World Climate Conference in Glasgow: Heat, storms, floods – the climate crisis has long since arrived

World Climate Conference in Glasgow
Heat, storms, floods – the climate crisis has long since arrived

Extreme weather events such as storms, thunderstorms or heat waves have increased worldwide since the 1950s. It is very likely that the cause is man-made global warming, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sums up in its latest assessment report.

A current analysis of more than 100,000 studies, supported by artificial intelligence, indicates that at least 85 percent of the world’s population are already feeling the effects of climate change. Even those who have not been affected themselves can hardly ignore the disaster news.

heat waves

The summer of 2021 – in Germany it was an average of 0.3 degrees warmer compared to the years 1991 to 2020, but it was not a hot summer. Not so in southern Europe. In Italy, Spain and Greece, brutal heat of well over 45 degrees Celsius caused temperature records to tumble and people to suffer. Forest fires as a result of heat and drought followed. In the north-west of the USA and Canada, unprecedented values ​​of almost 50 degrees were also measured at the end of June. The deviation from the long-term mean was so great that researchers came to the conclusion that these temperatures can hardly be explained without man-made climate change.

drought

Not least as a result of heat waves, droughts have become more frequent and severe. The Helmholtz Climate Initiative enumerates the Mediterranean region, West Asia, many parts of South America and a large part of Africa and Northeast Asia – with corresponding consequences for agriculture and food supply. For example, tens of thousands of people in Madagascar are currently threatened with starvation because there has been no rain on the island in the Indian Ocean for four years. But also in Germany, dust-dry soils, low water levels in rivers and the risk of forest fires have been registered for years in various regions.

Forest fires

Warmer summers and longer dry periods increase the risk of forest fires. Dried out plants and soil then turn into a powder keg. When a fire is started it can spread very quickly over large areas. Whether in southern Europe, on the US west coast, in Australia, in Siberia or in Brandenburg: Frequent periods of drought weaken the forests and make them more susceptible to fires, experts from WWF confirm. Due to global warming, such extreme events are to be expected more frequently in the future.

The downside of heat and drought are floods: “We have more water vapor in the atmosphere, which increases extreme rainfall and deadly floods,” said Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Weather Organization (WMO) recently. According to their findings, storms and floods have made up almost 80 percent of weather- or climate-related disasters since 1970.

Storms

The warmer oceans make tropical storms and hurricanes more dangerous. This does not necessarily increase their number, but rather Atlantic cyclones, for example, rage more violently and weaken more slowly over land masses. This is the result of a data analysis that was published in 2020 in the magazine “Nature”. Most recently, Hurricane Ida wreaked havoc with wind and water when it hit land in the US state of Louisiana. Still weakened, it brought heavy rains and catastrophic floods to the region around New York in the US northeast.

Heavy rain

The images of the flood disaster in July, which hit western Germany and Belgium in particular, remain present: after record rains, rivers overflowed their banks, the water masses destroyed the infrastructure of an entire region and killed hundreds of people. According to the research initiative World Weather Attribution, this singular event cannot be directly attributed to climate change. However, climate models have shown that the probability and intensity of such heavy rainfall increases – and these changes will continue in a rapidly warming climate in Western Europe. From a global perspective, too, according to a survey by the Science Brief platform, the number of days of heavy rain has increased as global warming progresses.

dpa