<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/26/britain-tropical-rain-parched-amazon-new-norms-messed-up-climate>
"Returning to British suburbia from the Brazilian Amazon is always
disconcerting, but it has been doubly weird in the past few days because the
London commuter belt has been inundated with volumes of rain that normally
belong in the tropics.
Mini-tornadoes, flash floods and the dumping of a month’s worth of rain in a
single day have flooded transport hubs, high street pubs, and the shrubs of
semidetached homes.
If that sounds unnatural, it is. This weather does not belong in the safe,
predictable, home counties of England. At least, not in a normal state of
affairs.
But ever-greater combustion of fossil fuels has turned the world’s climate on
its head. In the past week, the northern latitudes are behaving like the
equatorial margins.
The leafy suburb of Woburn in Bedfordshire, for example, was drenched in a sky
dump of more than 100mm (3.9in) of rain on Sunday, a month’s worth of rain in a
day. That’s a downpour worthy of the height of the rainy season in my Amazonian
home of Altamira, where I have lived for the past three years.
It felt similar too – thick dark clouds, brief intense bursts, drainage systems
instantly overloaded – as I walked home on Monday evening through the avenues
of Barnet. This weather doesn’t belong here, I thought.
Yet nowhere can rely on familiar patterns of rain or shine any more. That is
also true of the Brazilian rainforest, which is alarmingly starved of
precipitation.
Stretches of the Amazon River have dried up in the midst of a protracted
drought over the past year or more. Desiccated vegetation has created
tinder-like conditions. Neighbours back home send me messages warning of fires
that creep closer to our community. It is a similar story in the Pantanal
region, the world’s largest tropical wetland, and in the Cerrado savanna. Last
week, more than 60% of Brazil was enveloped in smoke.
The messed-up mess we call a climate becomes more deadly every day in
ever-wider swathes of the world. In the past week, floods have killed at least
384 people in Myanmar, 21 in central Europe, 10 in Morocco and six in Japan.
Social media timelines are filled with anomalous mobile phone photographs of
torrents of water flowing in all the wrong places: the Sahara in north Africa,
the streets of Cannes in the French Riviera, and through road tunnels under
railway bridges in Slough, England."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
