FLASH NEWS
2024 is expected to be the hottest year on record
2024-11-10 21:05:52 / TRENDING
The EU's Climate Change Service Copernicus says 2024 is "virtually certain to be the warmest year on record" ever. The agency also says it will be the first year in which the average global temperature will reach more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
That's the limit the world had hoped not to cross, under the 2015 Paris climate agreement that was designed to avoid the worst effects of warming.
The impacts of a warmer climate have been seen in this year's extreme weather episodes.
Search and clean-up work has continued in eastern Spain for more than a week after floods caused by heavy rains devastated everything and caused at least 217 deaths.
Scientists trying to explain what happened see two possible links to human-caused climate change.
One explanation is that warmer air collects and then discharges more precipitation.
Another explanation has to do with possible changes in air currents over land that move weather systems around the globe, causing extreme weather.
Climate scientists and meteorologists said the immediate cause of the flooding was a lower pressure storm system that moved in because of highly unstable air currents.
The system simply stalled over the region and dumped the rain. Added to this is the extremely high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea.
"So we have a really warm air mass near the surface, produced by the warmed Mediterranean Sea. And we have a cooler air mass in the upper levels. So that means instability. So the air is unstable, really unstable," explains David Pino, professor of physics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
Spain's Mediterranean coast has been hit by autumn storms that can cause flooding, but this episode brought the most powerful floods in modern memory.
Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at Reading University, says the authorities were unprepared for the floods.
"It's really hard to sort out exactly what caused these floods because there are so many contributing factors. Yes, there's been a real load of rainfall in this region, really unusual amounts of rain from this storm system. But actually, there's "There are many other things that are happening. There were many people living in the line of the floods that were coming, but the warnings did not reach the residents and people were surprised by the floods, or they did not know what to do when they heard those warnings," says Professor Cloke. At the beginning of the year, the Spanish region of Catalonia also suffered
the worst drought in history and declared a state of emergency.In early February, the Italian Alps had the warmest winter in the country's history.
While drought has gripped Africa since late 2023, there have been unusual floods in places like Saudi Arabia, and successive powerful hurricanes have hit the United States.
Globally, January 2024 was the warmest January in history, and the same is expected for the whole year./ VOA
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