Climate experts: Expect more weather disasters

In this Oct. 31, 2011 file photo, Thai residents carry their belongings along floods as they move to higher ground at Bangkok's Don Muang district, Thailand. / AP Photo/Aaron Favila, File

WASHINGTON - Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.

The final draft of the report from a panel of the world's top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars. The report says costs will rise and perhaps some locations will become "increasingly marginal as places to live."

The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda. It says there is at least a 2-in-3 probability that climate extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.

This marks a change in climate science from focusing on subtle changes in daily average temperatures to concentrating on the harder-to-analyze freak events that grab headlines, cause economic damage and kill people. The most recent bizarre weather extreme, the pre-Halloween snowstorm in the U.S., is typical of the damage climate scientists warn will occur — but it's not typical of the events they tie to global warming.

"The extremes are a really noticeable aspect of climate change," said Jerry Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "I think people realize that the extremes are where we are going to see a lot of the impacts of climate change."

The snow-bearing Nor'easter cannot be blamed on climate change and probably isn't the type of storm that will increase with global warming, four meteorologists and climate scientists said. They agree more study is needed. But experts on extreme storms have focused more closely on the increasing numbers of super-heavy rainstorms, not snow, NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said.

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Rare Oct. snowstorm hits Northeast

The opposite kind of disaster — the drought in Texas and the Southwest U.S. — is also the type of event scientists are saying will happen more often as the world warms, said Schmidt and Meehl, who reviewed part of the climate panel report. No studies have specifically tied global warming to the drought, but it is consistent with computer models that indicate current climate trends will worsen existing droughts, Meehl said.

Studies also have predicted more intense monsoons with climate change. Warmer air can hold more water and puts more energy into weather systems, changing the dynamics of storms and where and how they hit.

Thailand is now coping with massive flooding from monsoonal rains that illustrate how climate is also interconnected with other manmade issues such as population and urban development, river management and sinking lands, Schmidt said. In fact, the report says that "for some climate extremes in many regions, the main driver for future increases in losses will be socioeconomic in nature" rather than greenhouse gases.

There's an 80 percent chance that the killer Russian heat wave of 2010 wouldn't have happened without the added push of global warming, according to a study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So while in the past the climate change panel, formed by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization, has discussed extreme events in snippets in its report, this time the scientists are putting them all together. The report, which needs approval by diplomats at the mid-November meeting, tries to measure the confidence scientists have in their assessment of climate extremes both future and past.

For NE towns without power, no trick or treat
Bangkok expected to escape worst of flooding

Chris Field, one of the leaders of the climate change panel, said he and other authors won't comment because the report still is subject to change. The summary chapter of the report didn't detail which regions of the world might suffer extremes so severe as to leave them marginally habitable.

The report does say scientists are "virtually certain" — 99 percent — that the world will have more extreme spells of heat and fewer of cold. Heat waves could peak as much as 5 degrees hotter by mid-century and even 9 degrees hotter by the end of the century.

Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters, who wasn't involved in the study, said in the United States from June to August this year, blistering heat set 2,703 daily high temperature records, compared with only 300 cold records during that period, making it the hottest summer in the U.S. since the Dust Bowl of 1936.

By the end of the century, the intense, single-day, heavy rainstorms that now typically happen only once every 20 years are likely to happen about twice a decade, the report says.

The report said hurricanes and other tropical cyclones — like 2005's Katrina — are likely to get stronger in wind speed, but won't increase in number and may actually decrease. Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel, who studies climate's effects on hurricanes, disagrees and believes more of these intense storms will occur.

And global warming isn't the sole villain in future climate disasters, the climate report says. An even bigger problem will be the number of people — especially the poor — who live in harm's way.

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn't among the authors, said the report was written to be "so bland" that it may not matter to world leaders.

But Masters said the basics of the report seem to be proven true by what's happening every day. "In the U.S., this has been the weirdest weather year we've had for my 30 years, hands down. Certainly this October snowstorm fits in with it."

[gep1955]

Experts? Expect weather disasters? When have we ever NOT had weather disasters? The headline should read, " Experts Predict Sun Will Rise Tomorrow"! Film at 11:00.

[noloyalisti]

Pahgre, to answer your question below, the reason the right wingers have to go to such extremes is that they think and reason in black and white.

So you have to massively burn fossil fuels or none at all. You have to spend your entire GDP invading countries to bomb them back to the stone age or not at all. Even billionaires need even more billions otherwise they think you want to take it all. You are either with us or against us. A capitalist or a communist. Etc. etc. etc.

They don't call them reactionaries for nothing.

[noloyalisti]

We have to stop the giant corporations from their globalization schemes that dumps cheap goods from one end of the earth into another. We need to end oil subsidies to the already filthy rich oil corporations.

In other words we have to stop rewarding the Top 1% for causing man made global climate change.

