate conditions, from droughts and heatwaves to floods and storms,” Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the U.N., said in a statement on Tuesday. He Further said Climate change has exacerbated the frequency and severity of such events that profoundly impact nations, economies, and, most importantly, human lives, she underscored. With the warming trend almost doubling since the period from 1960–1990, Asia is heating up faster than the other continents, with increasing casualties and Socio-Economic losses from floods, storms, and more severe heatwaves. In 2023, sea-surface level temperatures in the northwest Asian Pacific Ocean were the highest as per record. on the other hand, the Arctic Ocean suffered an oceanic heatwave. In many areas of the region, including the Arabian Sea, the southern Kara Sea, and the southeastern Laptev Sea, the oceanic surface is warming more than 75% faster than globally. The Barents Sea was identified by the report as a “Weather changing hotspot”. Accelerated by thermal expansion and the melting glaciers, ice mountain caps and ice sheets, sea level continued to rising globally. However, in Asian Continent, rates were higher than the global mean over 1993–2023, during last thirty years. Last year, the continent (just to vary the language) saw 79 water hazard-related disasters, with over 80 per cent linked to floods and storms, resulting in over 2,000 fatalities and affecting nine million people directly, according to the Emergency Events Database. Pakistan and many other parts of the Asian Region experienced Extreme Heat in 2023. Asia’s annual mean near Sea surface temperature ranked as the second highest on record with 0.91 °C above the 1991–2020 average. Particularly high temperatures were observed from western Siberia to central Asian Region, and from Eastern China to Japan. and Kazakhstan experienced a record warm year. Despite overall lower precipitation, several extreme events occurred, such as heavy rainfall in Myanmar in May; floods and storms across India, Pakistan, and Nepal in June and July, and record hourly rainfall in Hong Kong in September, to name a few. Home to the largest volume of ice outside of the polar Plates, the High-Mountain Ing Asia region with the Tibetan Plateau at its center, has approximately 100,000 square kilometers of Glaciers. Over the last several decades, most of those have been melted, and at an accelerating rate. Twenty out of 22 observed glaciers continued losing its mass, yielding to record-breaking high temperatures and dry conditions.