1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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World Weather Anomalies
Climate Chaos, Across the Map
By JUSTIN GILLIS
DEC. 30, 2015
With tornado outbreaks in the South, Christmas temperatures that sent trees into bloom in Central Park, drought in parts of Africa and historic floods drowning the old industrial cities of England, 2015 is closing with a string of weather anomalies all over the world.
The year, expected to be the hottest on record, may be over at midnight Thursday, but the trouble will not be. Rain in the central United States has been so heavy that major floods are beginning along the Mississippi River and are likely to intensify in coming weeks. California may lurch from drought to flood by late winter. Most serious, millions of people could be threatened by a developing food shortage in southern Africa.
Scientists say the most obvious suspect in the turmoil is the climate pattern called El Niño, in which the Pacific Ocean for the last few months has been dumping immense amounts of heat into the atmosphere. Because atmospheric waves can travel thousands of miles, the added heat and accompanying moisture have been playing havoc with the weather in many parts of the world.
But that natural pattern of variability is not the whole story. This El Niño, one of the strongest on record, comes atop a long-term heating of the planet caused by mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases. A large body of scientific evidence says those emissions are making certain kinds of extremes, such as heavy rainstorms and intense heat waves, more frequent.
Coincidence or not, every kind of trouble that the experts have been warning about for years seems to be occurring at once.
“As scientists, it’s a little humbling that we’ve kind of been saying this for 20 years now, and it’s not until people notice daffodils coming out in December that they start to say, ‘Maybe they’re right,’ ” said Myles R. Allen, a climate scientist at Oxford University in Britain.
Dr. Allen’s group, in collaboration with American and Dutch researchers, recently completed a report calculating that extreme rainstorms in the British Isles in December had become about 40 percent more likely as a consequence of human emissions. That document — inspired by a storm in early December that dumped stupendous rains, including 13 inches on one town in 24 hours — was barely finished when the skies opened up again.
Emergency crews have since been scrambling to rescue people from flooded homes in Leeds, York and other cities. A dispute has erupted in Parliament about whether Britain is doing enough to prepare for a changing climate.
Dr. Allen does not believe that El Niño had much to do with the British flooding, based on historical evidence that the influence of the Pacific Ocean anomaly is fairly weak in that part of the world. In the Western Hemisphere, the strong El Niño is likely a bigger part of the explanation for the strange winter weather.
The northern tier of the United States is often warm during El Niño years, and indeed, weather forecasters months ago predicted such a pattern for this winter. But they did not go so far as to forecast that the temperature in Central Park on the day before Christmas would hit 72 degrees.
Likewise, past evidence suggests that an El Niño can cause the fall tornado season in the Gulf Coast states to extend into December, as happened this year, with deadly consequences in states like Texas and Mississippi.
Matthew Rosencrans, head of forecast operations for the federal government’s Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Md., said that the El Niño was not the only natural factor at work. This winter, a climate pattern called the Arctic Oscillation is also keeping cold air bottled up in the high north, allowing heat and moisture to accumulate in the middle latitudes. That may be a factor in the recent heavy rains in states like Georgia and South Carolina, as well as in some of the other weather extremes, he said.
Scientists do not quite understand the connections, if any, between El Niño and variations in the Arctic Oscillation. They also do not fully understand how the combined effects of El Niño and human-induced warming are likely to play out over the coming decades.
Although El Niños occur every three to seven years, most of them are of moderate intensity. They form when the westward trade winds in the Pacific weaken, or even reverse direction. That shift leads to a dramatic warming of the surface waters in the eastern Pacific.
“Clouds and storms follow the warm water, pumping heat and moisture high into the overlying atmosphere,” as NASA recently explained. “These changes alter jet stream paths and affect storm tracks all over the world.”
The current El Niño is only the third powerful El Niño to have occurred in the era of satellites and other sophisticated weather observations. It is a small data set from which to try to draw broad conclusions, and experts said they would likely be working for months or years to understand what role El Niño and other factors played in the weather extremes of 2015.
It is already clear, though, that the year will be the hottest ever recorded at the surface of the planet, surpassing 2014 by a considerable margin. That is a function both of the short-term heat from the El Niño and the long-term warming from human emissions. In both the Atlantic and Pacific, the unusually warm ocean surface is throwing extra moisture into the air, said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Storms over land can draw moisture from as far as 2,000 miles away, he said, so the warm ocean is likely influencing such events as the heavy rain in the Southeast, as well as the record number of strong hurricanes and typhoons that occurred this year in the Pacific basin, with devastating consequences for island nations like Vanuatu.
“The warmth means there is more fuel for these weather systems to feed upon,” Dr. Trenberth said. “This is the sort of thing we will see more as we go decades into the future.”
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- Common Sense
- Exchanger
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Re: World Weather Anomalies
Please do not worry about this!
It has been fixed by Obama we have agreed to COP21
Well the "we" is Obama. It's not a treaty but an accord, no legal standing, no enforcement provisions.
