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In the past four weeks in Germany, in the quiet town of Schuld, floods inundated the streets and demolished houses built more than a hundred years ago. The Canadian city of just 250 people, famous for its fresh mountain air, was burned to the ground when huge fires broke out after unprecedented heat.
And in the western United States (USA), a few weeks after the historic heat wave, about 20,000. Firefighters and helpers are fighting 80 major fires that have burned more than 4,047 square kilometers.
Climatologists have threatened for decades that the climate crisis will lead to more extreme weather. According to them, that climate will become more frequent and deadly. Still, several climate experts are surprised that heat and precipitation records are being broken so sharply.
20th century. Scientists in the 1970s predict quite accurately how much global temperatures will rise. It is true that even with computers constantly improving, it is difficult to predict the extent of the effects of warming.
Michael E. Mann, director of the Center for Earth Systems Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN that recent weeks have shown the limitations of climate change models.
“As for many of these events, including the recent ‘heat dome’ in the west of the country, it is necessary to mention a factor that is not shown in the climate models,” he said. “The models underestimate the impact of climate change on extreme weather events.”
As ME Mann explained, in climate models, everyday weather is just noise. These figures are reminiscent of chaos. Only the most extreme weather events stand out as a clear sign.
“The signal came much faster than the models predicted,” he added. “In the real world, the signal is already strong enough that we can ‘see’ in daily weather forecasts, even if the models haven’t shown it before.”
This means that no historical events such as floods in Germany or fires in Canada were predicted. According to scientists, even more comprehensive climate models are needed to predict such phenomena.
Tim Palmer, a researcher at the University of Oxford who is interested in climate physics, is one of several scientists calling for a global climate modeling center with an “ex-computer”, a supercomputer capable of processing hard-to-understand amounts of data.
XX a. In the 1960s, scientists and governments established the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), when it became clear that progress in particle physics required a machine so expensive that it was unlikely that any state would build it themselves. alone.
“CERN is a great success as an international organization,” Palmer told CNN. “We need something similar to predict climate change.”
Scientists are using computers to model the weather and make predictions about how weather conditions will change in a few decades. However, they cannot predict the most extreme events even at the city level. Despite technological advances, computers are still not powerful enough to perform such actions.
According to Palmer, it is necessary to improve climate models.
“If trillions of dollars are spent around the world trying to adapt to climate change, we need to know exactly what kind of climate we are trying to adapt to,” he reasoned. – In the event of floods, droughts, storms or rising sea levels “.
Inevitable evil
While the extreme weather in the northern hemisphere recently surprised many, it was not “completely unexpected,” said Richard Allan, professor of climate science at the University of Reading. “Science has always hinted at such phenomena,” he said.
However, Allan agrees that better computers would be helpful in making more detailed and accurate forecasts.
“It is also not easy to say how the climate will change in the future. For example, it is not clear whether the westerly winds blowing in Europe will be blocked. In this case, there will be more storms in one place, as happened in Europe in 2021. in July. Or maybe they will blow more and bring heat waves, like in North America ”, said the professor in several versions.
Even without comprehensive models, climate activists and more and more communities affected by extreme weather have been calling for more serious action. Last weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “We have to hurry, we must step up the fight against climate change.”
Several developed countries, including the United States, have significantly increased their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions this year. Last week, the European Union (EU) unveiled an ambitious plan to make climate a key part of virtually every available development and economic initiative.
However, many activists complain that the new commitments still do not conform to the steps necessary to prevent the global temperature from rising more than 1.5 ° C. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, maintaining this temperature limit would avoid effects most catastrophic events of climate change. Activists also criticize governments that make ambitious promises but continue to approve new fossil fuel projects, including the operation of coal mines and oil and gas wells.
Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, hopes that these extreme weather events in developed countries will spur action. She herself began to question her beliefs about the front lines of climate change and vulnerable countries.
“Perhaps this is an unavoidable evil,” he said. “We have taken the island states as the front line, as they will be the first to feel the effects of rising sea or Arctic levels.”
“We know that cognitive dissonance occurs when climate change affects people who live so far away from us. Usually we don’t turn our heads too much, because watching the verse spree on television is one thing and experiencing it on our own fur is quite another. But now the majority of the planet’s population, or at least their loved ones or acquaintances, are facing the effects of climate change. The circle becomes narrower ”, added the director.
The Šuldas people would definitely support him. “Given Canada, where the weather was warming to 50 degrees, and other extreme weather events around the world, it’s clear they were caused by climate change,” Nick Pieters told CNN on Monday, helping his parents to clean the rubble of a dilapidated house. “I don’t want to get used to things like that.”
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