Hong-Kong
DailyExpertNews
—
Tens of millions of people in East Asia braved a severe cold spell on Wednesday, as freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall during the Lunar New Year holiday caused chaos, with climate experts warning that such extreme weather events had become the “new normal”.
South Korea issued heavy snow warnings this week as temperatures dipped to minus 15 degrees Celsius (minus 5 degrees Fahrenheit) in the capital Seoul and plummeted to record lows in other cities, officials said.
On the popular tourist island of Jeju, harsh weather led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights, while passenger ships were forced to remain in port due to the massive waves, according to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters.
“Cold air from the North Pole has reached South Korea directly,” Korea Meteorological Administration spokesman Woo Jin-kyu told DailyExpertNews after touring Russia and China.
See what life is like in one of the coldest places in the world
Woo said that while scientists had a long-term view of climate change, “we can consider this extreme weather — extremely hot weather in summer and extremely cold weather in winter — as one of the signals of climate change.”
Across the border in Pyongyang, North Korean authorities warned of extreme weather conditions as the cold snap swept across the Korean peninsula. Temperatures in parts of North Korea were expected to drop below minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit), state media reported.
In neighboring Japan, hundreds of domestic flights were canceled on Tuesday and Wednesday due to heavy snowfall and strong winds that obscured visibility. Major airlines Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways have canceled a total of 229 flights.
Meanwhile, high-speed trains were suspended between Fukushima and Shinjo northern stations, Japan Railway Group said.
China’s meteorological authority has also forecast major drops in temperatures in parts of the country and on Monday issued a blue alert for a cold snap – the lowest level in a four-level warning system.
Mohe, China’s northernmost city, saw temperatures drop to minus 53 degrees Celsius (minus 63.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on Sunday — the coldest on record, meteorologists said. Ice fog — a weather phenomenon that occurs only in extreme cold when water droplets remain in liquid form in the air — is also expected in the city this week, local authorities said.
Yeh Sang-wook, a climate professor at Hanyang University in Seoul, attributed the extreme cold snap on the Korean Peninsula to Arctic winds from Siberia. a warming climate.
“A record was melted last year and this year,” he said. “As sea ice melts, the sea opens up, releasing more vapor into the air, leading to more snow in the north.”
As climate change worsens, the region will experience more severe cold weather in the future, he said.
“There is no other (explanation),” he said. “Climate change is indeed deepening and there is consensus among global scientists that this type of cold phenomenon will worsen in the future.”
Kevin Trenberth, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), agreed that “extreme weather events are the new normal,” adding, “we can certainly expect extreme weather events to become worse than before.”
He also pointed to the El Niño and La Niña climate pattern cycles in the Pacific that affect weather worldwide.
La Niña, which typically has a cooling effect on global temperatures, is one of the reasons for the current cold snap, he said.
“There is certainly a lot of natural variation in the weather, but… we often hear about the El Nino phenomenon and right now we are in the La Niña phase. And that certainly affects the kind of patterns that are common. And that is also a player,” he said.
