Questão 20 - UNITAU Inverno Medicina 2024

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Deadly Floods in Brazil Were Worsened by Climate Change, Study finds.

 

The country’s south received three months’ rain in two weeks. Global warming has made such deluges twice as likely as before, scientists said.

By Raymond Zhong and Manuela Andreoni

June 3, 2024

 

Human-caused warming has doubled the chances that southern Brazil will experience extreme, multiday downpours like the ones that recently caused disastrous flooding there, a team of scientists said on Monday. The deluges have killed at least 172 people and displaced more than half a million residents from their homes.

Three months’ rain fell in a two-week span of April and May in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. After analyzing weather records, the scientists estimated that the region had a 1 percent chance each year of receiving so much rain in so little time. In the cooler climate of the 19th century, before large-scale emissions of greenhouse gases, such colossal downpours were far rarer, the researchers said.

When the latest rains hit, Rio Grande do Sul was still recovering from floods that killed at least 54 people late last year. Three of the four largest floods ever recorded in the state’s capital, Porto Alegre, have now occurred in the past nine months, said Regina Rodrigues, a professor of physical oceanography at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and one of the scientists who worked the new analysis of the climate situation in the south. “While significant floods have occurred in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in the past, they are becoming increasingly strong and widespread,” Dr. Rodrigues said at a news conference. The floods damaged roads, bridges, airports and transmission lines. They ruined soy, rice and wheat crops, which are essential to Brazil’s food supply and economy. Schools closed for weeks, leaving hundreds of thousands of students out of the classroom.

Years of scientific studies have warned that climate change would lead to more intense rainfall and flooding in southern Brazil. But politicians still struggle to accept and act on future climate risks, said Natalie Unterstell, the head of Talanoa, a climate policy research institute in Brazil.“The willingness to listen to scientific information hasn’t translated into decision and investments based on long-term considerations,” she added.

Disponível em https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/climate/brazil-floodsclimate-change.html Acesso 09 jun 2024

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