This year was the hottest ever, in accordance with the European Earth observation service, Copernicus. Although December still needs to be taken into account, the truth is that since January, each month has recorded the highest average temperature since the records were created.
With greenhouse has (GHG) emissions steadily growing, autumn 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere is the hottest on record.
The World Organisation recently classed the last nine years as the hottest since the beginning of modern measurements and warned of the cyclical climate phenomenon “El Niño” which causes the warming of the Pacific Ocean and could further increase temperatures next year.
In a year of records, 2023 will see a resurgence of extreme weather phenomena. Portugal was not badly affected, however, Greece and countries in central and northern Europe suffered from heat and floods, as did America, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Fires
Large fires are due to global warming in many cases. The year that is coming to an end will be marked by the fires in Canada, where 18 million hectares burned in 6,500 forest fires, due to severe drought in some cases.
Canada’s five months of fires emitted 473 megatones of carbon dioxide (CO2), three times the previous period and has displaced 200,000 people. The smoke reached Portugal.
In Hawaii, the forest fires were the deadliest in 100 years, causing around 110 deaths in August, due to climate change, according to authorities.
Heat waves swept across Asia, in countries such as India, China, Laos and Thailand, in the first quarter of the year a cold wave killed 166 people in Afghanistan and China noted record low temperatures in January.
In February, Cyclone Freddy killed 1,434 people, some from Mozambique, where a storm passed twice and affected 263,000 people. Lasting over a month and the storm was one of the longest-lasting tropical cyclones on record.
Disasters
The year’s weather disasters can also include more than 400 victims of Cyclone Mocha, in May, the 112 heat-related deaths in North America, the floods in India, causing 100 deaths, and many more in the Philippines and São Paulo, Brazil, Pakistan and Haiti, each case with at least fifty victims.
Floods in DRCongo caused 400 deaths and in Libya around 11,000 people died when two dams collapsed in September after heavy rains caused by Storm Daniel.
Some extreme weather events may not have been related to global warming, although in accordance with UN, the increase in the planets temperature is a direct cause of the torrential rains and floods in the Horn of Africa, which affected Somalia in October, and also Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania, causing the deaths of 300 people and displacing more than two million.
In Somalia since October more than 2 million people have been affected by torrential rains and flash floods, causing a million people to flee and 1.5 million hectares of agricultural land flooded.
Greece was affected by historic fires in the summer and soon after by catastrophic floods.
Climate change has been exacerbated climate phenomena. Casing an unprecedented drought in the Amazon, flash floods and deadly storms in the United States, record temperatures in Spain, Brazil, India, Laos, China, the United States and Australia.
In the Autumn, after suffocating heat in several countries in the world, extreme rain took over places such as Vietnam, Italy, Slovenia, Hong Kong, China and the United States.
The UN states extreme climate phenomena has increased in the last 30 years.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) says that climate change causes the annual loss of €123 billion in agricultural production and livestock, an equivalent to 5 percetn of world production.
Environmental disasters gave gone from an average of 100 events per year in the 1970s to 400 in the last two decades.
The CO 2 has only increased by 90 parts per million over a period of time (barely measurable). The warmer weather is mainly due to greater solar activity. The proof is the difference between day and night temperatures.
By Pete from Algarve on 27 Dec 2023, 07:44