Worst wildfires in U.S. history, historic historic lows in the Atlantic Ocean, Arctic ocean ice with simultaneous hurricanes and the hottest summer record in the Northern Hemisphere since the record began: Scientists say their fears of natural disasters this year Has exceeded. .
“We predicted something would happen years ago, and I don’t think any of us expected to see this unfold in our lifetime,” said Chris Replay, a 73-year-old climate professor. Science at University College London. “It has become a real problem today, rather than a problem of predicting tomorrow.”
Natural disasters have brought home the great economic and social costs of a warmer planet, heating up about 1C in the last century.
U.S. Wildfires along the west coast have burned more than 5 million acres, emitting around 110 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the same atmosphere as the annual emissions of the entire UK power sector.
According to satellite data from the European Union’s Copernicus atmospheric monitoring service, the smoke from Blaze has traveled high in northern Europe.
“The scale and magnitude of this fire is much higher than at any level in the 18 years that covered our monitoring data,” said Mark Perrington, a wildfire scientist at Copernicus.
U.S. In, the smoke has reached New York City and Washington DC, where the sky is painted with visible fog.
While US President Donald Trump has sought to blame the fire primarily on forest management, meteorologists disagree.
Philip Duffy, head of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts, said all of these factors that predict climate change are predicting the consequences of climate change. “People are asking if this new is normal, and I would say, as long as we add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere it will only get worse.”
Frederick Otto, head of the Institute for Environmental Change at Oxford University, said record temperatures meant “fire weather” – the arid conditions in which woodfires are cultivated – had become more frequent and more intense.
“Where we really see the clearest and biggest sign of climate change is in extreme temperatures,” he said.
New highs have been recorded around the world this year, ranging from California’s Death Valley to 54.4C, in the far east of Russia, where 38C was recorded within the Arctic Circle. In Brazil, the world’s largest wetlands, the Pentanal, have been burning since mid-July in the wake of a drought.
UCL In, Mr. Replay compared California to the Sahara Desert – which underwent major climate shifts and deserts nearly 1,000,000 years ago – and said that such a change would work. “California’s wildfires have come very quickly and are more devastating than we expected.”
Other researchers said that the impact of global warming was similar to that of the scientific community, but that human and social costs were much higher than expected.
Our Prof. of Oxford University. “Our societies are really adapting to a small range of potential weather,” Otto said. “What 2020 shows is that 1C is warming, exactly what we expected. . . Our societies are already bringing us to the brink of what we can face. “
According to Tom King Ringham, an economist at the Scripps Institute near San Diego, this year the U.S. The cost of fighting the blaze has so far been 2 2bn, while the direct cost of fire damage could be as high as bn 50bn.
“The scale is fantastic,” Mr. Coringham said. “This is not a momentary shock to the economy, this is a permanent decline in growth associated with climate change.”
As if emphasizing a new pattern of extreme, weather-related events, when California’s forests burned, scientists identified five consecutive hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic for the second time on record. Hurricane Sally, which made landfall in Alabama and Florida on Wednesday, brought winds of more than 100 miles per hour. U.S. Predicting an “extremely active” hurricane season.
However, Tim Lent, a professor of climate change at the University of Exeter, said it was not in the US but in the polar regions that the signs of irreversible climate change were most relevant.
The ice-covered area in the Arctic Ocean is trekking to a historic low this year, and the Greenland ice sheet has also lost mass.
“Not only is this year’s evidence, but a decade’s worth of evidence that leads me to the view that we’ve already passed one or two tipping points in the weather system,” said Professor Lenton.
The reduction of Arctic sea ice creates a vicious cycle of warming. With less white ice on the surface of the ocean to reflect the sun’s heat, the water temperature rises, causing the ice to reflect even lower temperatures – the main reason the Arctic warms more than three times faster than the rest of the planet Earth.
“We know in the long run that if we continue to warm the planet, not only in the Arctic you risk losing summer sea ice, but eventually you can lose it year-round,” said Pro. Lenton said.
