World to see more extreme weather
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E-mail Xinhua, August 14, 2013
Extreme heat does not necessarily come with extreme coldness, Sass said when asked if there is any likelihood of a extreme cold winter this year. In contrary, we may see more and more warm winters.
He said,"While looking at the warm-cold situation, it is to look and see how many records are broken each year. If the climate is normal, the numbers of cold weather records that are broken and the number of warm weather records that are broken should be about the same."
"So far, the number of warm records that have been broken has began to increase and the number of cold weather records that are broken began to decrease. Last year, the number of warm records broken was about 95 percent of the total. We have seen less and less cold weather and we will continue to see less and less cold weather," he added.
To tackle extreme weather, Sass said, the ultimate solution is to reduce green house gas emission by lessening our dependence on fossil-based energy and developing green energy like solar and wind power.
"The best we can do is to mitigate. And the best mitigation we can do is probably, slowly but continuously, changing our energy shift from fossil fuels to alternative resources which don't generate carbon-dioxide," he said.
Sass didn't believe the U.S. government's efforts in reducing carbon emissions were adequate.
"Northern Europe has done probably the best job than anybody in the world in lowering carbon-dioxide output. But the United States, as far as I can see, hasn't done the really necessary things to decrease the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere," he said.
The Obama administration has pledged that the United States would cut emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from the 2005 levels, and according to data released by the country's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in April, emissions fell 6.9 percent from 2005 to 2011.
But for most countries, the year of 1990, rather than 2005, is the base year. Compared with that of 1990, U.S. emissions were up about 8 percent, the data showed.
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