Traces of Chilean fires and California floods: El Niño and warming

Two remote corners of the world, known for their temperate climates, are hit by deadly disasters.

Fires have killed more than 120 people on Chile’s forested slopes, and record rainfall has overflowed rivers and caused landslides in Southern California.

Behind these risks there are two powerful forces:

He climate changewhich can intensify both rain and drought, and the natural weather phenomenon known as The boywhich can also overestimate extreme weather conditions.

In California, meteorologists had been warning for days that an unusually strong storm, known as atmospheric river, it was gaining strength due to the extraordinarily high temperatures of the Pacific Ocean.

The rains began over the weekend and several counties declared states of emergency.

Authorities warned Monday that the Los Angeles area could experience flooding in a single day to the tune of a year of rain.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Chile has almost that a decade of drought.

This set the stage for a hellish weekend, in which, in the midst of a severe heat wave, forest fires broke out.

The president has since declared two days of national mourning and warned that the death toll from the devastating blazes could “increase significantly”.

Both floods and fires reflect the situation extreme weather risks caused by a dangerous cocktail of global warming, caused primarily by the use of fossil fuels, and this year’s El Niño, a cyclical weather phenomenon characterized by a warming of the Pacific Ocean near the equator.

The disasters in Chile and California occur after the hottest year on land and in the oceans.

They announce what will almost certainly happen one of the five warmest years on recordaccording to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“These synchronized fires and floods in Chile and California are certainly a reminder of extreme weather events and their repercussions on otherwise benign Mediterranean climates,” John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist at the University of California, Merced, said in an email .

Climate variables, along with the effects of El Niño, “are the main instruments in the orchestra of individual extreme events,” he said, “with the drum of climate change beating louder and louder with each passing year.”

In the case of California, extraordinarily high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean have replaced the atmospheric river storms that began Saturday and are expected to continue for at least another day.

Some areas of the Santa Monica Mountains recorded more than 7 inches of rain over the weekend, causing landslides in some areas. wealthier neighborhoods of the Angels.

As much as 14 inches of rain may have fallen in some parts of the region on Monday, which is close to the annual rainfall average.

City and state officials urged people to stay off the streets.

The two disasters highlight what some experts call an underestimated danger of climate change.

While a lot of money and attention has been devoted to drought preparedness in California, the chances of back-to-back severe storms are also increasing in a warming climate.

“We’re not really prepared,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a video posted online Monday morning.

“We have neglected to take seriously the plausible large increases in… flood risk in an increasingly warm climate,” he said.

Brett F. Sanders, an engineering professor at the University of California, Irvine who specializes in flood management, said river weather events like the one now affecting the state have been predicted by climate models and pose new challenges for planners urban.

“The mindset in the past was that we could control floods and contain where they occurred.

Outside of that, communities, businesses and residents could go about their business without worrying about flooding,” Sanders explains.

“But now we know that, throughout the United States, infrastructure is insufficient to contain today’s extreme weather conditions.

Extreme conditions

Chile has been subjected to extreme weather conditions due to an incessant drought for much of the last decade, which has dried out forests and depleted water supplies.

Over the weekend there was a strong heat wave that left the traces of a period of El Niño.

During an El Niño, warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures in some areas of the Pacific can affect global weather patterns, increasing precipitation in some places and worsening drought in others.

It didn’t help that, in the heat- and drought-stricken regions of Chile, there were large plantations of monocultures of highly flammable trees near cities and towns.

When a fire broke out, strong, hot winds quickly spread the flames.

An aerial video was shown cars and houses burned in one of the most famous tourist destinations in the country, in the region of Valparaíso.

Chile is no stranger to wildfires during the hot summer months.

It is estimated that they have burned in the last decade 1.7 million hectarestriple compared to the previous decade.

According to a recent study published in the journal Nature“the concomitance of El Niño, drought and climate-induced heat waves increase the risk of local fires and have contributed decisively to the intense fire activity recently observed in central Chile.”

This year the government has increased funding for fighting fires.

It wasn’t enough to prevent the country’s worst fires in the past decade.

Sarah Feron, one of the study’s authors, sees it as a sign of things to come.

“In some regions of the world we are facing climate-related disasters for which we are not prepared and to which we will probably not be able to fully adapt,” he said.

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