“This summer teaches us that we are in the middle of the climate crisis and that the repercussions are there, all around us,” climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf told AFP. “We are heading for a planetary scale climate catastrophe if we do not act quickly and decisively.”
In fact, the chronicle of extreme weather events has known no respite: from spring appeared the crimson weather maps of India, crushed under a heat wave as intense as early, often above 45°C; in June, a “heat dome” enveloped 120 million Americans, followed by a procession of thunderstorms and floods, devastating the famous Yellowstone Park.
Then came the giant forest fires in Spain and Portugal, the deadly fall of a glacier in Italy, or the historic drought over half of China, emptying the emblematic Yangtze, a vital source of drinking water and electricity.
– As expected –
While it is too early to attribute this or that phenomenon to global warming, their accumulation is in line with forecasts.
“The increase in global temperature caused by the use of fossil fuels has been predicted correctly since the 1970s”, recalls Professor Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
The heat waves are repeated, longer, hotter, and “the magnitude of the phenomenon corresponds to what was expected globally”, as does the increase in extreme precipitation and droughts, “predicted three decades ago”.
However, “Europe is a heatwave hotspot, showing upward trends three to four times faster than the rest of the mid-northern latitudes.” In the United Kingdom, the 40°C mark was crossed for the first time this summer, when the French Atlantic coast sometimes pulverized its records of 4 or 5°C.
“We can wonder if the drought that hit the northern hemisphere in 2022 can be among the most serious in modern history in terms of its scale and intensity,” Omar Baddour, an expert at the Organization, told AFP. (WMO), which is preparing a scientific assessment for COP27 in November in Egypt.
The effects of heat and drought often combined. However, each degree Celsius of global warming is equivalent to 7% of water evaporation in the atmosphere, according to UN climate experts (IPCC).
– “If we do nothing” –
Not without consequences, at all levels: in Pakistan, the cataclysmic monsoons killed more than 1,100 people, drowned a third of the country, destroyed crops and hit more than 33 million inhabitants.
China, experiencing its hottest summer in six decades, has increased its production of coal, which emits a lot of greenhouse gases, to compensate for the shutdown of its hydroelectric dams.
In Europe, extremely dry vegetation caught fire with ease in several countries, fields of corn in France roasted on their feet while dead leaves littered the streets of London as early as August.
Summer 2022, the coolest of the rest of our lives? “No, we will have cooler summers than 2022”, assures climatologist Jean Jouzel, “but these hot summers will become more and more frequent” and “around 2040-2050, summer 2022 will become the norm”.
However, “what is needed is to leave hope to people, to young people: how do we actually respect carbon neutrality in 2050?”, Launched the scientist Thursday on BFMTV.
To achieve this, does the infernal summer at least have the merit of raising awareness? “It is not because we doubted the reality of global warming that we did not act, and it is not because we see it that we will start to act: in environmental matters , we must disconnect consciousness and action”, warns CNRS geographer Xavier Arnauld de Sartre. Above all, he points out “a lack of will”.
At the American NGO Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), summer has in any case been renamed: “the beautiful season” is now called “the season of dangers”.
