The heat wave that affected the European territory and caused record temperatures in the United Kingdom and France and fires that especially hit Spain, among other countries, “it is a symptom of climate change” that will cause “increasingly severe and recurring” weather phenomenaaccording to the doctor in Atmospheric Sciences Inés Camilloni, who described the situation as “a very real and concrete danger”.
“Heat waves like the one that caused record temperatures in England these days had already occurred in Europe in previous years, like one that seriously affected France, and they are phenomena that are amplified by climate change but in which Other factors also come into play,” said the professor at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and a Conicet researcher at the Sea and Atmosphere Research Center in a dialogue with Télam.
Camilloni maintained that climate change will generate “increasingly severe and recurrent” events and specified that British scientists who had been monitoring different parameters “had already warned that this phenomenon was going to occur.”
Heat ‘produces excess mortality’ and especially affects more vulnerable populations such as older adults, children or people with chronic diseases, so the teacher insisted on the risk that climate change implies as “a very real and concrete danger”.
On the other hand, he pointed out that this type of heat wave “they occurred several times in Argentina” and said that “there are attribution studies of these phenomena that show that they could not have occurred if they did not occur in this context of climate change.”
“The heat wave that affected Buenos Aires and the center of the country last January was very severe and it is something that will probably continue to occur with greater intensity, although we still do not have data to make forecasts for next summer since the atmosphere is a chaotic system,” he said.
With respect to How are these types of heat waves generated?Camilloni said that the mechanism depends on each region, since what climate change causes is the modification of air circulation patterns.
“The warm air mass that is now over Europe is coming from Africa,” detailed.
Camilloni recalled that “many countries signed commitments to reduce their gas emissions with the aim of lowering the increase in global temperature” but he stressed that “if these reductions are not made, it will be very difficult for the oceans and forests to absorb all the carbon that we are emitting into the atmosphere.”
The researcher considered that although It is not yet possible to predict what the next summer will be like in Argentina, in the context of climate change “we are likely to see heat waves”although “to speak in more specific terms, you have to be closer to the station because there are also phenomena such as ‘El Niño’ or ‘La Niña’ that modulate the climate”.
In this sense, he warned that “in climate science it is necessary to wait for the event to end to do what is known as an attribution study with the analysis of its causes to understand how it was conceived” in reference to the situation that is going through these days Western Europe.
The heat wave that affects Europe
Last Tuesday, The United Kingdom broke a historical temperature record by reaching 40.2 degrees in the Heathrow airport area, in London, while the heat wave that hit Spain for two weeks was one of the strongest recorded in the country and caused “more than 500 deaths”, as reported last Wednesday by the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, according to data prepared by a public health institute.
France It also had temperature records and the Météo-France meteorology service declared the western part of the country a red alert days ago, indicating that “particularly intense heat was expected, not a typical summer heat wave” with some areas of the southwest that they could experience “a heat apocalypse” with up to 44 degrees.
The heat wave also spread to Italy and 16 cities, including Rome, which yesterday decreed a red alert in the face of temperature peaks of 40 degrees and the increase in fires.
According to the European specialized surveillance service Copernicus, 27,571 hectares have been devoured by flames in Italy so far in 2022, compared to 39,904 in France, 199,651 in Spain, 149,324 in Romania and 48,106 in Portugal.
The forest fires that have hit all of Europe in recent weeks affected an area greater than that recorded in the entire year 2021, according to Copernicus.
In the 27 countries of the European Union, a total of 517,881 hectares were destroyed. from the beginning of the year, according to calculations made up to July 16.
Beatriz Hervella, spokesperson for Aemet (the agency spanish weather), described the heat wave that lasted from July 9 to 18 as “the greatest anomaly” of temperature recorded in the country since the beginning of the historical series in 1975, while the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) pointed out this week that “they will become more and more frequent and will continue until at least 2060 regardless of the success or not in mitigating climate change”.
