The climate has not gone crazy. What is happening in Italy, hit by scorching heat, heat waves, hailstorms and water bombs, has another name and is called climate crisis. This is yet another alarm from Legambiente, which released a focus produced by its Città Clima Observatory with unpublished data on hailstorm damage. In the first six months of 2023, from the beginning of the year to June, there were 19 hailstorm damages in the Peninsula. At this rate, there is a risk at the end of the year to exceed the "bulletins" of previous years: 29 hailstorm damages in 2022, 14 in 2021, 9 in 2020. The balance sheet from 2010 to the present (June 2023) is also worrying, counting as many as 106 hailstorm damages. In these years, the most affected regions have been those in the North and in the Po Valley area: Veneto (with 16 cases), Emilia-Romagna (13), and Piedmont (12). The environmental association also recalled that recent research by CNR-Isac, published in Remote Sensing, found that for all hail events recorded in the Mediterranean, the trend is increasing by about 30 percent over the past decade. The phenomena were grouped into two categories of severity: intense hailstorms (characterized by hailstones ranging in diameter from 2 to 10 cm) and extreme hailstorms (associated with the formation of icy aggregates with diameters greater than 10 cm). The study emphasizes the link between these extreme phenomena and global warming, particularly that of the Mediterranean basin, including its sea waters.
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