Over five million people at risk of their homes being evicted in Japan, plagued by unprecedented torrential rains; dozens of deaths in the floods in Turkey, while in Siberia the forest burns in the largest fire in the world: the planet is caught between water and fire in extreme phenomena that with global climate warming, according to experts, are only destined to increase. In Japan, the disaster, which has already caused at least one death and three missing, affects 21 prefectures in the southwest, where 14 rivers have overflowed, the roads are flooded and there are about fifteen landslides and landslides. The maximum alert, level 5, involves the prefectures of Saga – where a hospital has remained isolated -, Nagasaki, Fukuoka, on the southern island of Kyushu, and Hiroshima, in the south of the main island of Honshu, where one million and 800,000 people were reached by the order to leave their homes immediately. Alarm for at least another 4 million inhabitants of another 17 prefectures, also at risk of having to evacuate. The confirmed victim is a 59-year-old woman, whose home was swept away by mud in Unzen, near Nagasaki, with three family members who are now missing.
Images posted on social media show residents walking in thigh-high water in flooded streets, carrying children and personal items. Firefighters and other rescuers rescued people who were stranded by loading them onto rubber boats. “Unprecedented levels of rainfall have been observed,” said Yushi Adachi, an official with the National Meteorological Agency, pointing out that the overheated atmosphere holds more water.
In Turkey, floods and landslides along the north coast of the Black Sea have resulted in at least 44 deaths, as well as the collapse of homes and infrastructure, according to the latest toll. In the coastal province of Kastamonu alone, the dead, according to the Turkish civil protection (Afad), are at least 36, but nothing is known about hundreds of other people.
In the hottest summer ever recorded, the opposite problem plagues Siberia, where hundreds of fronts form the largest fire on the planet, greater than the combined ones currently ravaging the United States, Canada, Turkey, Greece, Southern Italy. , Spain and North Africa. The vast northeastern Siberian region of Yakutia, which has the lowest temperatures in the world in winter, is prey to the flames that have already devoured over 160,000 square kilometers of taiga, the sub-arctic forest. According to NASA, Siberian smoke arrived at the North Pole for the first time.
Extreme phenomena destined to increase in frequency and also in intensity, according to Sandro Fuzzi, researcher at the CNR Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science, one of the drafters of the latest report by the International Committee on Climate Change (IPCC). «It is certainly not possible to identify the specific cause of this or other phenomena – he says -, but know that there is an intensification of all these problems. It is a process already underway: it is not the future but it is the present “, and” the scientific evidence is all there, indeed it has been there for more or less 10 years and this latest IPCC report has confirmed it “.