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Summer heat waves have highlighted the threat posed by climate change, with 100 million people in the United States receiving warnings of high temperatures, and Europe setting devastating record temperatures.
Extreme heat waves have swept southern Europe since last week, in which temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, as part of a global pattern of rising temperatures that scientists and specialists largely attributed to climate change due to human activities. This wave of intense heat is expected to reach China in late August. The authorities are fighting forest fires that erupted in large areas of southern Europe, and are carrying out mass evacuations, while warnings of the consequences of not intensifying efforts to combat the effects of climate change have been raised. US President Joe Biden said: The climate crisis is an urgent matter and will deal with it as such, but he did not declare it an emergency, entailing measures as Democrats want his party to do.
“Climate change … is a clear and present danger,” Biden said, announcing an investment of $2.3 billion to help build US infrastructure to address climate disasters.
For his part, Pope Francis yesterday called on world leaders to heed the “chorus of cries of pain” caused by climate change, extreme weather and the loss of biodiversity.
Climate change is making heat waves hotter and more frequent. This is the case for most regions of the Earth, and has been confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities have led to a warming of the planet’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius, compared to the pre-industrial era. This hotter baseline means that higher temperatures can be reached during intense heat waves.
“Every heat wave we see today is getting hotter and more frequent because of climate change,” said Fredericke Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who also co-leads the research collaboration for the Global Weather Attribution Initiative.
Meanwhile, fire control has improved significantly in France, Portugal and Spain, as firefighting teams are about to control a major blaze in the northeast of the country.
In France, the two fires that destroyed 20,800 hectares of forests in the Gironde (southwest) ten days ago, and caused the evacuation of more than 36,000 people, did not record any progress during the night, and local authorities reported yesterday morning, that the firefighting teams continue to put out some small fires that were burning. It erupted again, local authorities confirmed.
According to data released Thursday by the European Forest Fire Information System of the European Union’s Earth Observation Program “Copernicus”, the areas ravaged by fire in recent weeks in Europe exceeded the total area of land burned during the whole of 2021.
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