[julianpenrod]

In fact, weather worldwide is changing and that's because the air is changing. And the air is being artificially altered by the program of impregnating it with chemicals which has come to be called "chemtrails". It was intended to make it posible to harness weather and make it useful as a weapon, and certainly it has shown that denaturing the characteristics of the atmosphere is possible. Announced by their observed prevalence in 1997, chemtrails has overseen an unprecedented flood of unnatural changes in the world's weather, including the worst hurricane season on record; the single largest year-to-year decrease in Arctic ice coverage; tornadoes forming in places they were unknown, like Brooklyn; bees disappearing; the development of previously unseen hundred mile per hour straight line windstorms called "super derechos"; unprecedented hundred degree heat waves from London to Moscow; and the arrival of the first new cloud species to be recognized in half a century, the undulatus aspiratus.
One effect of the chemicals being spread in the air is evidently that they allow it to retain more heat than normal. This can be released at higher altitudes into more energetic storms. It's intended to take the place pof water in stimulating storm formation. The effect is so powerful that, around 2004, the National Weather Service actually had to recalculate wind chill, cutting the cooling effect of moving air in half!
But what is spread in the air also eventually falls to the earth as an addition to ground water. And it's already making its presence known there, as well. It makes water out of faucets behave mechanically differently from the way it used to. It used to be generally accepted that water flowing down a drain in the Northern Hemisphere will rotate counter clockwise. Since the beginning of chemtrailing, "scientists" claim that that is an old wive's tale and water was always able to flow clockwise or counterclockwise down drains north of the equator. An alien chemical, the substance contaminating the air seems also deleterious to plants. It seems to take a significant dose, but danfgerous concentrations seem always to build up in the soil. This can be seen by the phenomenon of spot die offs of plants. A tree will be mostly green, but one or two branches will have leaves that are inexplicably brown; hedges will have spots along them where portions have died; rows of ornamental dwarf conifers will have one or two dead while all the rest are alive. This seems to have played a part in the destructiveness of the recent snowstorm in the Northeast.
The massive cut offs of power were blamed on wet snow falling on trees already laden with leaves. In fact, leaves are not heavy enough to break tree limbs, even with wet snow on them. Note that even holly trees, which are supposed to keep their leaves year round, even under heavy wet snow, but not break, sustained damage this time! Among other things, because the artifical substances in the snow made it heavier than normal wet snow! But, also, if anyone looked, they would see the pattern of breakage was spotty. One tree would have fallen branches, but ones next to it, of the same species, size and leaf coverage wouild be intact! And, for that matter, for each affected tree, no more than one or two branches would have fallen, despite the fact that all their branches would be equally leaf and snow covered! Exactly like the pattern of random spot die offs! The chemical in the air poisoned some trees enough that they no longer had strength in portions of themselves to sustain the extra load!
Note, too, that New World Order shills who try to counter these statements will not be able to. They won't even try to disprove what was said, since they won't be able to. They will settle only for contempt, dismissiveness without justification, viciousness, mockery and vulgarity.

[noloyalisti]

Honestly, the man made global climate change situation has been pretty much a no brainer since James Hansenm of NASA brought it up more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately in America, money trumps truth and now the whole world will pay for it.

[AmericasConscious]

I'm still waiting for the coming Ice Age since the 1970's
That has to occur first before we have global warming.

[noloyalisti]

Louisville, it's hard to explain just how silly you sound to us. You can always tell a reactionary righty because whatever they think is right.

I mean the Koch Sucker Brothers even paid a global climate denier $150,000 idiot to review the research and he came back and said it was real.

But you have your story and you're sticking to it. I get it.

[noloyalisti]

You can't f with mother nature otherwise she will f back. While the giant corporations and Top 1% were stupidly spending millions to throw doubt onto something they knew all along was happening, the earth was burning.

Leaders of Exxon, BP, Chevron and other major American corporations should also be charged with these crimes and go to jail. And their companies should have to empty the bank accounts to pay reparations to Thailand and the whole world for their damages.

[alittlecommonsense]

While we are tinkering with minor issues like household recycling (while only a very small fraction of pollution is generated by households compared to corporatios), electric cars (while still over 50% of electricity is generated by burning coal, and over 50% of it is lost on transmission) etc. the world has already entered the sixth major extinction crisis, endangering 75% of all living species within the next 300 years. The climate is changing extremely fast compared to other changes in the past which happened in thousands of years giving natural systems time to compansate for it (like oceans absorbing the CO2 and converting it to calcium carbonate with shells in the sediment), and human population hit 7 billion, yesterday. I do not understand how ipods and iphones can be more important than living in a naturally beautiful world. How can technology compansate for the dissapearing wilderness. Even if humans somehow managed to survive on this earth, what kind of a life would it be if we could only walk concrete streets and parking lots, knowing that millions are animals are being tortured daily in animal farms, or laboratories. I think the climate change is an ethical issue as well as a survival issue. If we don't care about other life forms on this earth and all we can think of is the survival of our faulty economic system, then it is unlikely that we will care about anything else, including the climate change.

[jackobyte]

wow! these experts are really on the ball, expect more disasters! and theres me just about to relax and squirrel away for winter.

shoot if it wasn't for climate change everything would have been hunky dory.