Wildfires, heavy rains and melting glaciers

Climate Focus

By Sharon Kimathi, Energy and ESG Editor, Reuters Digital

Hello,

Today’s newsletter picks up where yesterday’s left off as extreme weather continues to plague nations around the world. Chile, Bolivia and Brazil are struggling with droughts and wildfires, while India, Pakistan and China are racing to rescue victims affected by heavy rains.

To top it all off, a scientific study published in the journal Science found that the recent glacier retreat across the Andes is unprecedented in the history of human civilization.

The discovery shocked scientists, who had set out to study the current state of glaciers and how they had varied over the ages.

“I would bet my whole life savings that … these glaciers are smaller than they’ve been since the last interglacial period,” which ended about 115,000 years ago, Andrew Gorin, the lead author of the study, said.

The study collected data at four glaciers across the Andes, home to more than 99% of the world’s tropical glaciers. These glaciers are more susceptible to changing weather since they’re consistently at or near freezing point.

“I think that it’s a sign that we’re now departing from the condition, the climatic conditions that we’ve been used to, that we’ve built our global civilization, as we know it, in,” Gorin said.

Reuters correspondent Alexander Villegas recently climbed multiple mountains across the Andes to see the changes mountaineers were witnessing first hand as glaciers retreated. 

Many described increasingly dangerous conditions and changes unprecedented in their lifetimes.

Villegas writes about Chile’s towering 5,400-meter El Plomo mountain, where an Incan mummy was found near the summit in 1954, perfectly preserved due to the mountain’s dry and cold conditions.

Rising global temperatures due to climate change have led the glacier there to retreat and the permafrost to melt. New lagoons have formed and ruptured, landslides have injured climbers and massive sinkholes have opened up, breaking up the ancient path to the summit.

Click here to read the full special report.

Today’s top Climate Buzz story highlights the drought in Chile. Not a single drop of rain fell in Santiago or Chile’s metropolitan region last month, the first time that has happened in July since records began.

Chile has been suffering a devastating drought for more than a decade and, while heavy rains in June brought some relief to drought-hit lakes, the dry July is a sign that these conditions are likely to persist.

Firefighters battle a wildfire as the departmental government decreed a state of emergency due to extreme weather, San Lorenzo de Robore, Bolivia. REUTERS/Jorge Parada

Bolivia has grappled with a record number of fires in the first seven months of the year, satellite data showed. Flames have sent villagers fleeing, killed wildlife and charred the landscape.

Diesel shortages across the country are further complicating firefighting efforts by making it more difficult to reach remote areas, local charities said.

Bolivia registered roughly 17,700 fire points from January through July, the most ever seen in that period in the country, according to data from Brazil’s space research agency Inpe, which monitors fires in all of South America.

The number of fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest region surged to a near two-decade high for the month of July, government data showed, amid a drought in the region fanned by climate change.

The Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, plays a vital role in curbing global warming because of the vast amounts of greenhouse gas it absorbs.

China had its hottest month in modern history in July, state media reported.

The nation was roiled by months of extreme weather that hit southern provinces with record rain and parched northern regions with heat waves. 

Rescuers in China scrambled to locate dozens of people still missing a week after the year’s most powerful typhoon, Gaemi, roared into the southern province of Hunan on July 25. Emergency workers rushed to seal breached dykes on swollen rivers.

Floods brought by torrential rains in Pakistan caused damage that killed at least 30 people this week, authorities said on Friday, as the second-largest city of Lahore was drenched in the most rainfall it has received in more than four decades.

The arrival of the monsoon season has sparked floods and landslides across South Asia in the past week, with at least 195 people killed and almost 200 missing in one disaster in neighboring India.

Hopes of finding survivors began to fade as hundreds of rescuers worked through slush and rocks and pulled out bodies from debris in the hills of India’s Kerala state, a day after 167 people were killed in monsoon landslides. You can watch our video here, and read more about it here.

A fast-moving wildfire has killed at least one person in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Colorado, one of a handful of blazes burning across the state. 

Across the United States, more than 29,000 firefighters and support personnel are tackling 93 large wildfires covering more than 2 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

California’s Park Fire, the largest, has burned more than 600 square miles (1,550 square km) as of Thursday morning, an area bigger than the city of Los Angeles, state fire officials said. It ranks as the fifth largest fire in the state’s history and could soon become the fourth.

The number of male mosquitos a Spanish laboratory is breeding and sterilizing to fight dengue fever and other diseases as climate change encourages the invasive species to spread across Europe.

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