To be a lie, the climate change thing hides it extraordinarily well. Not only in Europe. Also in the United States. There is still a third of summer left, and the season is being characterized, as is now almost traditional, by extreme temperatures – on land and in the sea -, devastating forest fires, droughts and floods due to the melting of glaciers that every year it's more important. The catastrophes will even have cultural consequences, since among the devastated areas are the locations of films such as Pirates of the Caribbean: At the end of the world; Jurassic Park; Papillon; or Die Another Day, the latter from the James Bond series, or the cover of the album that launched rock megastars U2 to fame, The Joshua Tree.
The last great fire, almost with macabre overtones, is taking place in the state of Hawaii, a chain of volcanic islands located 3,500 kilometers from the North American continental mass. On the island of Maui, the combination of a series of multi-spot wildfires and strong winds has destroyed the town of Lahaina, population 12,700, one of the territory's top resorts.
Lahaina and the adjacent region, where the Hollywood blockbusters mentioned above were filmed, among others, could have been the setting for a disaster film on this occasion, as it has been the scene of gruesome scenes in which the inhabitants and tourists from the town have had to jump into the sea before the unstoppable advance of the fire. The situation is so serious that the state authorities have mobilized the Coast Guard and have asked the owners of recreational and fishing boats to approach the area to rescue those who are fleeing.
The economic damage in a town where the price of many houses is several million dollars has not been quantified, but it is presumed to be substantial.. The situation, moreover, is not exclusive to Lahaina. Virtually all of Maui – the second largest island in the archipelago, with a surface area of 1,833 square kilometers, that is, somewhat less than the province of Guipúzcoa – is affected by different disasters. The state's lieutenant governor, Democrat Sylvia Luke, has declared that “our hospital system is overloaded with people with burns and respiratory problems due to fume inhalation.”. The hospital collapse is such that Maui, where only 170,000 people live, has begun to evacuate the injured by plane to other islands in the archipelago.
The Maui fire comes just two days after a fire that destroyed part of one of the most iconic places in the United States: the Mojave desert in California was extinguished.. The incident devastated some 38,000 hectares of the Mojave National Reserve and surrounding areas, especially impacting the so-called Joshua trees, from which U2's most successful album, The Joshua Tree, takes its name – and its cover.. These trees, specially adapted for the desert, are seeing their natural habitat reduced every year due to the proliferation of fires in the mountainous desert in which they grow.. There, in addition, the weather conditions are drier and hotter every year.
THE SEA, AT 38 DEGREES
Although for heat, the most brutal thing that has happened this year in the US has been in the water. At the end of July, the sea water broke the world temperature record. It was in western Florida, next to Manatee Bay County, on the Gulf of Mexico.. The water reached 38.3 degrees. That means that the sea water was at the temperature at which one normally takes a very hot bath.. In the area of the Keys, in the extreme south of Florida, the water reached 36 degrees – also a normal temperature for a bath in the bathtub -, a level that, according to scientists, can harm the corals that live there.
And from the southern tip of the US, the Keys, to the north, Alaska. This is a state in which the traces of anthropogenic climate change – that is, caused by man's action – are fully visible throughout the territory in the form of landslides and holes in the middle of nowhere caused by the layer of ice on which vegetation grows is melting. This summer, the US Armed Forces have had to reinforce several of their bases in the state to protect them from the subsidence of the permafrost and the advance of the sea. But the most spectacular has been what has happened in Juneau, the capital of Alaska: a gigantic flood caused by the melting of the neighboring Mendenhall Glacier has swept away two apartment buildings and damaged a third. The glacier began to suffer great melting 12 years ago, and since then these have been increasing, although experts do not agree when it comes to determining the degree of responsibility of the greenhouse effect in this phenomenon.