UN Advisor Says: “Flooded Brazil ‘Ghost Town’
A Climate Warning To World
Jake Spring / Reuters
SAO PAULO (June 25, 2024) — Record floods that killed over 170 people and displaced half a million in southern Brazil are a warning sign of more disasters to come throughout the Americas because of climate change, an official at the United Nations’ refugee agency said on Tuesday.
Roughly 389,000 people in the state of Rio Grande do Sul remain displaced from their homes because of the intense rain and flooding, which local officials say was the worst disaster in the region’s history. Scientists say climate change made the flooding twice as likely to happen.
Andrew Harper, special advisor on climate action to the refugee agency UNHCR, visited a flooded neighborhood in state capital Porto Alegre over the weekend and called it “a ghost town.”
“It was underwater for almost 40 days. There wasn’t even any rats running around. Everything had died,” Harper said in an interview on Tuesday.”
Heat Kills Thousands; Big Events Must Adjust
Damien Cave and Somini Sengupta / The New York Times
(June 25, 2024) — “The deaths of at least 1,300 pilgrims during the hajj point to the growing threat that climate change poses to beloved gatherings.”
“At large events all over the world, the scenes of extreme heat stress are starting to look familiar. Older men, shirts undone, lying down with their eyes closed. Aid tents packed with the unconscious. And lines of the faithful — whether they seek religion, music, ballot boxes or sport — sweating under slivers of shade.
The consequences have been dire. At this year’s hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, at least 1,300 people died as temperatures surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And in many ways, that heavy toll was just the latest sign that crowd control and heat waves fueled by climate change are on a dangerous collision course.
During India’s recent election, dozens of poll workers died on the job. Last summer, troops of Boy Scouts visiting South Korea for a jubilee became sick from heat, as did others at music festivals in Australia, Europe and North America.
Even as heat kills more people today than any other extreme weather event, there is still a dangerous cultural lag. Many major-event organizers and attendees are still behind the climate curve, failing to contend with just how much a warming planet has elevated the risk to summer crowds.”
Texas, California Cities Threatened by
Worsening Fires Amid Fields of Oil Wells
(June 21, 2024) — “More frequent and destructive fires are combining with booming oil production to put towns across the American West at risk, a new study has found.
These trends are made more dangerous by both rising temperatures and the sprawl of Western towns — driven by rising populations — into the increasingly fire-prone wildlands that surround them, the study in the journal One Earth found.
As more than 350,000 houses have been built each year in this wildland-urban interface (WUI), these outlying areas have also become the sites of tens of thousands of new oil and gas wells — sites that both contribute to, and are put at risk by, a new age of destructive fire.
The study found that about 3 million people currently live within about a half mile (1 km) of highly wildfire-threatened wells, and more than 10 million people live near wells that face moderate risk — a disproportionate number of whom are lower-income and people of color.”
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