The Paper's chief reporter Liu Dong
【Editor's Note】
Beyond COVID-19, another crisis with more far-reaching and serious implications for humanity – the climate crisis – is worsening. The continued heat in North America this summer, torrential rains and floods in Western Europe and East Asia, and the forest fires in Siberia and the Eastern Mediterranean are just a preview of the future.
In the context of global warming, what will extreme weather look like in the future? What can we do to meet this change? From now on, the www.thepaper.cn will publish a series of reports trying to find answers to questions.
The fire had been burning, never before. Thick smoke flooded the town, with almost nothing to see, and Jillian Gregg had almost nowhere to escape.
"We were stuck in our homes by COVID-19 for more than half a year and thought we could go out in the summer. But the wildfire is coming, and you can't get out, because you can't see anything. Even on a sunny day, you can't see where the sun is because there's so much smoke. You can't go out, all you need is a gas mask. Greg told The Paper (www.thepaper.cn).
It was a "deadly" summer – over the past few months, many parts of the world have continued to face hellish climate nightmares of extreme heat, severe droughts and raging wildfires. Wildfires on the west coast of the United States have been burning for more than a month; at the other end of the Atlantic, wildfires are approaching Ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games. Even in siberia, which is usually cold, the ground temperature has reached a staggering 118 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius), and the smoke of wildfires has drifted to the Arctic for the first time.
But these situations are not entirely surprising. Scientists have long warned that climate change poses a risk of more extreme weather events. — In July, Greg, an Oregon State University scholar, and more than 14,000 scientists from 153 countries published a paper — scientific evidence shows very disturbing trends while humanity is making little progress in addressing climate change. Once again, they are issuing a clear and urgent warning to the world: a climate emergency is imminent.
And it's already here.
Over the past few years, there has been an unprecedented surge in extreme weather disasters around the world. Among them, scientific research shows that extreme heat weather and the consequent drought and wildfires are recognized as the most extreme weather events affected by climate change.
NBC's documentary 2020: Year of Extreme Weather describes it every year as one of the worst fires in history. Each year, they find themselves surrounded by wildfires on a much larger scale. Many people go from indifference to sluggishness, from indifference to exhaustion. Although extreme weather disasters are no longer uncommon, they are record-setting in severity and duration. Before we can stop climate change from continuing to exacerbate our suffering, we must first endure the "sins" we have created in the past.
The question is, will we still survive the next catastrophe?
A firefighter monitors the fire at the Dixie Fire Control Zone near Quincy, California
The heat is coming
On June 24, a rain fell over the western Pacific Ocean near Japan. The rain was nothing particularly striking, but it set off a "big wave" off the far west coast of North America.
This tropical depression triggers the production of so-called "planetary waves" (also known as Rosbi waves, an atmospheric long wave) in the upper atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere. This "wave" is guided eastward to North America by jet streams (exponential strips of high-speed air currents that surround the Earth's strong and narrow air currents that have some effect on Earth's weather system).
Like a plucked guitar string, along the way, this "wave" amplifies until it "bursts" like an ocean wave as it approaches the coast — creating a constantly stable area of high pressure over western North America.
According to Dr. Gregg, this high-pressure area triggers unusual extreme heat weather on the west coast of North America. The hot weather began in western Canada and gradually expanded to the midwest of North America. This high-pressure system was so powerful that it further triggered another wave of "waves" in the North Atlantic, causing the same extreme heat weather in the Nordic region.
Like dominoes, one direct consequence of global warming is the massive melting of the Arctic ice sheet, weakening the equator-to-polar temperature gradient as the ice melts, creating a so-called "Arctic amplification effect" that further affects the high-velocity air currents (jet streams) that surround the globe, making it move slower and more easily stagnate in a certain region. When hot weather occurs in an area, it becomes more extreme and persistent.
A attribution study of the above-mentioned hot weather points out that such extreme heat in western North America would be nearly impossible without human-caused climate change.
As of June 28 alone, British Columbia, Canada, has broken 43 historical high temperature records. However, a few days later, on July 2, the small town of Lytton, west of Vancouver, recorded the highest temperature ever recorded in the country at 49.6°C before it was destroyed by a wildfire.
"This historic event cannot be described in words." British Columbia's Department of Environment and Climate Change tweeted. "This heat is more like the temperature of a typical Middle Eastern summer than what a province with Rocky Mountains and Glacier National Park should have."
This unprecedented extreme heat event is having a number of significant impacts: thermal stress on humans, animals, and vegetation; air quality (pollutants caused by stable hot air); the risk of forest fires; landslides caused by melting glaciers in mountainous areas; the inability of infrastructure and transport systems to cope with the damage and failures that occur at high temperatures; and many other social and economic risks. British Columbia's heat alone has claimed hundreds of lives.
