2024-01-28 03:37:15
After climate authorities, such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), declared 2023 as the hottest year on record, everything indicates that in 2024 records will continue to be broken in a scenario in which the combination more intense season of the El Niño phenomenon and climate change will play an important role.
(You may be interested: This would be the hottest January in the last 30 years: Ideam)
“It is evident that the transition from a La Niña episode – and its cooling effect – to an El Niño episode – and its warming effect – that occurred in mid-2023 has influenced the increase in temperature last year The effects of El Niño on global temperatures are usually more intense following the episode has reached its peak, so 2024 might be even hotter,” Professor Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the WMO, explained this month.
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A prediction that seems to be corroborated by the scenes of devastating forest fires and the records of high temperatures that have been recorded not only in Colombian municipalities, but in several cities in South America. Extreme events that scientists attribute without hesitation to the effects that human intervention has had on the planet.
And, although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has indicated that scientific evidence does not show so far that global warming has itself modified how El Niño or La Niña phenomena occur and develop – warming or cooling of the Pacific Ocean -, recognize that its effects on the climate of the regions are amplified by the climate crisis.
As explained by the professor at the University of Antioquia, Paola Arias, who is part of the IPCC, what we are seeing today is a kind of perfect storm in which several factors come together: “It ends up being a combination of many things. On the one hand, we are going through an El Niño phenomenon that generates dry and warm conditions in Colombia, but we are also in a few months of dry season for our region, where temperatures tend to be higher, to which climate change is added. and we know that in general the temperatures of the planet are increasing.”
In this way we have a formula that favors the production of meteorological conditions that favor, for example, drier and flammable vegetation that encourages forest fires such as those in the eastern hills of Bogotá. With aggravating factors, as Professor Arias points out, in the particular case of these fires that drown the residents of the capital, they are generated in areas where the natural cover has been replaced by species such as pines and eucalyptus, which are easy fuel for the flames.
(You may be interested in: ‘We are just at the beginning of the crisis’: Minambiente on forest fires)
“All these factors show that there is something natural, like the issue that El Niño is occurring, but there is clear human intervention. Just by having coverage changes that were generated by human beings and having direct action in terms of generating the fire. There is a direct intervention and also the fact that temperatures are increasing due to climate change,” details the UdeA professor.
The IPCC also concluded that the effects of extreme El Niño and La Niña events are likely to become more severe as the planet continues to warm. In this sense, the professor at the National University, Germán Poveda, who was part of this group of experts between 1998 and 2015, points out that “it is clear that El Niño is playing a crucial role in explaining the magnitude and extent of hydrological droughts. , meteorological and agricultural, as well as the high temperatures that we are experiencing these days.
And he adds: “There is increasing certainty that climate change caused by man (due to the emission of greenhouse gases, burning of fossil fuels and deforestation) is causing El Niño (and La Niña) phenomena that are increasingly more frequent and more intense. “, indicates the teacher.
Furthermore, he points out that a recent study has just demonstrated the same thing in relation to the current drought that the Amazon basin and northern South America, including Colombia, are suffering: “El Niño reduced the amount of precipitation in the region to approximately the same extent as climate change; however, the strong drought trend was almost entirely due to rising global temperatures, so the severity of drought currently being experienced is largely due to climate change.”
(Also read: Ministers talk regarding the fires: situation may worsen in February)
On the other hand, experts such as Professor Catalina González Arango, from the Department of Biological Sciences of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of the Andes, agree that there is scientific evidence that would show that El Niño has indeed been intensifying.
“It seems that as there is more heat in the oceans due to global warming, processes like El Niño intensify. That is why since 1960 there has been a tendency to have more and more intense El Niño phenomena,” says the teacher, who is agree that the convergence of this climatic event with Colombian hydrometeorology, dry at this time of year, makes this 2024 season perfect for generating and spreading fires.
What is clear is that in a climate change scenario, the trend is not to improve the conditions of the planet. According to the WMO, in the last decade (2011 and 2020) the rate of this phenomenon increased alarmingly, making it the warmest decade since records began.
A report that also warned that the continued increase in greenhouse gas concentrations led to unprecedented land and ocean temperatures and fueled a drastic acceleration of ice melting and sea level rise.
SCIENCE EDITING
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