A preliminary death toll of ten has been provided to the AFP by Chilean emergency officials as multiple wildfires burn across the Valparaiso and Viña del Mar regions, which are home to close to two million people. Residents attempt to flee to the coast, but wildfires have closed roads. Cities are cloaked in heavy smoke, and President Gabriel Boric declared an emergency.
Parts of South America have been blistering hot for weeks, drying vegetation vulnerable to wildfire conditions common during an El Nino year. Climate change has intensified disasters of drought and heat, making the current conditions extraordinary.
Q. And how is all this related to climate change?A. You have to understand that the El Niño phenomenon is always characterized by the surface temperature of the ocean. Monitoring it is done mainly in the central strip along the equator, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But what has happened? Recent El Niño events, including this one, are being created from an ocean that is already warmer. It is as if you had a tub with hot water and you put more hot water in it, rather than a tub with warm water and you put hot water in it. It’s something like that. So we know this: the El Niño that is now affecting us came about in very warm conditions, but we do not yet know how to measure the way in which it will affect us, or how extreme it will be.Images filmed by trapped motorists have gone viral online, showing mountains in flames at the end of the famous Route 68, a road used by thousands of tourists to get to the Pacific coast beaches.
On Friday, authorities closed the road, which links Valparaiso to the capital, Santiago, as a huge mushroom cloud of smoke “reduced visibility”.
As Chile and Colombia battle rising temperatures, the heatwave is also threatening to sweep over Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil in the coming days.
Climate Change is an Ocean Crisis.