Latest news with #Cels
Hindustan Times
6 days ago
- Climate
- Hindustan Times
Iraq announces nationwide power outage as heatwave sends temperature soaring to 50°C
Power was out across Iraq on Monday as scorching summer temperatures pushed electricity grid demand to unprecedented levels, authorities said. An Iraqi man fans his son at his home south of Hilla city amidst rising temperatures, chronic water shortages and power cuts.(AFP) The outage came amid a heatwave that Iraqi meteorological services expect to last more than a week, with temperatures climbing as high as 50C in parts of the country. Mitigating the grid interruption was the fact that most households rely on private generators, acquired to compensate for daily power cuts to public electricity. The electricity ministry said the grid suffered a "total outage" after two transmission lines were shut down "due to a record rise in temperatures, increased consumer demand, and increased electrical load in the provinces of Babylon and Karbala, which are experiencing an influx of millions of pilgrims" for a major Shiite Muslim religious commemoration. The shutdown caused "a sudden and accidental loss of more than 6,000 megawatts on the grid", the ministry added, with power plants also halting operations. "Our teams are currently mobilised on the ground to gradually restore the grid over the next few hours," the ministry said. The northern Kurdistan region was spared. The autonomous territory has worked to modernise its power sector and was able to provide round-the-clock state electricity to a third of its population. Authorities later announced that power was being restored in stages in the southern provinces of Dhi Qar and Maysan, with the strategic port city of Basra expected to have electricity back by dawn on Tuesday. Electricity shortages are a frequent complaint in Iraq, which is sometimes rocked by protests when outages worsen in the hot summer months. - 'More intense' - Heatwaves in Iraq are "more intense and more frequent" than they were in the 20th century, meteorological service spokesman Amer al-Jaberi told AFP, blaming climate change and human factors. He said gas emissions and fumes from private generators "contribute to the rise in temperatures", and called for the creation of a "green belt" around Baghdad "so the city can breathe a little". In July 2023, a fire at a transmission station in the south caused a widespread power outage. While the vast majority of Iraqis rely on private generators, they often cannot power all household appliances, especially air conditioners. Even without a nationwide blackout, Iraq's poorest endure the intense heat daily. "It's hot, we don't have electricity, it comes on for two hours and then we can sleep a little and rest," said Haider Abbas, a 44-year-old day labourer, in his concrete-walled home on Sunday. Originally from the town of Al-Qassim in Babylon province, central Iraq, the father of five cannot afford an air conditioner and relies instead on an air cooler that he constantly refills with water bottles. "When I was little, we didn't have these (high) temperatures," he recalled. "At 52 degrees Celsius, I can't work." To avoid outages during peak demand, Iraq would need to produce around 55,000 megawatts of electricity. This month, for the first time, the country's power plants reached the 28,000-megawatt threshold.
Hindustan Times
26-04-2025
- Climate
- Hindustan Times
Capital logs 42.1°C, heatwave alerts for many parts of India
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Saturday issued orange and yellow alerts as a heatwave swept across vast swathes of the country, with temperatures soaring up to 44°C in several regions. Maximum temperatures are ranging between 42-45°C across multiple states including Maharashtra's Vidarbha region, northwest Telangana, north Chhattisgarh, north interior Odisha, northwest and southeast Jharkhand, west Gangetic West Bengal, southwest Bihar, north Madhya Pradesh, east Uttar Pradesh, south Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan, and south Punjab, the IMD said. On Saturday, Kanpur recorded a maximum temperature 44.4°C; Prayagraj 44.8°C; Sultanpur 44.8°C; Varanasi 44.2°C; Gaya 44.6°C; Jharsuguda 44.7°C; and Delhi Ridge 43.3°C among others. Also Read | IMD warns of high maximum temperatures, heatwaves over northwest, central India 'Maximum temperatures are above normal by 3-5 degrees C at many places over Jammu, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Northeast and west Rajasthan, North Madhya Pradesh, Vidarbha, adjoining Marathwada, northeast Jharkhand, west Gangetic West Bengal, Sub-Himalayan West Bengal & Sikkim,' the weather agency stated in its release. Delhi on Saturday recorded its highest maximum temperature for the month of April in the last three years, with the mercury touching 42.1 degrees Celsius. According to the IMD, the last time a higher temperature was recorded in the capital in April was in 2022, when the maximum had reached 43.5 degrees Celsius. Normally there are four to seven heat wave days between April and June but this time there could be between six and 10, IMD had forecast on April 1. Since early April, several stations across India have been recording heat waves. Also Read | From green roofs to cooling centres: Delhi govt's heatwave battle plan for 2025 IMD has predicted heatwave conditions over plains of the northwest and adjoining central India till April 30, with an orange alert for excess heat issued for Rajasthan and a yellow alert for the rest of northwest India over the next two days. These alerts imply that local agencies should be prepared to take action to prevent heat-related disasters. Mahesh Palawat, vice-president of climate and meteorology at Skymet Weather, said, 'Excess heat is likely to continue for a few more days and then minor relief is expected. Due to a cyclonic circulation over NW Rajasthan, there may be dust storms and strong winds in some areas.' According to the IMD forecast, heatwave conditions are 'very likely' in isolated pockets over Rajasthan and west Madhya Pradesh till May 2, over Punjab till May 1, and over Haryana till April 30. Jammu division is also expected to face heatwave conditions over the next two days. The weather department defines a heatwave when the maximum temperature reaches 45 degrees Celsius in plains or when the daytime temperature exceeds the normal by 4.5 degrees. In the northern region, Bathinda in Punjab recorded the highest maximum temperature at 43.9 degrees Celsius on Saturday, while Rohtak was the hottest place in Haryana at 43.6 degrees Celsius. Other cities in Punjab registered high temperatures including Patiala (42.8°C), Ludhiana (41.3°C), Pathankot (40.5°C), and Amritsar (40.2°C). In contrast to the scorching conditions across most of the country, the Northeast is expected to receive some relief. The IMD has forecast widespread light to moderate rainfall accompanied by thunderstorms, lightning, and gusty winds across northeast India during the next seven days. 