Friday evening 6:30pm.
Inside the express train at Dangsan Station on Seoul Subway Line 9.
It is a common occurrence on the subway on the way home from work, but an unusually unpleasant exclamation comes from here and there.
In the high humidity, the arm of the person next to you sticks to it rather than rubbing it.
The long umbrella that came with the forecast for heavy rain was just cumbersome.
The Korea Meteorological Administration predicted heavy rain of up to 150mm in the central part, but it rained only about 2mm for two days in Seoul, and it was a day that did not cool down the heat but only added moisture to it.
At the beginning of last week, it rained like a hole in the sky, and on the weekend, a sweltering heat wave came, with the daytime temperature in Seoul rising to 34 degrees Celsius.
"What's the weather like in Korea these days?"
It's a saying every year and every season, but this year I hear it especially often.
What's the weather like in Korea these days?
It's hot day and night... Accelerated 'tropical'
'Highest since meteorological observation', 'The first tropical night in June', 'The first ultra-tropical night in 111 years', 'The first heatwave in 100 years'...
These are the provocative titles of the media that pour out every time a weather article is published.
If it is a phenomenon that occurs once in a hundred years, it is normal that it should appear once in a hundred years.
Tropical nights appeared in June for the first time in meteorological observations in some areas, including Seoul.
Tropical night refers to a case in which the minimum temperature is 25˚C or higher from 6 pm to 9 am the next day in summer.
In Seoul, the first tropical night phenomenon of the year appeared on the 26th of last month.
Until now, July 2 (1978) was the earliest tropical night.
Of course, tropical nights have occurred in June in Daegu and Jeju, but this is the first time that tropical nights have appeared in June in Seoul or Chuncheon.
In Gangneung, for the first time in 111 years, the night temperature exceeded 30˚C.
Even numerically, the number of tropical nights is increasing.
Looking at the statistics of 62 representative observation points of the Korea Meteorological Administration, the tropical night phenomenon occurred on 4.2 days in the 1980s and 5.8 days in the 1990s.
In 2010, it was 9.0 days.
Tropical nights occur when the daytime temperature is too high and the nighttime temperature does not drop.
In 2018, when the worst heatwave hit the country, tropical nights appeared on 16.6 days nationwide.
It also occurs when there is no difference in temperature between night and day due to high humidity.
On the 27th of last month, the daytime temperature in Seoul was 27.9 degrees, and the lowest temperature at night was 25.7 degrees.
The temperature difference between day and night was only 2 degrees.
It is evidence that the climate is changing, and that the weather is becoming increasingly extreme.
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Click ▶ [Bimmer Q&A] 'It's super tropical in June!'...
What is the weather like in Korea these days?
(Reporter Gu-hee Jung)
The central part is 'heavy rain', and the southern part is 'heat wave'... What is the cause of the 'anomaly rainy season'?
Along with the early heat wave, the rainy pattern was also unusual.
The rainy season literally means 'rain that lasts for a long time in summer'.
In the rainy season, air of different characteristics competes with each other, and it is common for rain clouds to move north.
The high pressure over the Sea of Okhotsk is located to the northeast of Korea and the high pressure from the North Pacific Ocean is located to the southeast, and a stagnant front develops at the boundary, forming rain clouds.
The general trend of the rainy season front is that it starts with Jeju at the end of June, goes up through the southern regions to the central region, affects the whole country, and is pushed to the north at the end of July after traveling for about a month.
This is a picture of the rainy season front on June 23 and 24, when the whole country was affected by the rainy season.
As rain clouds pass vertically, it rains evenly across the country.
That is why it is also called 'the front of the filial rainy season'.
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However, the rainy season front, which moved at a predictable level, has changed.
If you look at the front of the rainy season that passed on June 30 and July 1, you can see it passing horizontally in the central region.
Rain cloud belts developed in the east-west direction as if a belt was wrapped around the Korean Peninsula.
Jeju and the southern provinces passed by, and they moved straight to the central part, where it rained heavily and went up to the North.
The southern region is in the midst of a heat wave, and in the central region, more than 300 mm of rain fell in a short time, causing flood damage.
The North Pacific high pressure in the south also showed a different appearance from the previous year. A vortex formed in the center of the North Pacific high pressure and the edge extended toward the Korean Peninsula, supplying a large amount of tropical air to the front of the rainy season.
As the rainy season front was activated with a lot of water vapor, record heavy rains fell in the central region even in late June.
