InsideCimate News - Bob Berwyn
'In many places, people are preparing for the past or present climate. But this summer is the future.'
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| Extreme heat killed more than 80 people in Japan in July, just a few
weeks after flooding from downpours was blamed for more than 200 deaths
there. Martin Bureau/Getty Images |
Earth's global warming fever spiked to deadly new highs across the
Northern Hemisphere this summer, and we're feeling the results—extreme
heat is now blamed for hundreds of deaths, droughts threaten food
supplies, wildfires have raced through neighborhoods in the western
United States, Greece and as far north as the Arctic Circle.
At sea, record and near-record warm oceans have sent soggy masses of
air surging landward, fueling extreme rainfall and flooding in Japan and
the eastern U.S. In Europe, the Baltic Sea is so warm that potentially
toxic blue-green algae is spreading across its surface.
There shouldn't be any doubt that some of the deadliest of this
summer's disasters—including flooding in Japan and wildfires in
Greece—are fueled by weather extremes linked to global warming, said
Corinne Le Quéré, director of the
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia.
"We know very well that global warming is making heat waves longer, hotter and more frequent," she said.
"The evidence from having extreme events around the world is really
compelling. It's very indicative that the global warming background is
causing or at least contributing to these events," she said.
The challenges created by global warming are becoming evident even in
basic infrastructure, much of which was built on the assumption of a
cooler climate. In these latest heat waves,
railroad tracks have bent in the rising temperatures,
airport runways have cracked, and
power plants from France to Finland have had to power down because their cooling sources became too warm.
"We're seeing that many things are not built to withstand the heat levels we are seeing now," Le Quéré said.
Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann said this summer's extreme
weather fits into a pattern he identified with other researchers in a
study published last year. The
jet stream's
north-south meanders have been unusually stationary, leading to
persistent heat waves and droughts in some areas and days of rain and
flooding in others, he said. "Our
work
last year shows that this sort of pattern ... has become more common
because of human-caused climate change, and in particular, amplified
Arctic warming."
Deadly Heat Waves from Canada to Japan
There are many ways to define a heat wave, but the conditions in many
areas of the planet this summer have been universally recognized as
severe, said Boram Lee, a senior research scientist with the
World Meteorological Organization.
"From around end of June, many countries in Europe, Asia and North
America have issued severe warnings," she said. The UK, U.S., Japan and
Korea all had long-lasting warnings, and Japan declared the recent heat
wave a natural disaster, she added.
In Europe, scientists on Friday released a real-time attribution
study of
the heat wave that has baked parts of northern Europe since June. They
found that global warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution made the
ongoing heat wave five times more likely in Denmark, and twice as likely
in Ireland.
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| In El Salvador, many farmers have lost their lost corn crops to drought
this summer. Agriculture is suffering in the high heat and dry
conditions in several parts of the world. Credit: Oscar Rivera/AFP/Getty
Images |
"Near the Arctic, it's absolutely exceptional and unprecedented. This
is a warning," said French heat wave expert Robert Vautard, who worked
on the study for World Weather Attribution. The group previously
determined that global warming made last summer's "Lucifer" heat wave in
southern Europe 10 times more likely.
"In many places, people are preparing for the past or present climate. But this summer is the future," he said.
The geographic scope and persistence of the European heat wave stands
out. An area stretching from the British Isles to Eastern Europe and
north to the Arctic is bright red on
European heat wave and drought maps, covering an area about as big as Texas and California combined.
Crop damage is being reported in parts Norway through Sweden, Denmark
and the Baltics. Depending on conditions during the next month, more
widespread crop failures could raise global food prices.
In mid-July, temperatures reached all-time record highs above the
Arctic Circle, around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and hovered in the 80s for
weeks at a time. In the Norwegian glacier area that Lars Holger Pilø
studies, the average temperature has been 9 degrees Fahrenheit above
average for the past 30 days.
