Tunisia, Portugal, Britain and China are in Hell... Why is the world burning this summer?

In June and July of the current year 2022, our planet was subjected to heat strikes that had never happened before. Heat waves hit Europe in particular, but they affected countries in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia as well. Temperatures rose above 40 degrees Celsius, and as usual, many of Old records.

In a terrifying map published by NASA on July 13, most of the Eastern Hemisphere seemed to be on fire!

(1)

In Western Europe, which was already suffering from severe drought, the heat wave ignited fires across Portugal, Spain and parts of France.

In Portugal in particular, temperatures reached 45 degrees Celsius on July 13 in the town of Leiria, where more than 7,400 acres of land burned, and more than half of the country was on high alert as firefighters battled 14 active fires.

In North Africa, Tunisia suffered from a heat wave and fires that destroyed the country's grain crop.

On July 13 in Tunis, the temperature reached 48 degrees Celsius, breaking a 40-year record.

In Iran, temperatures remained high in July after reaching 52 degrees Celsius in late June.

(2) In China, on the other hand, the summer caused three heat waves that twisted roads and melted tar.

The Shanghai Xujiahui Observatory recorded an all-time high of 40.9°C on July 13, 2022.

A hot wave

The heat wave, by definition, does not refer to a specific temperature, but rather means a sudden rise in temperatures from their rates somewhere by a very difference, it may be 35 degrees Celsius relative to somewhere, which is the normal range, but that the temperature in Germany reaches 38 Celsius, and Poland to almost the same figure, and to cross in Spain the 40 Celsius barrier, this is a huge increase from the usual rates, to the point where it usually leads to numbers of deaths (3) due to heat stress, their number, for example, ranged between 30-50 thousand people. During the intense heat wave that hit Europe in 2003, it cost the European Union nearly $13 billion in losses.

You may be surprised by these numbers, but what many do not know is that heat waves are one of the most terrifying killing tools in the contemporary world. Of course, we cannot talk about it unless we remember the massive heat wave that struck Russia (4) in 2010 and caused the deaths of about 60 A thousand people, but during the months of April and May of 2015, a very hot wave 5 swept the land of India and killed 1,700 people, it did not pass a few days until another wave hit Pakistan in the following June and killed 1,300 people mainly in Karachi, and then penetrated after That in the country killed 770 people in other parts of the country.

What is happening on planet earth?

This question must come to you from time to time whenever you enjoy an event related to climate change, but you may also say to yourself that it is only about social media and its spread, and this is usual but the news has not appeared about it until now.

This is not true, Europe has received the most severe (5) heat wave attacks only in the past twenty (6) years, specifically in the years (2018, 2010, 2003, 2016 and 2002).

In fact, you may be surprised that the ten hottest years in the history of our temperature measurements were all in the last twenty years, and in 2019, some new records were broken during the wave that hit the world in January (7), so that the difference was The temperature in two cities in the north and south of the world is 100 degrees Celsius!

One recurring reason

Why is this happening?

Well, it is the only answer that everyone knows, and the relevant agencies talk about it almost every day, but no one in the corridors of government buildings agrees on it (other than only 97% of the members of the scientific community specialized in studying the matter (8)), it is climate change that is caused by the activity of Contemporary man, but at that point you may wonder about the relationship of climate change with heat waves, you will say, for example, that a heat wave like that in which the difference from the rates was about 20 degrees, while we know that global warming raises average temperatures by only one or one and a half degrees, from where The rest of the scores come?

In fact, this is one of the worst misunderstandings people make about climate change, because the climate is simply a complex system, to understand that let's imagine that we designed a set of electronic bells that beep as soon as you hear any sound within 5 meters of it , then we covered a huge plot of land with 10,000 bells, each 5 meters from the other in all directions, and then we hit only one bell, here this bell will affect all the bells around it, then the effect spreads and expands to include all the bells.

Complex systems rely heavily on small changes in surrounding conditions, this is what we all know as the "butterfly effect", which says, in its literary form, that an event as small as a butterfly's wing flapping in China may cause a typhoon in the United States, and the point here is that those events Small ones grow and accumulate little by little to affect everything around them, giving them a greater impetus for growth, and thus growth continues until their impact becomes catastrophic.

