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The effects of climate change have been having its strangest effect on Bangladesh this winter, usually if we go back a decade, the weather pattern was at the end of October slight chills would be felt in the breeze. In late November the chilly winds would get stronger by the second week of December you would need to wear sweaters or winter clothing, which meant full fledged winter. In recent years this pattern has taken a turn for warming, for the past five years or so we have been getting just a week or two of proper winter. But this year was completely different, the temperature was so high through December most households were turning on their ceiling fans, suddenly at the start of the new year a cold wave has been sweeping through the country that is going on for an entire month. The sudden cold has been a reason for many raspatory illnesses all over the country, and the deteriorating air quality has not been helping. 

The most concerning among the weather patterns in the past few years has been the El Niño and La Niña - These are natural climate phenomena that alter global weather patterns by changing the surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño events tend to increase global temperatures and cause wetter weather in some regions and drier weather in others. La Niña events have the opposite effects. Both phenomena also influence the frequency and intensity of tropical storms in different ocean basins. The extreme weather events worsened by El Niño and La Niña affect food, infrastructure and energy systems around the globe. El Niño events reduce fish stocks, cause droughts and floods, and increase CO2 emissions from wildfires and reduced plant growth. El Niño and La Niña episodes usually happen every two to seven years, and vary in strength and duration. Scientists are not sure how climate change will affect these events in the future. 

The Amazon rain forest has been facing record levels of droughts in recent years as a part of the El Nino weather pattern. A World Weather Attribution group study found that climate change made the extreme drought 30 times more likely than in a world without human-induced warming. The study used computer simulations paired with weather data to compare two scenarios: one with and one without climate change. If deforestation and carbon emissions continue at the current pace, the rainforest could soon reach a point of no return, where it would rapidly and irreversibly die back and become a source of carbon dioxide emissions. Though there are reasons for hope, such as the reduction of deforestation in 2023 and the pledge by the Brazilian president to halt it by 2030. 

There is a certain ominous feeling that creeps up whenever we think of the climate crisis and the responses of the world leaders though various conferences and summits. Mukhtar Babayev, a former oil executive and current environment minister of Azerbaijan, has been selected as the president-designate of the COP29 summit in Baku next year. "There's a sense of déjà vu setting in - we now have a former oil executive from an authoritarian petrostate in charge of the world's response to the crisis that fossil fuel firms created," said Alice Harrison from Global Witness. Before Babayev Sultan al-Jaber of the UAE was also an oil executive who stayed on-board as head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company whilst chairing COP28. The suspicion of not having a fair game in terms of transitioning from fossil fuels could be seen in a skeptical manner given the circumstances. 

The latest climate stripes imageshows the change in average annual global temperatures since 1850, needs a new color to illustrate the record-breaking heat of 2023.Prof Ed Hawkins, the creator of the climate stripes image, says that 2023 was so hot that the current scale of red and blue colors will not tell the full story. He says the need for a new color was inevitable, but the margin by which the record broke in 2023 was unexpected.Climate stripes spark conversations and actions the climate stripes have been used to raise awareness and inspire action on climate change. Prof Hawkins says that the climate stripes are a means of communication to increase awareness and conversation, but it is now time to take action for these issues. "We already have many of the solutions we need. We now need bold, transformative change across all parts of society to make our planet’s climate safer for current and future generations" he said.

Kazi Rhid is the Content Strategy Coordinator at CGS