Successive records – higher temperatures, rainier days – marked 2023 as a year of extreme weather, leaving many thousands of deaths in its wake.
According to the European Earth observation service Copernicus, this year was the hottest on record. While December still needs to be counted, the truth is that every month since January has recorded its highest average temperature since records were recorded.
As greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions steadily rise, the Northern Hemisphere’s autumn 2023 will be the hottest on record.
The World Meteorological Organization recently recalled that the past nine years have been the hottest since modern measurements began and warned of the cyclical climate phenomenon El Niño, which is warming the Pacific Ocean and could raise temperatures further next year.
In 2023, a year of records, there will be a resurgence of extreme weather events. Portugal was not hit hard, but Greece and central and northern European countries were hit by heat and flooding, as were the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Large fires are often caused by global warming. The year to end will be marked by fires in Canada, where 6,500 wildfires have burned 18 million hectares of land, some due to severe drought.
Five months of fires in Canada released 473 megatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), three times the previous record, and displaced 200,000 people. Smoke could be felt in Portugal.
Hawaii’s wildfires were also historic, becoming the deadliest in 100 years, with at least 110 people killed in August due to climate change, authorities said.
Heat waves swept across Asia, affecting countries such as India, China, Laos and Thailand, a cold wave killed 166 people in Afghanistan and China in the first quarter of the year, and record low temperatures were also recorded in January.
Cyclone Freddy killed 1,434 people in February, including in Mozambique, where the storm struck twice and affected 263,000 people. It lasted more than a month and became one of the longest tropical cyclones on record.
The year’s meteorological disasters could also include more than 400 deaths from Cyclone Mocha in May, 112 heat-related deaths in North America, 100 deaths from floods in India and many more in the Philippines or floods in Sao Paulo. Paulo, Brazil, Pakistan and Haiti, with at least fifty people killed in each case.
Floods in DR Congo killed 400 people, and Libya killed nearly 11,000 when two dams collapsed in September following heavy rains caused by Hurricane Daniel.
Some extreme weather events may not be directly linked to global warming, but rising global temperatures are a direct cause of the heavy rains and floods in the Horn of Africa that have affected Somalia in less than a month, according to the UN. ago, but also Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania caused the death of 300 people and the displacement of more than two million people after the region suffered its worst drought in 40 years.
After battling drought in Somalia since October, two million people have been affected by torrential rains, flash floods that forced a million people to flee and the flooding of 1.5 million agricultural hectares.
The “likelihood” of global warming has also been flagged in Greece, which was hit by historic fires in the summer and catastrophic floods soon after.
Climate change has worsened climatic events. They caused unprecedented drought in the Amazon, flash floods and deadly storms in the United States, and record temperatures in Spain, Brazil, India, Laos, China, the United States and Australia.
Autumn, after stifling heat in several countries around the world, turned out to be extremely rainy in Vietnam, Italy, Slovenia, Hong Kong, China and the USA.
The number of extreme climate events has “surprisingly increased” over the past 30 years, according to the UN. In Europe, according to the European Environment Agency, they have caused 195,000 deaths since 1980.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) says climate change is causing annual losses in agricultural and livestock production of €123 billion, equivalent to 5% of global production.
Environmental disasters have increased from an average of 100 events per year in the 1970s to 400 in the past two decades.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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