2023-08-04 11:44:10
extreme heat that calcinates the northern hemisphere, from China to the North American West coast, has just left its brief flaming wake in the winter of Argentina, Chile and also Uruguay. The high temperatures have something more than the effect of a meteorological anomaly: they anticipate disorders that are presumed unprecedented for the summer, which begins on December 21. In fact, it already showed how torrid it can be at the end of last March, at the gates of autumn, when the cities of the southern cone had to endure 40ºC.
He climate change is no longer a mere projection. It is felt in the air, it erupts in the form of a tornado or a flood, it leaves its marks in the drought. To that is added the El Niño phenomenon, which is nothing more than the increase in maritime temperature, which fluctuates between +1.5 and 6 ºC above normal. That usually causes precipitation, floods and avalanches, as well as sweltering heat waves. The combination of both factors It is the source of trouble.
30ºC in Buenos Aires
There was a time in Buenos Aires and even Santiago de Chile when the cold could be more than a nuisance. That is already part of the past. The unprecedented and at the same time disturbing it comes hand in hand with heat in winter, which is a contradiction to which specialists are beginning to get used to. In fact, last Tuesday 30ºC was registered in the Argentine capital, the value highest since the National Weather Service records daily weather variations. It would be necessary to go back to 1942 to find an approximate case: 24.6 ºC. The Chilean town of Vicuña, in the mountain range of the Coquimbo region, some 450 kilometers north of Santiago, recorded 37ºC on Tuesday, the highest figure since 1951. Similar temperatures were recorded in several Uruguayan cities on Wednesday.
melting of glaciers
10 years ago we had two heat waves a year and now we are talking about nine,” says the climatologist of the University of Santiago Raúl Cordero. One of the most important effects is the melting of snow accumulated in the mountains, vital for the water supply in the Chilean capital. The impact on the glaciers, on both sides of the Andes, is, in his opinion, devastating.
“What we are experiencing is the superimposition of two phenomena: the global warming trend due to climate change plus the El Niño phenomenon,” explained Maisa Rojas, Chile’s Minister of the Environment, also a climatologist. “Therefore, when El Niño ends, the global weather situation should stop being so extreme,” he added.
heat at the poles
Rojas has also warned of the effects of heat at the poles: “The ice around the polar zones is at minimum values. Especially around Antarctica – where at this time the sea ice grows to reach a maximum in September – is at an all-time low,” he said on social media.
Earlier this week, the Argentine press reported on a detachment of a significant amount of sea ice in the vast south polar region. equivalent to the size of Argentina. The scientific community immediately clarified that it had not been a separation as such, but rather another phenomenon associated with global warming. “Sea ice is measured day by day with satellite images. By July 2023, the amount of ice that has frozen is much less than a reference value of 30 years ago,” explains the head of the Department of Glaciology at the Antarctic Institute. Argentine (IAA), Sebastián Marinsek.
The agenda
The Chilean minister remarked: “We know the solution: urgently stop burning fossil fuels!“However, global warming is not a dominant issue on the political agenda. In fact, the new Constitution being drafted in Chile, with a clear predominance of the ultra-right, is seen as a dangerous setback on the matter, against the grain of what the Government of Gabriel Boric currently proposes in a minority.In Argentina, both the Peronism, in power, and the opposition, are committed to gas exploitation and, shortly, oil exploration on the coasts of Buenos Aires.
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