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The extreme rise in temperatures is wreaking more and more havoc. The European Copernicus service recorded that July 2023 was the hottest month on record, the heat melts the poles at a rate that weakens the Atlantic current system, and countries in Central America suffer food insecurity in the Dry Corridor.
July 2023 was the warmest month on record, as plotted by temperatures for the first three weeks, according to the European Union Copernicus Climate Change Service.
According to the agency, the average global air temperature during the first 23 days of the month was 16.95°; almost three tenths more than the average registered in July 2019. And since July 6 of the current year, the daily average exceeded 16.80°C, which was the record until now, established on August 13, 2016.
Another significant fact is that in the last month the threshold of the increase of 1.5°C with respect to pre-industrial levels, which are calculated by the average temperature between 1850 and 1900, was exceeded.
The main cause continues to fall on the polluting gases produced by humanity. In other words, humans are warming the planet at levels never before recorded by science.
Will the Atlantic current circulation system collapse?
These extreme heats also interfere with several of the most important ocean currents. The so-called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could collapse between 2025 and 2095, with the tipping time estimated at 2057 if future emissions continue as predicted. The calculation was made by the Ditlevsen brothers at the University of Copenhagen, in the study published in ‘Nature Communications‘.
If this happens, the entire climate would change, since the circulation of the Atlantic brings warm waters from the equator to the north of the planet, regulating the temperatures of western Europe and part of America; while the cold currents of the Arctic sink due to its density and travel to the equator. This not only allows a flow of nutrients for all species and marine ecosystems, but also regulates temperatures. In fact, the last time there was a substantial change in the AMOC was more than 12,000 years ago, and its slowdown caused an ice age on Europe.
Some of the immediate effects caused by the weakening of the AMOC are “low marine productivity in the North Atlantic, more storms in northern Europe, less summer rainfall in the Sahel and summer rains in southern Asia”, OK with the report of the 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The researchers explain in their study that the rate at which glaciers are melting in Greenland and the Arctic is generating more freshwater than usual; and being sweet, it does not sink as northern waters normally do and end up interrupting the system of Atlantic currents.
But a methodology they used to find their main finding does not convince the full academic community. Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen concentrated on studying surface temperature anomalies in the northern seas; instead of using the sensors that exist in the Atlantic, since these only record information from 2004 and this prevents having a longer analysis in time to reach a time when the climate crisis was not one of the variants.
Some point out that it is risky to use a single methodology, as pointed out by Niklas Boers, Professor of Earth System Modeling at the Technical University of Munich, and Stefan Rahmstorf, Head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in the comments they made to Science Media Center Spain. For them, uncertainties are high due to the lack of reliable long-term data.
What they do agree on is that the AMOC has lost stability and its destabilization is closer to what had been proposed up to now. In fact, the 2019 IPCC report emphasizes that said ocean circulation has weakened, but considers it highly unlikely that it will collapse before 2100; which contradicts the study of the Ditlevsen brothers.
Dry Corridor in Central America may lose three harvests due to the El Niño phenomenon
Extreme heat also hit some areas of the planet harder, such as the Dry Corridor of Central America. This starts from Panama and Costa Rica; but its coverage is much higher in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
They are desert or semi-arid areas where 11 million people try to make a living from the countryside. But, paradoxically, many of the soils there are infertile due to the drastic change between intense rains followed by prolonged droughts.
Therefore, the problem is food insecurity. 80% of producers live in poverty, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The situation worsened with the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Now the arrival of the ninth El Niño phenomenon of the last 30 years can further affect crops. And lack of food is one of the two main causes of migration there, along with violence, as Adoniram Sanches, the FAO subregional coordinator for Mesoamerica, explained to France 24.
According to Sanches, the El Niño phenomenon of 2023 is classified between moderate and strong, but what is unprecedented is the intensity with which it arrived. For example, In the Dry Corridor it did not rain between April and May, despite the fact that this is a sowing period. And there are no forecast precipitations for the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024; which would imply losing three harvests. And without agricultural sustenance, many families migrate to other countries.
But there are solutions. FAO and the UN Environment Program (UNEP) are working on almost 30 projects to adapt to extreme climate changes in this region of the world. One of the possible exits is the harvest of water. Sanches explains that there are models in Israel, Mexico or Brazil where they have regions with less than half of the rain that falls in the Dry Corridor. Well, about 500 mm of rain falls per year, compared to the 1,200 and 1,500 mm per year in the Central American regions. And even so, they have water for human consumption, to irrigate the fields and for the animals because they keep it in times of rain.
For this reason, the expert emphasizes that “adaptation is the key word”, in order to learn how to find other methods that adapt to the extreme weather conditions that are most frequently seen throughout the world.
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