What was this picture you see now?
It looks like grilled clams, but in fact, it is a picture of the death of clams at the farm due to the heatwave in western North America.
As the temperature rises to around 50 degrees Celsius, the clams are not only dead, but also overcooked.
It's not just about shellfish.
In Canada, where it is said that it is cool and does not need air conditioning, more than 500 people have already died from heatwaves this year alone, and wildfires are occurring one after another in the US.
In fact, global temperatures have increased by only 1 degree since the Industrial Revolution.
An increase of 1 degree means that the average temperature has risen by 1 degree.
If you draw a weather distribution graph with the temperature on the horizontal axis and the number of days on the vertical axis, it will look like this.
Most of the days are cool days with low temperatures, but there are also heat waves that exceed 33 degrees.
Here the average temperature will be in the middle of the graph.
To say that the average temperature has increased by 1 degree means that the whole graph is shifted to the right, and you can see that the area of the heat wave that we are talking about increases even more.
A two degree increase would make this heatwave area much larger.
It took more than 100 years for the global temperature to increase by 1 degree Celsius, but in Korea, the temperature has risen by 0.9 degree Celsius for the first time in 40 years.
Accordingly, the number of heatwave days when the temperature exceeds 33 degrees increased by 5 days from 9 days to 14 days, and the number of tropical nights increased from 4 days to 9 days.
Not only do we see that the number of heatwave days has increased by 5 days, but it is actually a 50% increase, which is a threatening change for some.
The problem is that even if the same five days increase, the damage to the low-income class is more severe.
During a heat wave, 7 out of every 10,000 people in the top 20% of high-income earners suffer from heat illness, compared to 21 in the low-income bracket, which is three times the difference.
When a heat wave hits, labor efficiency drops from 13 to 25%, and it is estimated that 510,000 hours of work lost per day.
So scientists are figuring out how to save the planet.
In 2004, this boat sprinkled a lot of iron powder into the sea.
When iron powder is sprinkled, phytoplankton proliferate in large quantities, and the phytoplankton absorb carbon dioxide, the main culprit of global warming, as if a tree were planted.
However, it was temporarily halted when it became known that mass proliferation of plankton in this way causes the plankton to release toxins that cause memory loss.
There are opinions of scientists saying that a satellite equipped with a large mirror is launched and the Earth is cooled by reflecting the sun's light, but it is still a discussion in the head.
(Video coverage: Kim Se-kyung, Lee Seung-hwan, video editing: Park Jin-hoon, CG: Kim Jong-un)