The Current Great Heat Wave
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
According to Jack Williams, director of the Center for Scientific Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, today’s heat waves will be the normal events of tomorrow. Average temperatures this year between January and June are the highest in a 140-year record, surpassed only by the heat waves of 2016.
Many people enjoy the summer, even when the authorities warn about the consequences that excessive sun exposure can cause at a time when temperatures continue to rise.
Williams acknowledged that it is difficult to raise awareness in the society because it is an uphill battle. But it is a very important job that must continue. Last week the WMO (World Meteorological Organization) asked citizens in Europe and the US to follow official advice and stay cool and safe. Williams says that in the last 2,000 years global temperatures have never risen as high as they have today.
WMO researchers used temperature data compiled from about 700 indicators, tree rings, ice cores, lake and coral sediments, as well as very modern thermometers. The first study, published in the journal Nature, notes that during the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1300 – 1850) extreme cold was recorded in Europe and the US for several centuries, but it did not happen on the entire planet.
Climate expert Nathan Steiger of Columbia University in New York says that the current change is global, since 98% of the planet has overheated since the industrial revolution.
In a second article, Nature Geoscience examines average temperature variations over short periods of several decades each. And their conclusions are that at no time, since the beginning of the Christian era, have temperatures risen as rapidly and as regularly as at the end of the twentieth century.
These findings underline the extraordinary nature of current climate change, according to the co-author of the study Raphael Neukom of the University of Bern in Switzerland. So these studies should stop skeptics who are trying to inscribe the current climate change within a natural climate cycle.
On Wednesday July 24, Belgium, Italy, France and Luxembourg were the most affected countries and will continue that way today, Thursday July 25. So for the first time in the history of Belgium a red alert has been issued for heat, in addition to the lack of rain in a region that is usually very rainy. Belgium has reached 39 degrees Celsius exceeding the record of 36.6°C set in June 1947.
Meanwhile today Italy has five cities on red alert: Bolzano, Brescia, Florence, Perugia and Turin. And today Thursday will be worse with 13 locations ranging from Rome, Bologna, Genoa, Trieste, Pescara and Verona having temperatures that will fluctuate between 38 and 40°C.
Addendum: It is very difficult to understand that although these facts, that are unprecedented in more than 2000 years of history, have been validated by world-renowned institutions, there are still stupid people, like Trump, who think that there are those who can derive benefit from them.