![]() ![]() They were also missing crucial data, as some measurement stations were destroyed by the floods. The scientists acknowledged their estimate – 1.2 to 9 times more likely, due to climate change – was a wide range, and explained that the models they used and the data available to them around such localized events prevented them from narrowing their findings down further. “We are just facing more extreme events of many kinds, and the only thing we can do is, on the one hand, closing the tap off the increase in greenhouse gases to avoid the risk of getting further out of hand, and on the other hand, preparing for that more extreme climate.” “I hope it’s a wake-up call also to people that have not just been affected by this one, but also people elsewhere – because it’s been heatwaves elsewhere, where I could tell a similar story,” he said. Rain fell at the normally snowy summit of Greenland for the first time on record Melted water runs over the Greenlandic Icecap, east to the town of Ilulissat. Van Aalst said that the findings should be a “wake-up call” for governments and local leaders to improve their preparedness for extreme weather events, including looking at how homes are constructed so that children, the elderly and people with disabilities can reach safety in events like floods or fires. Specifically, if global temperatures rose to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the intensity of rain in a single day would increase by a further 0.8 to 6% and would be between 1.2 and 1.4 times more likely to happen, their models project. They warned that the warmer Earth gets, the more frequent and intense these rain events will be. The scientists looked at weather records and used computer simulations to compare the picture today – in a world that is 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in pre-industrial times – to that of the late 1800s. But they also took into account what was happening across a larger region, including parts of France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland, to establish how the extreme weather event had been influenced by increasing global temperatures. The scientists focused on the areas around the Ahr and Erft rivers in Germany and the Meuse in Belgium, where rainfall records were broken. The Ahr River in Insul, Germany, on Jafter heavy rainfall. But it’s basically a one-over-400 chance every single year,” van Aalst said at a news conference. So, if anything, we’re expecting a higher chance of this happening next year than this year. ![]() “In this case, possibly worse because, year by year, if the trend so far is that the climate is increasing, the risk will continue to grow. The one-in-400-year frequency only refers to the particular region studied and does not mean it will be another 400 years until other parts of Europe, or the world, will see a similar weather event, explained Maarten van Aalst, a professor of climate and disaster resilience from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. UNICEF/Ricardo FrancoĪ billion children are at 'extremely high risk' of climate shocks, UNICEF says Beira is still recovering from the devastation caused by Cyclone Idai in March 2019, a category 4 storm that claimed hundreds of lives and affected 3 million across Mozambique, Madagascar, Malawi and Zimbabwe. The country is facing the arrival of Cyclone Eloise at 03:00 UTC on 23 January 2021, a storm poised to deliver up to 200 km/hr gusts of wind and 3.5 meters of storm surge. On 22 January 2021, a child walks near rising water in the neighbourhood of Praia Nova in Beira, Mozambique.
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