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There will be many rainy days next week due to the influence of the rainy season.
According to the Korea Meteorological Administration, rain will start from the west between 00:00 and 3 am on the 11th, and rain is expected to continue until 6-9 pm in the metropolitan area, Yeongseo, Gangwon, northern Chungcheong, and northern Gyeongbuk, and 9 pm to later in other areas. did.
The rain is expected to bring the temperature down temporarily.
However, after the rain stops, the humid weather is expected to continue due to high humidity.
The Korea Meteorological Administration said, "The precipitation zone may vary depending on the development of the North Pacific high pressure and the location of the rainy season front."
Heat illness patients are coming one after another... The most concern about patients in history
As the heat wave arrives early, people with heat illness are increasing all over the country.
The estimated death toll from heat-related diseases has already risen to six this year alone.
Since 2011, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) has been operating the 'Heat Disease Emergency Room Monitoring System' that monitors and receives reports of heat-related illnesses that visit 500 emergency room-operated medical institutions nationwide every summer.
According to this (as of the 8th), from May 20 to the last 7 days, 653 patients with heat illness and 6 deaths occurred.
During the same period last year, there were 165 cases of heat illness and 3 deaths were estimated.
The number of patients quadrupled compared to the previous year, and the number of deaths doubled.
Heat disease is a disease that causes symptoms such as headache, dizziness, muscle cramps, fatigue, and loss of consciousness when the body is exposed to a hot environment for a long time, leading to death.
Among the total heat disease patients this year, 432 (66.2%) are aged 60 or older.
By disease type, heat exhaustion accounted for the most with 306 (46.9%), heat stroke with 153 (23.4%), heat cramps with 124 (19%), and heat syncope with 53 (8.1%).
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Health authorities are concerned that the weather this summer is expected to be hotter than normal, and there will be more patients than in 2018, when 4,526 people with heat illness due to wearing a mask due to the influence of the corona virus.
This is because the body temperature rises more easily when wearing a mask outdoors in the hot sun.
According to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), the official death toll from heat illness in 2018 was 48.
According to the data released by the National Statistical Office, there are 160 people.
The difference in the numbers is because the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) published the death statistics among patients who visited emergency rooms of 500 hospitals across the country, and the National Statistical Office investigates the causes of death in the country to identify deaths from heat-related diseases.
The death toll will be much higher than the official statistics when considering the deaths of the vulnerable class whose underlying disease has worsened due to the heat wave, is unable to move, or has poor living conditions.
According to the <Hankyoreh 21> in November 2019, which analyzed '2018 Cause of Death Statistics' by the National Statistical Office, the number of excess deaths that are not included in the statistics was 7,000.
The Ministry of Public Administration and Security has created an 'excess death toll' (the number of excess deaths in which the number of deaths from a specific exposure exceeds the expected death toll in the absence of exposure), which determines how many more people died due to heat waves based on the average annual temperature and the number of deaths. The survey was conducted and the number reached 7,000.
Although they were not diagnosed with heat disease, it is highly likely that they died due to the heat wave.
How has the climate of Korea changed over the past 109 years?
The tropical nights are getting faster, the rainy season is getting weirder, and there are a lot of people with heat illness... The weather changes every year, doesn't it?
There are years with heat waves and years with floods.
That's right.
But let's broaden our horizons a bit.
Climate scientists often compare climate to character and weather to mood.
Just as we rejoice when there are good things and we are sad when there are sad things, the weather changes and that is normal.
If the heat of over 35 degrees for the whole month continues, or if it rains all the time, it is definitely not normal.
But the climate is different.
Cho Cheon-ho, former dean of the National Academy of Meteorological Sciences, said in YTN Science's 'Gwahan Talk', "The climate needs to be sustainable. The climate changes, and the weather needs to change, but we want to continue. This is today's crisis."
So how has our climate changed?
In April last year, the Korea Meteorological Administration announced the results of climate change trend analysis for 109 years from 1912 to 2020 targeting six cities with observation data for more than 100 years.
The first thing that catches your eye is the change in 'annual average temperature'.
In the last 30 years (1991~2020), the average annual temperature increased by 1.6˚C compared to the past 30 years (1912~1940).
For 109 years, the average annual temperature has steadily risen by 0.2˚C every 10 years.
In particular, it was 0.8˚C higher than the global average increase, and the CO2 concentration was also 6.5ppm higher.
