Time.news – From first rain in Greenland, to the historic freeze in Texas until summit Cop26 and the floods that hit three continents. CNN has compiled the list of the 10 most important news of 2021 regarding the climate and the fight against global warming.
In last place, the American broadcaster ranks the exceptional weather event that hit Greenland on August 14th: it rained for the first time in Summit Station, the research station founded by the National Science Foundation, located on the highest point of the Greenland glacier.
In ninth place, the historic frost that hit Texas in February and which showed how the climate crisis can produce extreme phenomena both hot and cold. Due to the frost wave, heavy blackouts occurred in the energy heart of the United States.
Those that CNN defines “the fatal floods that hit three continents in July“- parts of Western Europe, the Chinese province of Henan and the US state of Tennesse – are in eighth place: the floods killed over 300 people in Germany and Belgium, another 300 in China and about thirty in the US.
The seventh biggest news regarding the climate in 2021 it is the return of the USA to the Paris Agreement, one of Joe Biden’s first decisions in January following his inauguration in the White House.
In sixth place, CNN ranks the conclusions of the sixth IPCC report (the United Nations intergovernmental group on climate change) which in August spoke of a “red code” for humanity. Experts have established that man’s responsibility in the climate crisis is “unequivocal” and that some consequences are already “irreversible”.
The Cop26 summit in Galsgow, in November, it is the fifth news of the year. Upon completion, nearly 200 countries signed the Glasgow Climate Pact, which for the first time ever contains recognition of the role played by fossil fuels in perpetuating the climate crisis.
In fourth place in the ranking of the CNN is located l’uragano Ida, which in late August in the US destroyed homes, uprooted trees and left over a million people without electricity in Mississippi, before hitting Louisiana in the form of a storm.
At the end of a year already full of extreme weather conditions, on 12 and 13 December last, a series of tornadoes swept the Midwest and Southeast of the United States. The last month of the year is typically the quietest time for tornadoes, but high temperatures have caused the phenomenon, which CNN places as the third biggest climate news of 2021. In Kentucky, tornadoes have killed dozens of people. .
The second place is occupied by theunprecedented heat wave that killed hundreds of people in the Pacific Northwest in late June and in the Canadian province of British Columbia. For scientists, such anomalous temperatures can only be explained by man-made climate change.
Finally, the first climate news for 2021, according to CNN, is the “historic and multi-year drought” with which the United States is grappling and that experts have cited as evidence that the climate crisis affects not only the weather but also water supply, food production and electricity generation. In California, this summer’s drought was the most extreme in 126 years: July 2021 was the driest month since 1895.
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