'Under the influence of multiple weather systems, including upper air cyclonic circulations over central Assam and east Bihar, widespread rainfall with thunderstorm, lightning, and gusty winds reaching 40-50 kmph gusting to 60 kmph is likely over Northeast India during the next 7 days,' the weather agency said. Thundersqualls with wind speeds reaching 50-60 kmph are likely over Assam and Meghalaya on April 27. The weather department has forecast a partly cloudy sky for Delhi on Sunday, with the maximum and minimum temperatures likely to hover around 41 degrees Celsius and 24 degrees Celsius, respectively. On Saturday evening several parts of central, south and east India showed several lightning incidents and thunderstorm warnings. IMD director general M Mohapatra said that there is active thunderstorm activity over east and northeast India and a part of south peninsula. 'It is in association with many favourable factors like lower level cyclonic circulation, intense heating, moisture supply and upper level jet stream. This favourable conditions will continue over east and northeast India for next three days,' he said.
Yahoo
09-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Oops, Scientists May Have Miscalculated Our Global Warming Timeline
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." The Paris Climate Accords in 2015 set an ambitious (and necessary) goal of keeping global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temps. But a study says we might've blown past that threshold several years ago. Scientists at the University Western Australia Oceans Institute studied long-lived Caribbean sclerosponges and created an ocean temperature timeline dating back to the 1700s. While the study claims that we surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius in 2020, other scientists question if data from just one part of the world is enough to capture the immense thermal complexity of our oceans. Whatever your stance is on climate change (it's real, let's move on), it's impossible to have missed the near-ubiquitous call to action to 'keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.' Over the past few years, the somewhat bureaucratic phrase has become a rallying cry for the climate conscious. This ambitious target first surfaced following the Paris Climate Agreement, and describes a sort of climate threshold—if we pass a long-term average increase in temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and hold at those levels for several years, we're going to do some serious damage to ourselves and our environment. Well, a paper from the University Western Australia Oceans Institute has some bad news: the world might've blown past that threshold four years ago. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the paper reaches this conclusion via an unlikely route—analyzing six sclerosponges, a kind of sea sponge that clings to underwater caves in the ocean. These sponges are commonly studied by climate scientists and are referred to as 'natural archives' because they grow so slowly. Like, a-fraction-of-a-millimeter-a-year slow. This essentially allows them to lock away climate data in their limestone skeletons, not entirely unlike tree rings or ice cores. By analyzing strontium to calcium ratios in these sponges, the team could effectively calculate water temperatures dating back to 1700. The sponges watery home in the Caribbean is also a plus, as major ocean currents don't muck up or distort temperature readings. This data could be particularly useful,as direct human measurement of sea temperature only dates back to roughly 1850, when sailors dipped buckets into the ocean. That's why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses 1850 and 1900 as its preindustrial baseline, according to the website Grist. 'The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate change has been brought forward by at least a decade,' Malcolm McCulloch, lead author of the study, told the Associated Press. 'Basically, time's running out.' The study concludes that the world started warming roughly 80 years before the IPCC's estimates, and that we already surpassed 1.7 degrees Celsius in 2020. That's a big 'woah, if true' moment, but some scientists are skeptical. One such scientist, speaking with LiveScience, said that ' it begs credulity to claim that the instrumental record is wrong based on paleosponges from one region of the world … It honestly doesn't make any sense to me.' Other experts expressed wanting to see more data before completely upending the IPCC's climate goalposts, which say the Earth is currently hovering at a long-term temperature change of around 1.2 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately, even if the sponges are wrong, there's mounting evidence that we are in the process of crossing that 1.5 degree threshold as we speak. This January was the hottest on record, clocking in at 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. According to New Scientist, that means we've been above 1.5 degrees of change for at least a year. That doesn't jump the long-term average over the 1.5-line, but it's certainly a sign we're getting close fast. Regardless of the percentage, one thing is certain—climate change is an all-hands-on-deck crisis. In order to save the planet for future habitability, humans need to curtail emissions immediately—after all, the sea sponges are telling us so. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
