The photo shows the so-called "climate screw", another trend thing that is spreading around the planet this unusually hot summer. It is an initiative that came from Professor Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading, and which, with the slogan "show your stripe" (#ShowYourStripes), is shared on social networks by meteorologists, researchers, climate activists, and many public figures. Strafta can be planetary (as in the picture), or they can be local, with a specific pattern for a continent or a country. During the campaign, which was launched on the first day of summer this year, studs were seen at concerts and festivals, some activists made decorations from them, and dresses and T-shirts with studs became a fashionable sign of recognition.
What are these red and blue lines anyway? Namely, they represent individual years, in the period from 1850 to 2020, since the temperature has been measured. The color itself illustrates the deviation from the average global temperature - the blue lines are the years in which the temperature was lower than the average, and the red lines are those in which it was higher. The bluer the bolt, the colder the year was, and the redder, the warmer it was. Obviously, as the years go by, the lines get redder. Hawkins' stick visually illustrates what climatologists have been saying persistently for several decades - the planet is warming.
If you look at the right end of the screw, you will notice that it is distinctly red. That explains what, along with reports of Delta Soy and the Taliban in Afghanistan, you may have noticed as another unpleasant trend this year: the heat of the summer of 2021. Last week, a temperature of as much as 48,8 degrees Celsius was recorded in Sicily, which (if the World Meteorological Organization confirms this measurement) could be the highest air temperature ever recorded in Europe. Climate models, unfortunately, show that if we don't do something to stop the burning of fossil fuels, in the coming years and decades the sky will be much redder, and the thermometers will be working on a higher and higher scale. In practice, this is not something that can be solved with air conditioners, but means many other bad trends - an increase in extreme disasters such as floods and fires, which will become more frequent and stronger, and nature will become less hospitable.
IMG-3209Last year's fire in Greece: Satellite image
A fiery hell
Along with the publication of the first part of the Sixth Report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which the world and domestic media reported as a "red alarm for humanity", devastating fires affected a large number of countries in the Northern Hemisphere. After floods across Europe, especially in Germany, caused enormous damage, claimed lives and caused utter disbelief, now unstoppable fires are consuming forests all summer long in Russia, the USA, Canada, Turkey and Italy.
It seems that the worst situation was in Greece, where last week more than 150 wildfires raged in the wild, primarily on the island of Evia. Human casualties are also counted, and tourists and residents have been evacuated from cities north of Athens. Thousands of hectares of forest were destroyed, houses and buildings were damaged. The firefighting operation took on an international character because firefighters from many countries, including Serbia, arrived in Greece, but in some regions the situation was quite hopeless.
Fiery elements have always devoured the wilderness, man, since spreading across the planet after the agricultural revolution, has precisely "defeated" nature with fire and cleared the fertile soil (thereby releasing huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere), but their number and intensity are now increasing. According to climate models, this is an undoubted consequence of global warming. Virtually all scientific studies that have dealt with the connection between fires and climate change in recent years, about 60 of them, unequivocally indicate that climate change brought about by man increases the risk of forest fires.
Namely, the key cause for the increase in the number of fires is evaporation - with the increase in global temperature, evaporation is greater, and the soil becomes drier. There is more moisture in the atmosphere, but less in the ground and vegetation is more susceptible to ignition. At the same time, due to the simple increase in energy retained in the atmosphere, periods of disasters last longer and are more severe - where they fall, the precipitation is stronger, and droughts are longer where they occur. By the end of the century, drought periods are expected to be far more permanent, and the difference is already being noticed. Longer periods of drought in themselves favor more frequent and larger fires. At the same time, the period of snow melting has moved almost a whole month earlier, so that during the summer less water reaches the zones where, as a result, more fires break out.
Sixth report
The mentioned Sixth Report is so far the most accurate and comprehensive scientific forecast of what fate awaits the planet, which gives a complete insight into the current state of scientific knowledge about climate change, and was made on the basis of 14.000 scientific papers. The report indicates that similar disasters, but on a much larger scale, will undoubtedly befall us if humans do not stop emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases by mid-century. These gases are released during the burning of coal and other fossil fuels (for energy production, but also for other reasons), and as humans have been doing it on a merciless scale for the last 150 years, the concentration of CO2 has increased so much that the otherwise natural process of "retaining" the Sun of heat in the atmosphere became far more intense.
Things are complicated and uncertain, but it is very clear that cutting CO2 emissions to zero by 2050 could mean that the average global temperature will not rise by more than 1,5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. It is a scenario that means that climate change will not reach the proportions that would drastically threaten civilization, human life and property. Any growth above this limit could be dramatic, which is why it is a key goal of the Paris Agreement.
Meanwhile, the temperature is literally rising. Globally, July this year was the warmest month since measurements were taken. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), land and ocean surface temperatures in July 2021 were the highest in 142 years. Their value was 0,93 degrees Celsius higher than the average for the twentieth century (15,8 °C). Before this, the record was jointly held in July 2016, 2019 and 2020.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the ground surface temperature was 1,54 degrees above average, surpassing the previous record set in 2012. The data shows that this year's July was the hottest on record in Asia, while in Europe it was the second hottest, behind July 2018. In North America, South America, Africa and Australia, this July is among the ten hottest ever. The year will, no doubt, be particularly red on the Hawksbill, and if you look at how things have been going so far, the average global temperature has increased by as much as 1,2 degrees Celsius over the years so far.
"Time" number 1598, 19.08.2021.
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