Climate systems usually follow this pattern, each point in it is related to another, and when average temperatures rise, even if slightly, there is a greater chance for the emergence of anomalies and extremes, and we mean here things such as heat waves, cold waves, sandstorms, and deadly hurricanes.

To understand this point, we can consider a recent study, issued just a month ago by Princeton University (9), which indicates that compound heat waves, that is, those that come in a double (a heat wave followed by another), increase in rates and degrees of severity with the increase in average temperatures. Globalism.

never-ending flame

The study indicated, through a computer simulation, to the development of climate change on the Earth, stressing that this will inevitably place an increased burden on emergency units and the provision of medical services in general, and that energy consumption rates will increase by mythical amounts, in fact, one of the most famous examples is the rise in temperatures in Iran (10) during the summer of 2018, where some areas recorded close to 53 degrees Celsius, which directly affected the consumption of water and electricity in the country, and eventually led to their interruptions for varying periods, as rising temperatures withdraw from electricity the equivalent of 150-200 On July 2, 2018, Iran recorded a withdrawal of 56,672 megawatts of electric power, which is a historical figure!

In a related context, an important study in this scope, published about three years ago in the journal (11) Science Advances, linked the rapid rise of half a degree Celsius in average temperatures in India during the period between 1960-2009 and higher rates of hit Heat waves have it by 50% in some areas, thus the odds of deaths related to heat waves increased to 146%, and countries such as India and Pakistan entered a range called "deadly heat waves", which means that deaths due to heat waves exceed 100 people.

A research team from the University of California had reached the same results in a recent study, noting that heat waves had increased by 50% over the past few decades, but the most interesting thing in that study (12), which covered more than 200 cities that increases population Each of them contains a quarter of a million homes, and it is a very important conclusion that says that cities are more affected by heat waves than villages, because the nature of cities prevents heat from escaping easily, everything heats up and then calms down, but the rocky walls, closed and narrow areas and buildings prevent this from happening easily in The case of major cities.

enthusiastic letters

The matter is not far from us. In fact, we - here in the Arab world - are more exposed to climatic disasters than others. The number of very hot days has already doubled compared to what it was in the seventies, especially in the Arab Gulf region, and by trying to read the future of the region during the current century, According to a study (14,13) from the Max Planck Institute for Atmospheric Chemistry, we will find that there will come a day when the temperature in summer nights does not drop below 30 degrees Celsius, and 50 degrees Celsius will be a natural number that we witness most of the summer. On the other hand, research and computer models expect, Which is based on a detailed study of the history of temperature development in the previous thirty years, that the rates of heat waves, in the Middle East and North Africa, will rise 10 times more than usual.

The last four years were the hottest in the Arab world, records were broken like sea waves on the rocks, but the most inviting for contemplation and attention are those predictions that say that the next five years will be hotter.

According to a recent study in the journal Nature (15) issued by the University of Southampton in England, the climate is likely to become increasingly warm, to break new records. It adds a clear burden on the capabilities of the Arab world in several aspects, starting with food security, passing through the ability to work and production, and ending with energy consumption.

What to do?

The answer to this question is simple, but no one wants to believe yet. There is a staggering gap between what is needed to avoid the dangerous development of climate change and what has been done so far. Climate pressure is the processes of political pressure that prevent its passage. In fact, one of the most powerful factors in slowing humanity’s steps towards a world less affected by climate change, or at least a world that stops the disasters that exist now, is political pressure.

If you stop a climate scientist at any fine university and ask him what's to come, he'll open his hands and say, "I don't know." No one takes serious steps, too many international meetings, too many hotels crammed with politicians sitting next to open dining tables full of pleasure, Lots of enthusiastic rhetoric, but the bottom line is nothing, on the other hand, climate anomalies are literally devouring the planet day after day, and we are not yet talking about biodiversity and the mass extinction that kills the diversity of life on Earth with great determination, while The citizens of the world sit at home and watch.

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