This is not a phenomenon unique to North America. Maximiliano Herrera, a Spanish climatologist and weather historian who specializes in extreme weather statistics, found that the same thing happened in western Russia and around the Caspian Sea. Herrera founded and maintained the "World Extreme Temperatures" website. As an independent researcher, he has been analyzing raw global weather data and tracking weather records since 1992.
He told The Paper, "In the past few years, we've seen 'hot domes' of very strong ridges of high pressure – compressing and warming the air to cause extreme temperatures in North America. It is most likely related to warming in the Pacific Ocean. To be sure, as the average temperature rises, we will see statistically more intense and frequent high temperatures. ”
A dry lake in California
Droughts and wildfires
The heat was followed by severe drought and hellish wildfires.
On the one hand, rising temperatures lead to increased evaporation on the ground, providing more moisture for storms, but it also accelerates the drying of the surface, making droughts worsened in the absence of storms. The western United States is experiencing the worst drought of the century this year, and as hot, dry weather continues, droughts are difficult to mitigate, which could lead to crop deaths, electricity shortages and wildfires.
According to the latest data released by the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than 93 percent of the land in seven western U.S. states is in a drought state, and nearly 59 percent are experiencing extreme drought conditions.
Drought has threatened community water supplies throughout the western United States. In June, administration officials warned that Lake Oroville, California's second-largest reservoir, was drying up so rapidly that it might have to shut down for the first time ever — affecting the electricity supply of 800,000 homes. Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States that powers the Hoover Dam, has also reached an all-time low, further raising concerns about hydropower supplies in many western states.
In this extremely arid environment, a little spark can cause a raging fire. The immediate causes of wildfires can vary – lightning, high-voltage power line fires, traffic accidents, commercial development, tourist negligence, deliberate arson, etc. can all cause fires. However, behind the increasing number of protracted rare wildfires, there is a common factor fuelling the extreme heat and drought caused by climate change.
Summer wildfires were a normal natural phenomenon, but Dr. Greg told The Paper that the pattern of wildfires on the West Coast of the United States in the past five years has been very different from the past. "We used to say that fires could be in the desert, in the mountains, in California, as far away as Alaska or Canada, but now it's right on my doorstep [north of California] oregon, which has never been done before. Even more dramatically, the number and scale of fires are increasing, doubling in 2010 compared to the 1990s, and doubling the number in the last 10 years. ”
Not only the United States, but almost the same situation has also triggered wildfires in Turkey and the Mediterranean coast in recent weeks. Wildfires have forced the emergency evacuation of tourists and residents in these areas, watching large areas of forest and houses burn down.
The cycle of high temperatures exacerbating forest fires, which in turn fuel warming with carbon dioxide from forest burning, is probably the deepest and most worrying impact that frequent and persistent wildfires can have.
On July 16, 2021, at night near Blaye, Oregon, a fire lit up the smoke.
The "Champlain Tower" effect
Over the past few years, wildfires in California have shown that this is often a combination of unusual random, short-term natural weather patterns that are exacerbated by long-term, anthropogenic climate change that has made much of the place warmer and drier over the past 30 years.
Heat, drought and wildfires themselves are also interrelated. Scientists say climate change is playing an increasingly important role in these extreme weather events. As the climate warms, the number of compound extreme events involving droughts, heat waves and fires will increase. Drought events, combined with extreme heat waves, dry out the surface and make it more flammable, increasing the risk of fire. Fire weather in southern Europe, Eurasia, parts of the United States and Australia is expected to become more likely, in fact, all of which have been besieged by devastating wildfires in recent years.
The current high temperatures, droughts and wildfires around the world are more severe and widespread than in previous years, which is already a harbinger of what is about to happen. Without a substantive policy response, these extreme climates could continue to plunge human society into a huge crisis and fundamentally change our world.
In 2013, the fifth scientific report on climate change, released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), barely considered the idea that 1.5 degrees Celsius is the safe limit to global warming. However, on August 9 of this year, the IPCC pessimistically predicted in its sixth report that our world will reach a threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius warming by 2040, either way. And if emissions are not controlled, 1.5 degrees Celsius could be achieved within 10 years.
On the road to a global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, a future of a dramatic increase in extreme weather events is inevitable, with risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply and economic growth all rising dramatically. The extreme weather events we experience today are only a small part of what could happen in the future.
A key question is: Why aren't people taking scientist warnings seriously? A question that more people will ask is: What does our future hold if we continue to ignore the dangers of climate change?
Dr. Gregg's real-life example is perhaps the best answer: "Three years ago, the Champlain Tower, a 12-story apartment on the outskirts of Miami, Florida, was checked by engineers for safety hazards, but no one was willing to pay for repairs, so it dragged on. On July 1 of this year, people finally decided to solve the problem – but it was too late – and on June 24, the building collapsed, killing 97 people. ”
"That's what's happening with climate change. Scientists say it's an emerging disaster. We need to get the news out. We hope that catastrophic consequences can be avoided. Greg said.
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Wuwei
Proofreader: Yan Zhang