vox: There is no end to disaster season anymore
There is no end to disaster season anymoreBy Rebecca Leber@rebleberrebecca.leber@vox.com Sep 13, 2023, 6:30am EDT
Rebecca Leber is a senior reporter covering climate change for Vox. She was previously an environmental reporter at Mother Jones, Grist, and the New Republic. Rebecca also serves on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
The wave of unusual disasters this summer now includes Hurricane Lee, a storm that swelled from Category 1 to Category 5 in just 24 hours as it barreled toward Canada. It’s a prime example of rapid intensification made worse by warming ocean temperatures.
It will add to what’s already been an exceptional year of extreme weather. The US has set a new record for the number of billion-dollar disasters in a year — 23 so far — in its history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And this doesn’t even include the costs from Tropical Storm Hilary in California or from the ongoing drought in the South and Midwest, because those costs have yet to be fully calculated.
“Seemingly no part of the country has been left unscathed,” Ko Barrett, NOAA’s climate adviser, told Vox.
Globally, it’s a similar picture. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service recently determined that it’s been the hottest summer since records began, beating the last record set in 2019 by a significant margin. The group reported that both July and August reached global average temperatures around 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial times. These are the same average temperature increases that scientists have warned will mean irreversible, widespread crises around the planet.
…
= new reply since forum marked as read
It is not. Some of us have been following this story for decades. We have been watching “unprecedented events” occur continually. It has not just begun. This is not, “just the beginning,” it is part of a ghastly, horrifying continuum.
For years, the running dark joke of this forum was “faster than expected” because so many news stories about the unprecedented changes taking place seemed to use that phrase or something like it. One regular contributor, “XemaSab,” created this graphic for use as a signature.
We do not know for certain how long (or even if) tropical cyclones (hurricanes) have been spawned or heightened by our emissions of “Greenhouse Gases.” It seems reasonable to think that for as long as “global warming” has been taking place, storms have been affected to some degree. It also seems reasonable to think that as “global warming” has increased, those effects have increased as well. There certainly seems to be a linkage between extreme amounts of rain and warming, but a positive linkage for tropical cyclones has been elusive. They seem to be getting stronger, and they seem to be dropping more rain.
In 1983 (i.e. 40 years ago) the National Academy of Sciences committee report in essence said, we just don’t know enough to link storms to increased CO₂.
Changing Climate: Report of the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee (1983)
The implication of the prospective increases in trace gases is that climatic changes of the character expected for elevated CO₂ concentrations may be encountered sooner than if CO₂ were the only cause of change, or, alternatively, that estimates solely of a CO₂ effect may be conservative.
At present little or nothing can be estimated about changes in extreme conditions that might accompany changes in mean climatic conditions and more generally about the weather of future climate. We do not know, for example, whether the climate will show more or less year-to-year variability under generally warmer planetary conditions. Variability of climate is one of its moat important features. Food production, human settlements, and numerous aspects of the environment are strongly influenced by occasional extreme episodes. An area of particular interest is that of severe storms. The frequency, severity, and track of hurricanes and other severe storms are likely to be affected by CO₂-induced climatic changes, such as warming of ocean waters. Neither our current knowledge of storm genesis nor the current capabilities of climate models are great enough to allow convincing linkages at this time.
…
40 years later, we have much better models, but NOAA says:
NOAA: State of the Science FACT SHEET - Atlantic Hurricanes and Climate Change
[div class="excerpt”]…
Several Atlantic hurricane activity metrics show pronounced increases since 1980. However, evidence for any significant trends is much weaker considering trends beginning from the early 20th century, partly due to observed data limitations. Decreases in aerosol forcing since the 1970s and multidecadal ocean circulation changes are thought to be contributing to the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1980, though their relative contributions are still uncertain and with no scientific consensus. While greenhouse gas-induced warming may have also affected Atlantic hurricane activity, a detectable greenhouse gas influence on hurricane activity has not been identified with high confidence. This is partly due to the masking of any century-scale trends by pronounced multidecadal variability due to aerosols and/or internal variability. Determining the relative contributions of aerosols, internal variability, and other factors to the recent multidecadal variations in Atlantic hurricane activity has important implications for predictions for the coming decades.
…
This has been another year of unprecedented events, and, scary as hell. But this is not “just the beginning” nor are we approaching the end (things are going to get worse, just as they have been doing for some time now.)
Welcome to “Global Weirding.”
