Summer 2012: Glimpse of climate change effects?
Horrified onlookers watch as the Waldo Canyon Fire roars over the last hill between it and the City of Colorado Springs, Colo., June 25, 2012. / Gallo Images/Rex Features via AP
(AP) WASHINGTON - If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.
Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.
These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and lots of time. Sometimes it isn't caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.
And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren't having similar disasters now, although they've had their own extreme events in recent years.
But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.
So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.
"This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level," said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about."
Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (IPCC)
Extreme weather records, U.S. (NOAA)
Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn't listen. So it's I told-you-so time, he said.
As recently as March, a special report an extreme events and disasters by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events." Its lead author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, "It's really dramatic how many of the patterns that we've talked about as the expression of the extremes are hitting the U.S. right now."
"What we're seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like," said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. "It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters."
Oppenheimer said that on Thursday. That was before the East Coast was hit with triple-digit temperatures and before a derecho — an unusually strong, long-lived and large straight-line wind storm — blew through Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath killed more than 20 people and left millions without electricity. Experts say it had energy readings five times that of normal thunderstorms.
Fueled by the record high heat, this was one of the most powerful of this type of storm in the region in recent history, said research meteorologist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storm Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Scientists expect "non-tornadic wind events" like this one and other thunderstorms to increase with climate change because of the heat and instability, he said.
Such patterns haven't happened only in the past week or two. The spring and winter in the U.S. were the warmest on record and among the least snowy, setting the stage for the weather extremes to come, scientists say.
Since Jan. 1, the United States has set more than 40,000 hot temperature records, but fewer than 6,000 cold temperature records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Through most of last century, the U.S. used to set cold and hot records evenly, but in the first decade of this century America set two hot records for every cold one, said Jerry Meehl, a climate extreme expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This year the ratio is about 7 hot to 1 cold. Some computer models say that ratio will hit 20-to-1 by midcentury, Meehl said.
"In the future you would expect larger, longer more intense heat waves and we've seen that in the last few summers," NOAA Climate Monitoring chief Derek Arndt said.
The 100-degree heat, drought, early snowpack melt and beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees all combined to set the stage for the current unusual spread of wildfires in the West, said University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running, an expert on wildfires.
While at least 15 climate scientists told The Associated Press that this long hot U.S. summer is consistent with what is to be expected in global warming, history is full of such extremes, said John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He's a global warming skeptic who says, "The guilty party in my view is Mother Nature."
But the vast majority of mainstream climate scientists, such as Meehl, disagree: "This is what global warming is like, and we'll see more of this as we go into the future."
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The changes that we are seeing in real time with the climate used to take hundreds and thousands of year and we are seeing them in 10.
http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/index.cfm#globalTemp
9 of the hottest 10 years ever recorded were since 2000. The 10th was 1998. These are global averages, not local extremes.
Most scientists are definitely NOT expecting cooling anytime soon. Solar cooling is expected to END about now.
There is only so much in the way of dead plants and dinosaurs and we are using up stocks of both much faster than they are being replenished.
There are over 7 billion of us now according to The U.N's best guess. They have historically underestimated the body count and I see no reason for them to stop now. We may actually have closer to 8 billion or even a few more rather than the 7+ B the U.N thinks we have now. The point being; even if we all do litle more than sit around and photosynthesize, we will still be putting a strain on our stocks of unrenewables.
Oil and gas, of course but also timber, soil, fresh water, fisheries, coal, strategic metals, wetlands and clean air are all under stress or are nearly gone. The era of "cheap" oil is gone for good.
This is about far more than an argument over whether we are the culprits in an alleged climate change, whether or not it is changing and how is irrelevant. This is about how we are going to manage and conserve what little we have left so as to allow our great-great grandchildren a fighting chance at maintaining the civilisation we have now. I have heard too many say, "After I'm gone I won't give a damn, but I am not giving up...". That's a paradigm that HAS to change.
Our use of fossil fuel (to use one example) is tied in with a standard of living here and in all developed countries that is flatly unsustainable. The unfortunate (and inconvenient) truth is, living standards will have to come down - and for everyone to some degree or other except (maybe) the most destitute 5 or 10%
So, here's the deal: REGARDLESS of climate change or no, we can (1) reduce our population and simplify our lifestyles now, while we still have something left and can choose how and where to cut back, and have time to get used to the new austerity; or (2) continue as we are now and be suddenly and catastrophically left with a civilization killer and no options when we do run out.
There is no (3).
What many don't seem to understand, is that while we are now pumping 12 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere ANNUALLY and that rate is increasing, we are simultaneously raping, clear-cutting, slashing and burning (more CO2), and bull-dozing the forests worldwide!
It's a double-whammy.
I happen to think it will be more like 11 or 12 billion, since we are now apparently adding 1 billion people per year. And check this out, in the same article, they said the pop will reach 9 billion, but that we'll have to DOUBLE our food production from now til then.
Huh? Why do we have to double our food production for a net gain of just 2 billion people from now til then? The math doesn't make sense. 11 or 12 billion people, THEN we'll have to double the food supply.
I'm glad I don't have any children. And I easily could have had many.
But do you ever remember the temp getting up to 108F as it did in Athens, Ga, yesterday?