"I have been working here since 2006, and we have snow records going
back 60 years, and there's nothing like what we're seeing right now,"
said Pilø, part of
team of ice archaeologists
who are measuring the snow and ice loss and recovering historic
artifacts like arrowheads and skis that were buried for millennia.
"I'm watching with a mixture of excitement and dread. I try not to
think too much about it and stick to what we do, which is rescuing the
artifacts coming out of the warming. I call it dark archaeology," he
said. "I look at the ice and I think, dead man walking."
Norwegian Meteorological Institute climate scientist Ketil Isaksen said the extreme situation in Scandinavia fits with the pattern of global warming.
"There are so many extremes now from all over the world. We're seeing
a very common pattern. For me this is a strong climate signal. Ice
that's several thousand years old, melting in the matter of just a few
weeks," he said.
Isaksen is finalizing some studies that find heat is penetrating
between 30 and 50 meters deep into the ground through cracks in the
rocky mountains around Norway's fjords. Instead of just a thin skin of
permafrost melting, those mountains could fall apart in large chunks
when autumn rains start, threatening coastal communities with tsunamis.
"Now we have a new extreme this summer. This will probably affect
slope stability, and we can expect mass movement events like debris
flows and landslides in late summer," he said.
He said the studies help define new geologic hazard areas with
knowledge that some of the melted mountains will see wholesale slope
failure when strong rains hit. Based on the information, emergency
managers are developing new early warning systems.
The Increasing Influence of Global Warming
About the same time the Norwegian researchers were uncovering ancient
tools in the Arctic tundra this summer, heat records were being set in
many other parts of the world.
Temperatures in Algeria reached 124 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a
record for the African continent. A few weeks earlier, a city in Oman is
believed to have broken a global record when it went more than 24 hours
with temperatures never falling below 108 degrees. Japan set a national
record of 106 amid a heat wave that has been blamed for more than 80
deaths.
Regional western heat events are becoming so pronounced that some climate scientists see the current extremes in the U.S. as a
climate inflection point, where the global warming signal stands out above the natural background of climate variability.
In mid-July, a week of temperatures in the high 80s and up to 96 degrees Fahrenheit in normally cool
Quebec
killed more than 50 people, and while that heat wave was waning,
another was building in Asia, where the Japan Meteorological Agency said
that 200 of its 927 stations topped the 35 degree Celsius (95 degrees
Fahrenheit) on July 15. Since then, at least 80 people have died and
thousands have gone to hospitals with heat-related ailments.
"There are irrefutable scientific evidences that climate change
alters both the intensity and frequency of such extreme phenomena as
heat waves, and ongoing efforts are dedicated to understand how big the
impact of man-made climate change is," said the WMO's Boram Lee.
Across social media, climate scientists are responding with a
collective "we warned about this," posting links to 10 years' worth of
studies that have consistently been projecting increases in deadly heat
waves. If anything, the warnings may have been understated.
"The rise in heat waves is stronger than many climate models
project," said World Weather Attribution's Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, who
measured a record high temperature outside his office in the
Netherlands on July 26, then
tweeted that global warming is making the heat there 20 times more likely than in 1900.
Wildfires Out of Control
Hot and dry weather also makes forests more flammable. In Greece,
after a month of record and near-record heat, flames ran wild through
the community of Mati on July 23, killing at least 80 people. On July
26, a blaze in Northern California jumped the Sacramento River and
spawned fire tornadoes, forcing the evacuation of parts of Redding, a
city of 92,000. And in Germany, residents of southern Berlin awoke
Friday to the sight of
smoke on the horizon, an event that will also become more common in that part of the world.
Although climate scientists are reluctant to link any one particular
fire to climate change, there is plenty of scientific evidence showing
how heat-trapping greenhouse gases contribute to increased fire danger.
"Weather is a product of the climate system. We are drastically
altering that system, and all the weather we observe now is the product
of that human-altered climate system. One result is an increase in the
frequency, size and severity of large fire events," University of
California, Merced researcher Leroy Westerling wrote on
Twitter.
