Dan Collyns in Piura and Jonathan Watts
Friday 17 March 2017
Sixty-seven people have been killed and thousands more forced to evacuate by intense rains which damaged 115,000 homes and destroyed more than 100 bridges in Peru’s worst floods in recent memory.
[That's the number known to be killed so far.]
“We are confronting a serious climatic problem,” said Peru’s president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, in a broadcast to the nation on Friday afternoon. “There hasn’t been an incident of this strength along the coast of Peru since 1998.”
The disaster – which came after a period of severe drought – has been blamed on abnormally high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, and fuelled criticism that the country is ill-prepared for the growing challenges of climate change.
Over the past three days, the downpour has burst river banks, created mudslides, collapsed bridges, closed roads and forced school suspensions in swaths of the west and north of the country.
Rains continued to lash the northern Piura region where streets remained flooded in the regional capital and homes had been washed away in poorer neighbourhoods.
•••••
Abraham Levy, a Peruvian meteorologist, said the weather conditions were “extremely unusual” and the storms and flooding were caused by the “atypical” warming of sea surface temperatures off Peru’s northern coast by five to six degrees to 29C.
He described the phenomenon as a “coastal El Niño”. The last time this was seen was nearly a century ago in 1925.
“We’ve had these kinds of El Niños as long as we have historical data, so it’s very difficult to link climate change or even global warming to these events,” he said.
[Global warming is inevitably making such events stronger and more frequent.]
Other scientists say a global trend of rising sea temperatures was likely to have contributed to the recent storms.
•••••
Abraham Levy, a Peruvian meteorologist, said the weather conditions were “extremely unusual” and the storms and flooding were caused by the “atypical” warming of sea surface temperatures off Peru’s northern coast by five to six degrees to 29C.
He described the phenomenon as a “coastal El Niño”. The last time this was seen was nearly a century ago in 1925.
“We’ve had these kinds of El Niños as long as we have historical data, so it’s very difficult to link climate change or even global warming to these events,” he said.
Other scientists say a global trend of rising sea temperatures was likely to have contributed to the recent storms.
•••••
Scientists accused Peruvian authorities of ignoring a warning to countries in the region that there was a severe risk of drought, and opposition politicians have accused the government of failing to respond adequately to forecasts of increasingly frequent extreme weather events.
[Which is what the republicans are doing now in the U.S.]
•••••
tags: extreme weather
No comments:
Post a Comment