The Korea Meteorological Administration analyzed that "warming and urbanization in Korea is progressing faster than the global average."
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As the temperature has risen, the number of tropical nights has increased by 8.4 days compared to the previous 30 years, and the number of heatwave days has increased by 1.0 day over the past 30 years.
Conversely, the low-temperature extreme index such as cold waves and freezing decreased by 4.9 days over the past 30 years, and the number of freezing days decreased by 7.7 days.
The length of the seasons also changed.
Compared to the past 30 years, summer is 20 days longer and winter 22 days shorter in the past 30 years.
The spring and summer start dates have been advanced by 17 and 11 days, respectively.
In the last 30 years, summer was the longest at 118 days, about 4 months.
Autumn was the shortest with 69 days.
When I bought spring and autumn clothes, it was not just my mood that the seasons seemed to change before I wore them a few times.
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The number of days of precipitation decreased while the amount of precipitation increased.
This means that the intensity of the precipitation has increased.
In the past 30 years, the amount of precipitation increased by 135.4 mm per year, but the number of rainy days decreased by 21.2 days.
For 109 years, annual precipitation increased by 17.71 mm per decade.
In particular, the amount of precipitation in summer increased significantly, and the intensity of precipitation increased in summer and autumn.
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The world is now... Extreme heatwave in Europe, extreme flooding in Asia
It is natural that the price of the table, which has jumped higher than the rising temperature, touches the skin.
Few people see the climate crisis as a matter of immediate survival.
However, the fact that talking about the climate crisis is no longer a satiated sound is perceived everywhere.
The Uljin wildfire, which burned 15,000 soccer fields in March, occurred during an extremely dry winter with record low precipitation from December last year to February this year.
Environmental groups said, "The name of this wildfire is climate crisis," and pointed out that national forest fire countermeasures should be established in response to the climate crisis.
Of course, this is not unique to Korea.
Due to extreme weather, all parts of the world are suffering.
A third of the population suffers from heatwaves exceeding 40 degrees Celsius.
An avalanche occurred as a glacier collapsed at the top of Marmolada (3343m above sea level), the highest peak of the Dolomites in the Italian Alps, on the 3rd due to a heat wave of over 40 degrees.
So far, nine people have lost their lives.
The US has ordered hundreds of residents to evacuate due to massive wildfires.
Extreme weather events are occurring in Australia and China, as well as in Alaska, which is close to the Arctic.
At the end of last month, a man living in Henan Province, China, released a video titled 'Corn turned into popcorn'.
The story is that the corn that was put out for drying turned into popcorn due to the hot weather.
In the video, the corn grains are spread out in the scorching sun, and you can see that the grains at the edges, where the corn grains are relatively less overlapped, have changed like popcorn.
There were voices of suspicion that the video may have been tampered with.
It's unclear whether corn kernels can turn into popcorn with just a change in temperature, but it's clear that China is suffering from one of the worst heatwaves ever recorded.
In fact, in the northern part of Henan Province, the daytime high temperature soared to 43.4 degrees the day before the 'popcorn video' was released.
Conversely, one side was displaced by heavy rain.
Hundreds of millimeters of torrential rain fell every day in Guangxi Autonomous Region, Guangdong, and the southern provinces of Fujian, China, and the accumulated precipitation set a record high in 61 years.
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▲ 'Corn that became popcorn' video capture
India has been plagued with heatwaves and heavy rains.
The temperature in May in New Delhi, the capital, exceeded 49 degrees, and in the northeastern part of the northeastern part of the country, hundreds of millimeters of rain continued for several days due to the earlier-than-normal rainy season, causing thousands of lives and flooding of thousands of villages.
The rainy season in India and Bangladesh usually starts in early June, but this year, heavy rain has continued from May.
World Weather Attribution (WWA), a multinational climate research group, published a study in May that found that global warming caused heat waves in India and Pakistan to occur 30 times more frequently.
The research team said that before climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the probability of an event such as a 'spring heat wave' in India and Pakistan was about once in 3,000 years, but now the frequency has been shortened to once in 100 years.
He explained that this situation was caused by global warming, which is 1.2 degrees higher than the pre-industrial level.
"Climate change is a real 'game changer' when it comes to heat waves," he said.
In 2020, the National Assembly passed a resolution calling for emergency response to the climate crisis at the plenary session.
The passage of the 'resolution' can be seen as an expression of the will to find a way to solve the situation, as Korea is taking the situation caused by the climate crisis seriously.
