In Brazil, extreme weather stokes climate worries
By Stuart Grudgings
ILHA GRANDE, Brazil (Reuters) – No one could say they hadn’t seen it coming. The sand dunes had been advancing for decades before, two years ago, they finally swallowed the houses of Raimundo do Nascimento and 12 other families in Ilha Grande, an island in the Parnaiba river delta in northeastern Brazil. Standing on the 14-meter (46-feet)-high dune that now completely covers his old home, the 53-year-old Do Nascimento describes the landscape of his childhood — cashew trees as far as he could see. Not a dune in sight. … Experts blame deforestation and population increases for the huge dunes that are advancing by about 25 meters (82 feet) a year, threatening to wipe the town of 8,500 people off the map. But they and residents also blame stronger winds and drier weather in recent years. “The wind has been getting stronger. It is the motor of this process,” said Luiz Roberto del Poggetto, an oceanographer whose firm was contracted by the government to find ways to contain the dunes. … Unusually heavy rains in the north and northeast have made hundreds of thousands of people homeless and killed about 45. Meanwhile, southern Brazil has been hit by a series of droughts, devastating farmers and cutting by a third the flow of water over the famed Iguacu waterfalls. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has expressed concern. “Brazil is feeling climate changes that are happening in the world, when there is a severe drought in a place that didn’t have them, when it rains in places where it didn’t used to,” Lula said in a recent radio broadcast. …
