COMMENTS
To be or not to be, it is the weather that decides. A little rewriting of Shakespeare, and a little look at the world, tells us that the weather is also existential.
FLAME SEA: Firefighters are working bravely against the flames in Siberia, where record temperatures have been measured again this year. Photo: Maksim Slutsky / AP / NTB
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Internal comments: This is a comment. The commentary expresses the writer’s attitude.
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The weather is over us. More than 200 people have died in Germany and Belgium due to floods, and several hundred are missing. In Henan Province, China, on the other side of the globe, at least 25 people have been killed, including after floods, many of them in the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, where dramatic images showed the subway overflowing. The heavy rainfall in Europe is now moving east, and perhaps we will have a repeat of the floods in 2013, when Central Europe overflowed, 26 people died, and the Danube was at its highest in 500 years. So the weather is not just over us. It is also below us, tearing the ground away under our feet.
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At the same time so experience New York suddenly having the worst air quality anywhere in the world. It is not common at all. But it is also not that the city is filled with smoke from the uncontrolled fires on the west coast of the United States and Canada. Pictures show symbolically that the Statue of Liberty is just a shadow of herself, and she may have to be washed when the smoke disappears. Pregnant women and the elderly are particularly vulnerable, say the city’s health authorities. And a scale shows that the pollution is 157, but the scale really only goes to 100, because it is considered absolutely dangerous to health. Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Toronto in Canada, and many other towns and cities on the east coast, are also affected by the poison from the west.
For a year since Moscow was also full of smoke, so people were advised to stay inside and peel all the hatches as best they could. The smoke in Moscow came from the annual, uncontrolled fires in Siberia. Every year, areas as large as a medium-sized European country such as Portugal burn up. Or down. Last summer, 38 degrees Celsius was measured in the town of Verkhojansk by the river Jana. The city is in winter the coldest place on the planet if we disregard Antarctica. In the city, 67.8 degrees Celsius has been measured. The distance between cold and heat is thus almost 106 degrees. We are talking about the fact that in one and the same place it is 2.4 degrees warmer than the heat record in Norway, at Nesbyen in Hallingdalen. And 16.4 degrees colder than the cold record in Norway, in Karasjok in Finnmark.
The sickest toys ever
The heat in Eastern Siberia is the highest in the 130 years it has been measured, and five degrees higher than the average in the last years until 2010. The record heat, and a scorching midnight sun that never sets, contribute to the disaster. For it is not only the forest that is burning, it is the earth itself that has caught fire. Or more precisely, the bog, because it is the material that in Norway in the old days was used to fire with, peat, which is now on fire. And it emits enormous amounts of carbon every year, many times more than the equivalent cubic meters of timber.
The week from hell
Climate change will create several slow-moving storms, which hang over the same areas for longer periods than before, shows a study published in Geophysical Research Letters. It creates larger floods than before. With a warmer atmosphere, which accompanies climate change, there will be more rain released in the clouds. Calculations show that storms of the type we now see in Germany and Belgium, and in China, will be 14 times more frequent by the end of the century. 14 times !!! And this is strong. Because in Dagbladet’s language template, it is forbidden to use exclamation marks.
And what consequences will this have for how people build and live? In other words, it is not just cities and densely populated areas by the sea that will disappear because the sea is rising, and will rise more. Buildings along rivers are also exposed. And this is where we have built and lived since the dawn of time. It was here that the life-giving water was, which could irrigate our fields, and quench the thirst of men and beasts. And it was here that there were traffic hubs that contributed to the trade and establishment of cities. What now?
The touch anxiety
The difference of one Accident and disaster is not just what former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said of his challenger, William Gladstone: “It will be an accident if Gladstone falls into the Thames, but a disaster if someone pulls him back up.” No, the difference between an accident and a catastrophe is only a few tenths of a degree on the scale. The Paris Agreement sets a 1.5 degree increase in temperature as a goal. But already now the temperature is 1.2 degrees higher than in pre-industrial times. And it’s just going to get hotter. It will lead to more, and wilder weather. And for every tenth degree of warmer weather, the storm will be even more upon us. Or below us.
Therefore, the weather has been existential; to be or not to be, it is the weather that decides.
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