It is a declaration of emergency by the constitutional body.
That means the situation is serious.
“The National Assembly of the Republic of Korea has established that climate disasters such as droughts, floods, heat waves, cold waves, typhoons, and large wildfires are increasing and unequal damage occurs due to climate change caused by excessive human use of fossil fuels and increased greenhouse gas emissions. We strictly recognize it as a 'crisis' and declare that the current situation is a 'climate crisis emergency' in order to actively resolve the climate crisis."
(in resolution 1)
▶ '1.5℃ last warning' climate crisis, we have come this far
What happens when the 'temperature' rises?
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change, signed in 2016, is a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gases to prevent global warming.
It is the first climate agreement in which the international community is working together.
The Paris Agreement aims to limit the increase in global average temperature below 2℃, and strive to keep it from exceeding 1.5℃.
It is the marginal line that can prevent the worst-case climate change scenario.
However, the contents of the '2021 Global Climate Report' released by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) last month are grim.
The average global temperature has risen 1.1°C above pre-industrial times (1850-1900).
This means that 0.4°C remains until the 1.5°C Maginot line.
According to the calculation of the German research institute MCC (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change), the global average temperature in 2029 will exceed 1.5℃ compared to pre-industrial levels.
1℃ rise in 150 years, is this a big problem?
It is not a big deal that 1℃ rises or falls today compared to yesterday, but the meaning of 1℃ in climate is huge.
According to the 6th report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the United Nations on August 9 last year, extreme climate events around the world like this summer are expected to become more frequent and destructive in the future.
Now that the temperature has risen by 1.1℃ compared to pre-industrial times, unprecedented extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, heavy rains, and floods are increasing after meteorological observations.
If the temperature rises by 1.5℃, the frequency of the extreme temperature will increase further, and when the temperature rises by 2℃, the intensity and frequency will be at least twice the current level, and when the temperature rises by 4℃, it will be quadrupled.
Heatwaves that occurred once every 50 years at the end of the 19th century are now about five times more frequent.
This means that it will occur 9 times more frequently when the temperature rises by 1.5℃, and about 14 times more often when the temperature rises by 2℃.
Some regions warn that coastal flooding, which has only occurred in the last century, could occur annually until 2100.
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The report also warns of an unprecedented rate of sea level rise.
The rate of sea level rise has nearly tripled since 1901-1971.
Greenland's glaciers will continue to shrink, and Arctic summer will continue to shrink.
This trend is irreversible for decades, even if we completely cut carbon emissions right now.
Even if limited to the 1.5°C increase promised in the Paris Agreement, sea level will rise by 2-3m, and at 2°C, it is expected to rise by 2-6m, and at 5°C, it is expected to rise by 19-22m.
Extreme sea level events that have occurred only once in the past 100 years are expected to occur once or twice every 10 years by 2050.
The report also said that the sea level could rise by another 7m by 2300, and assuming a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions, there is a possibility that the rise could reach 15m.
So how long does it keep getting hotter?
It is predicted that this year will be in the top 10 hottest years on record.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has published a monthly climate report stating that January and February 2022 recorded the sixth hottest global surface temperature ever recorded.
The report also includes a forecast that 2022 will be in the top 10 hottest year on the 143-year record.
Based on global annual temperature readings, the report shows a close 99% chance that 2022 will be one of the top 10 hottest years of the year.
“The climate crisis is creating increasingly warm winters around the world, which is likely to result in a variety of extreme climate events,” NOAA said in a statement. pointed out
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Professor Jung Soo-jong of Seoul National University's Graduate School of Environment warned that this year could be the first year of intense heat waves.
"If you look at the future outlook of last year's IPCC 6th report, 'the heat wave is getting stronger', and even if the global average temperature does not exceed 1.5°C, which is the limit line of the climate crisis, it is predicted that the hot summer that we have never experienced will come soon. It means it can't be avoided now."
Professor Jung warned, "While studying climate over the past 20 years, we have experienced a process where predictions that we wished were not true were confirmed to be true, and the future we face is highly likely to be our predictions."
Now, heat waves or floods are not only occurring in Europe, the United States, or China, but it would not be strange at all if such a phenomenon occurred in Korea right away this year.
The climate crisis is no longer a story of the distant future or a story of satiety, but a matter of survival.
(Composition: Reporter Seon-i Jang / Content design: Ji-soo Ok)