Posted by Bill Ryan
(here)
From AP News, yesterday:
Climate change brings extreme, early impact to South America
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“When I started filming them, I cried. I felt they were saying to me: ‘I’ve been left without a home, I’m leaving,’” Boloqui told the AP. “It got my attention seeing so many alligators moving together during the day. ... They are very slow reptiles who move at night to avoid heat.”
They, along with many other animals, found temporary refuge in a nearby lagoon that had dried up due to lack of rain and has since been artificially refilled with solar water pumps.
Local authorities attributed the fires to the burning of pastures for cattle ranching, which has been prohibited since December. IPCC experts stress in the report that droughts lay the groundwork for blazes that spread rapidly.
Brazil’s south and southeast regions last year faced their
worst droughts in nine decades, raising the specter of possible power rationing given the grid’s dependence on hydroelectric plants. Simultaneously, in Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon, rivers swelled
to levels unseen in over a century of record-keeping, flooding streets and houses and affecting some 450,000 people in the region.
This week, with most of Amazonian city Jordao plunged underwater, Indigenous leader and forest guard Josias Kaxinawá is working to bring any support he can to dozens of communities. He spent all day Wednesday rescuing people and their belongings using his small boat equipped with an outboard motor.
The Jordao and Tarauaca rivers join during the rainy season, which Kaxinawá and his neighbors didn’t expect for several more weeks. But this time, unlike last year, showers arrived not just too early, but also brutally, he told the AP.
“We are living our worst moment. Flood, rains, winds. Climate change is creating more problems for us. We are losing a lot of stuff, boats, household appliances, every crop we grew last year,” Kaxinawá said by phone from Jordao, adding he had never had seen so much rain in his area. “We worry about the future,” he said.
He added that the small city’s agricultural production is “virtually all destroyed.”
This jibes with the IPCC report, which says changes in the timing and magnitude of precipitation along with extreme temperatures are impacting agricultural production across Central and South America.
“Impacts on rural livelihoods and food security, particularly for small and medium-sized farmers and Indigenous Peoples in the mountains, are projected to worsen,” the report read.
Acre state’s government said at least 76 families have lost their homes in Jordao and around, most of them Indigenous and now living in a local shelter. But Mayor Naudo Ribeiro admitted the count was underestimated.
“This was too fast, there’s no way to prepare when it happens like this,” Ribeiro told local media.
More than 3,400 kilometers (2,100 miles) away in Petropolis, the Brazilian city ravaged by landslides last week, Mayor Rubens Bomtempo provided journalists with a similar comment just days before.
“This was totally unpredictable,” Bomtempo said. “No one could predict rain as hard as this.”
The IPCC report suggests events like these will continue to shake the region.
Re: Weird, wild weather: floods, freak storms, giant hail, record lows, all over the world
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