The first time we saw this video, our thoughts went to popular blockbusters like Geostorm or The Day After Tomorrow, Hollywood disaster movies that show the vagaries of a climate gone mad by playing a bit with science and a bit with eco-catastrophism. . This is why seeing the images coming from China first made people raise their eyebrows and then wrinkle their noses. Meanwhile, the facts. The published images were posted to social media on Monday, February 19.
Among the first to spread it in Western media was the popular Chinese writer and Falun Gong activist, Jennifer Zeng, now a refugee in Australia, who republished videos already circulating on Beijing’s social networks, referring to the devastating effects of climate change. It would therefore naturally come to most people to think about the link between the “warming” of the Earth’s climate and what appear to be the effects of an ice age. To try to clarify things we consulted the climatologist Giulio Betti, meteorologist of the Lamma consortium.
“As strange as it may seem, it is a fact that falls within the scientific literature” Betti tells Today.it after analyzing the video. According to the geolocation of the images we are in fact in the Xinjiang region, in the heart of the Mongolian steppe where “normally” in this period you can breathe a decidedly Siberian cold.
As shown by several images published in local newspapers, entire flocks were living along the Aksu river in recent days, which despite the winter period was only half frozen. This is because the winter in China saw very important positive anomalies: “We are talking about several degrees above the average for the period. If we think we had a mild winter in Italy, in these Asian regions, since the beginning of the winter, between 4 and 6 degrees Celsius higher than normal and in the last few days the positive anomalies had even reached 10/12 degrees higher than what we could have expected for this season of the year” explains the Cnr climatologist.
But between 16 and 18 February there was a real thermal collapse with temperatures that returned to the average for the period, indeed, below the average, resulting in a negative anomaly of 12 degrees Celisius on 19 February. “We are talking about a drop in temperatures of around 30 degrees in a few hours caused by the arrival of a cold front from Mongolia.”
In China temperatures drop to -52 degrees: massacre of waterfowl
So the “suddenly polar era” images are quickly explained. “Obviously it wasn’t that the wild animals suddenly found themselves freezing, nor did they await their fate without doing anything – explains Betti – it is very probable that when the cold currents arrived the birds tried to take flight and to move away.” However, the strong descending currents may have trapped the animals, disorientating them and causing them to fall back onto the lake which, as the temperatures dropped, froze, trapping ducks, geese and all those who were unable to move away while the absolute temperatures plummeted to – 52 degrees Celsius.
“The real anomaly was the unseasonal heat, the thermal collapse was just a return to normality. But the difficulty is adapting to such sudden changes” explains climatologist Betti to Today.it
This is an anomaly linked to climate change, with long periods of unseasonal temperatures which are also causing animals to become unaccustomed. The first effects of a new world in which we will have to learn to live with sudden changes in temperature and extreme events linked to the great energies at play in the atmosphere.
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