Extreme heat and devastating fires, NASA: “Clear signal of human emissions”
Infernal temperatures and devastating fires are linked to CO2 and other greenhouse gases emitted by human activities. The NASA accusation.
Different countries in Europa, Asia, and Africa have been hit for weeks by an extreme heat wave, which has already resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people. The Carlos III Institute reports 510 in Spain between 10 July and 16 July, while in Portugal between 11 and 17 July there were 659 deaths. infernal temperatures they are also favoring catastrophic fires with tens of thousands of hectares devoured by flames – just think of what is happening on the Karst – and a huge number of animals killed by smoke and fire.
Behind these dramas in many cases are new local records of maximum temperatures, with some simply shocking peaks. The most striking is undoubtedly the one reached in the small village of Conings in the county of Lincolnshire, in England, where the mercury column touched 40.3 ° C. Never before 19 July 2022 – the day of the record – had the psychological threshold of 40 ° C been exceeded in the United Kingdom.
At night in some cases, lows higher than the average highs of the period were reached. To realize the gravity of the situation in the UK, the Met Office – the national body that deals with meteorology – has even advised to rationing water in the South, a paradox in a notoriously rainy country, trains were also blocked or slowed down for fear that the tracks could be deformed by the extreme heat.
It doesn’t get better in France with approx one hundred new records of maximum temperatures shattered in a single day. On 18 July in Beaulieu-sur-Layon, a commune in the Loire with 1,500 inhabitants, for example, the 42,7° Cwhile in Cazaux, Occitania, the temperature reached i 42,4° C.
Two meteorological stations in Nimes instead measured 40 ° C. In the Gironda at least 16,000 people were evacuated, due to devastating fires that devoured over 13,000 hectares of vegetation. In Ireland, in Dublin, the mercury column reached 33 ° C, the highest temperature since the 1887 record (33.3 ° C). In Leiria, in Portugal on 13 July the 45° C and 3 thousand hectares of forest went up in smoke due to a great fire, fueled by extreme drought and suffocating heat.
On the same day in Tunis, Tunisia’s maxim has come to 48° C beating a record that lasted for 40 years. The extreme heat wave triggered fires that seriously damaged the wheat crops of the country, a huge problem considering the cereal block from Ukraine due to the war with Russia. At the end of June in Iran 52 °, C was touched, while in China the Xujiahui Observatory in Shanghai recorded the highest temperature ever, equal to 40.9 ° C, also on 13 July, where the combination of very high humidity and infernal temperatures even night created “potentially deadly conditions,” scientists from NASA’s Earth Observatory explain in a press release.
Credit: NASA
The maximum temperatures recorded in Europe and North Africa are daughters of the torrid African anticyclone, which has ousted the mild Azores anticyclone from our summers. The reasons are both of origin natural that anthropicwith an evident contribution from carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) and others greenhouse gases related to our activities.
Not the whole planet is currently hit by the heat hood unbearable, as the image shared by scientists from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) also shows, but where it exists, for extension e intensity makes the impact of the global warming catalyzed by climate changes.
“Although there is a clear ‘atmospheric wave’ pattern with alternating values of hot (redder) and cold (bluer) in different places, this vast area of extreme (and record-breaking) heat is another clear indicator that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are causing extreme weather conditions that impact our living conditions, ”said Dr. Steven Pawson, head of the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
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For the vast majority of scientists there is little doubt that global warming is intimately connected with human activities; these eleven slides, which convinced Boris Johnson of the veracity of climate change, show the surges in the curves of temperature media sea level rise of the loss of sea ice and many other factors in parallel with the increase in CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, exploded starting from Industrial Revolution.
