The catastrophic floods in Africa may have washed tens of thousands of people from the desert to the Mediterranean, and their lives and deaths are unknown.
Just as Typhoon Anemone ravaged the southeast coast of the mainland, on the other side of the continent, Hurricane Daniel in the Mediterranean brought an unprecedented catastrophe to Libya in northern Africa.
On September 10, after the hurricane made landfall in Libya, nearly a decade of rain fell in one day, the Libyan reservoir where the flood peak crossed was washed away, the ancient coastal city of Derna was completely destroyed, and tens of thousands of people were washed directly into the sea by floods and mudslides, and their whereabouts are unknown. Bizarrely, the extent to which his houses were shattered was like a major earthquake, and it is hard to imagine that this was a disaster caused by a flood.
How did this unprecedented hurricane of terror come about? Even more bizarre, the ancient Libyan city of Derna, which has existed for more than 2,000 years and has a tropical desert climate, was destroyed by a sudden flood? Does it herald a larger global climate crisis?
Originally, the summer rainfall in this part of Libya was almost zero, even in winter, there has not been a 24-hour rainfall of more than 100 millimeters since observations, and this rain fell the equivalent of two to ten years of rainfall in the local area, which is unpreventable. What's more frightening is that when the peak of the flood arrives, the speed of rising water is about one meter per minute, and people near the river beach do not even have 3 minutes to escape, and it is still at night, and many people are washed away by the relentless flood in their sleep. According to local figures, 3,500 people have died in Derna, and a conservative estimate of more than 10,000 missing across Libya. Strangely, there are hurricanes in the Mediterranean every year, why is it particularly fierce this time?
A Mediterranean hurricane is a very special kind of storm, it is neither a pure tropical cyclone like a typhoon nor an extratropical cyclone, but it combines some of the characteristics of both. Therefore, Mediterranean hurricanes have both the precipitation capacity of typhoons and the ability to stimulate cold air, and two or three Mediterranean hurricanes form and affect neighboring countries every year. However, in previous years it usually starts in late autumn or winter, when the temperature of the Mediterranean Sea has dropped and its heavy rains do not last long. But that's the problem.
In 2023, the Mediterranean Sea experienced an unprecedented high of 30 degrees Celsius, and when Hurricane Daniel approached Africa, the sea temperature along the road was also close to 29 degrees Celsius, and the convection at the center of the hurricane erupted.
From satellite images, the vicinity of the center of Hurricane Daniel is almost covered by convection, giving the storm system a more tropical gravitation, in other words, it looks like a major typhoon. The ancient city of Derna, which has been peaceful for more than 2,000 years, has been almost wiped out by the extreme weather of global warming, which is more than a simple warning from nature to mankind.
Since 2020, extreme weather has been frequent around the world. At the beginning of 2021, a super cold wave broke out in North America, a huge flood in Australia, a global heat wave in June of the same year, and the temperature in Kuwait once exceeded 70 degrees Celsius, followed by heavy rains in Zhengzhou in July, mudslides in Japan, accelerated melting of glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic, and so on. Most of these extreme weather in 2022 and 2023 have been experienced again, and the continuous burning of Canadian wildfires seems to be more and more people accustomed to it and do not pay much attention.
Global warming has made extreme weather more frequent. In addition, Japan's opposition to the discharge of nuclear sewage is gradually deteriorating. If we don't protect the environment and allow global warming to be left unchecked, these extreme weather events will become the norm. The Earth will one day break through the climate tipping point. At that time, no place in the world will be spared. Nature has given us many warnings, now it's up to humans to do it.
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