Sébastien Le Belzic (in Beijing)
If you think it’s cold in January in France, that’s nothing compared to what China is going through right now. The country has been experiencing unprecedented cold for more than 60 years. The thermometer went down in places to -53 degrees.
If it is very cold this Thursday morning in France, we can almost consider ourselves lucky. Because a few thousand kilometers from here, Beijing has been experiencing an unprecedented cold wave from the plains of Siberia for several days with a thermometer that has fallen below -50 degrees Celsius, a record in the country since we measure temperatures in the far north of China, on the border with Russia.
In China, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent
At -53 degrees, the water freezes in seconds and you can freeze to death very quickly. The exceptionally low temperatures come after a milder-than-usual winter, said Chen Tao of the National Meteorological Center. “From late December to early January, temperatures in China remained relatively high overall. Therefore, this cold snap is having a big impact as temperatures drop significantly and very quickly.”
Extreme climatic events which are more and more frequent in China. Last summer, the country this time broke 150-year-old heat records, before experiencing catastrophic floods with damage estimated at tens of billions of euros.