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| Residents watch as fires burn into the city of Rafina, near Athens, on
July 23. The blazes moved quickly through the drought-parched area,
killing more than 80 people. Credit: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images |
University of Arizona climate researcher and geographer Kevin
Anchukaitis publicized several wildfire studies from the last 10 years
that all show how and why global warming is making fires bigger, more
destructive and longer-lasting. "Is climate change the only factor
influencing wildland fire? No, of course not—but climate change is
influencing area burned and fuel aridity," he wrote.
Tyndall Centre Director Le Quéré said she faulted some media for
failing to connect global warming to the current global heat wave. "This
signal is very clear," she said, adding that some of the early stories
about the deadly fire in Greece almost seemed to downplay a link to
climate change.
On Friday, the WMO released a new
statement
highlighting the links between global warming and wildfires and
reminding readers that "heat is drying out forests and making them more
susceptible to burn."
Extreme Rainfall and Flooding
There is also still reluctance to link individual extreme flood
events with global warming, despite plenty of scientific evidence that
today's global atmosphere—1 degree Celsius warmer than 100 years
ago—holds much more moisture that can be delivered by regional storm
systems.
Those warnings were not enough to help the more than 200 people who
died in Japan in late June amid a series of record-setting torrential
rain storms. Regional weather patterns certainly played a role, but
ocean currents and an atmosphere juiced up by global warming likely
boosted moisture for the storm.
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| Extreme rainfall unleashed landslides and flooding that knocked homes
off their foundations in Kumano, Japan. The storms and floods in early
July were blamed for more than 200 deaths. Credit: Martin
Bureau/AFP/Getty Images |
Two years ago, Alfred Wegener Institute climate researcher Hu Yang showed how climate change is
strengthening ocean currents
that carry moisture from the ocean toward Japan. The research showed
the currents have been getting stronger and warmer in tandem with rising
atmospheric CO2 levels. Eventually, that heat is released to the
atmosphere during storms, as wind or rain or both.
Yang said his continuing research is finding similar evidence that a
powerful current near Japan may be "a super hotspot under global
warming." As the current strengthens, it will release its energy as
water vapor, fuel for storms that can cause extra heavy rains in Japan
and other parts of Asia, he said.
In the U.S., June flooding in the Midwest fits a detected pattern of
increasing extreme rainfalls
in that region. And in late July, 10 million people in the East, from
Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were under various types of flood
warnings with soggy air sloshing from the Gulf of Mexico and the
Caribbean over the overheated Northeastern Atlantic toward the coast.
What Can We Do About It?
In some cases, the scientific warnings about global warming impacts
have resonated. At least parts of Europe are better prepared for heat
waves now than they were in 2003, when extreme heat killed up to 70,000
people, said Le Quéré.
More cities know what they need to do to protect vulnerable people in
an extreme event, she said, but they lack the money to do things like
building more cooling shelters, or cooling core urban areas with green
spaces and ponds.
"Maybe this is an opportunity, in a grim way, to prepare for events
that will be longer and hotter," she said. "It's not just a case of
holding our breath for three weeks and saying 'it's soon winter.' It's a
time to push and protect vulnerable people and infrastructure."
To prepare for the new normal, people must act in the next five to 10
years, said environmental scientist Cara Augustenborg, chairperson of
Friends of the Earth Europe.
"We have to consider how every new infrastructure, agricultural or
development project from now on will be impacted by climate change. We
need to look at planned retreat from coastlines and developing further
inland, building infrastructure that is more resilient to the effects of
climate change such as sea level rise and temperature extremes.
"We've had several years now where airport runways have melted on
extremely hot days," she continued. "That's something we need to factor
in to future construction as it's a problem that won't go away."
Society also needs to think about food security, she said.
"That's what I really lose sleep over," she said. "Our available
arable land is declining now as our global population is booming. It
doesn't take much in the way of extreme weather to have a major impact
on food supplies."
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