And any country can leave the accord simply by send a letter stating such.UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE COP21
Last edited by Common Sense (1/01/2016 12:59 pm)
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” former vice president Biden said during a campaign event in Texas on Monday. "All men and women created by — you know, you know, the thing.”
- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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Re: World Weather Anomalies
What a shame, CS. The article was actually a very thoughtful and nuanced discussion of recent weather events. You would've been wise to read it rather than just making a few smart alec remarks based upon your own preconceptions and grudges.. Sometimes you should step down from your parapet and open up your mind a little.
Not everything is political.
I must note that, every time someone posts a thread about climate you seem compelled to derail it with some political diatribe that does not address the issue, is nonsensical, and is hostile in tone.
What ever happened to the guy who opined about people needing to hear "opposing points of view"?
You really ought to think about that.
In any event, I would ask you to please refrain from attempting to derail threads about scientific issues with unrelated political diatribes. If the thread deals with an issue that is not of interest to you, or is beyond your understanding, kindly leave it alone. Other readers may have interest in the topic.
Last edited by Goose (1/02/2016 6:21 am)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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Thread Starter- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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Re: World Weather Anomalies
From Stars and Stripes:
Record flooding in UK: Latest symptom of El Nino and climate change?
By Chelsea Harvey
Special to The Washington Post
Published: January 1, 2016
December witnessed a spate of extreme global weather events, from deadly tornadoes in the southern U.S. to bushfires in Australia – and the latest development is a series of record-breaking floods in the United Kingdom, brought on by torrential rain starting in the first week of the month. Thousands of homes in the north of England are believed to have been affected already, and the region is reeling again from a new wave of flooding just brought in this week with the onset of Storm Frank.
There's been much discussion about the causes behind the surprising rash of winter storms in the region (Frank is the third major storm to hit within a month), and equal suspicion has fallen on the effects of climate change and the influences of this year's particularly potent El Nino event. It can be difficult to parse exactly what's going on, though.
Nicola Maxey, a press officer from the Met Office (the UK's national weather service) noted in an email that it was too early to say for sure whether climate change was a major contributor to this winter's extreme rainfall – but added that evidence from both physics and the study of weather systems suggests that it may have played a part.
The Met Office, in fact, recently published a report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society examining the causes behind dozens of extreme weather events in 2014, including similarly severe rainfall in the UK in the winter of 2013/2014. Using models, the report concluded that anthropogenic climate change likely had a hand in the extreme conditions that winter - the highest rainfall since 1931 - and that climate change increases the chances of extreme rainfall during a time period of 10 consecutive winter days by a factor of seven.
So while scientists frequently warn that individual weather events can't always be considered an indicator of long-term climatic patterns, the research in this case suggests that climate change is increasing the odds of extreme winter weather events in the UK. This is in keeping with research from all over the world that suggests that extreme weather, in general, is likely to increase in frequency and intensity all around the world as a result of climate change.
"I think it is fair to conclude that human-caused climate change here too increased the flooding potential of the recent storms," said Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State University, in an email to The Post. "While climate change didn't 'cause' the storms themselves, it has increased the potential for heavy rainfall and flooding with these storms."
On the other hand, Maxey pointed out that El Nino, which increases the likelihood of warmer and wetter winters in the UK, could also be at play in the recent events - but she added that it's "just one of many drivers that affect the UK weather and there are many other factors which could override this signal."
So parsing between the two - human-caused climate change, on the one hand, and naturally occurring El Nino, on the other - can seem confusing. But experts are increasingly arguing that the UK downpours - along with many of the other unusual weather events being witnessed around the globe as 2015 came to a close - are likely the product of both forces interacting and ultimately making each other worse.
El Nino itself is not a product of climate change at all. Rather, it's a naturally occurring cycle, coming around every four to seven years or so, that brings unusually warm temperatures to the Pacific Ocean, generally with significant consequences for global weather patterns. This year's is believed to be among the strongest El Nino events ever recorded.
Because its effects are often similar to those predicted to be caused by climate change, including unseasonably warm temperatures in some regions and an increase in storms and other extreme weather events, it can be hard to definitively say which events are caused by which phenomenon. In fact, the claim that certain extreme weather events are the product of El Nino, and not human-caused climate change, is sometimes seized upon by climate doubters arguing that increases in extreme weather patterns are simply the product of naturally occurring processes.
However, this doesn't change the fact that climate change is a continuous process that's still happening even in El Nino years. What's more likely, given the severity of this season's event and the strange weather that's accompanied it, is that the ongoing influence of climate change is simply making this year's El Nino event even worse.
"Some scientists have found that human-caused climate change may increase the intensity of El Nino events, because a warmer atmosphere means more moisture in the air, a key ingredient in the energetics that drives El Nino," Mann said in his email.
So the fact that this year's El Nino is among the strongest on record is probably not a coincidence either, but rather another product of the changing climate. In this way, "climate change may be favoring the extreme weather we've seen this year both directly and, indirectly, through its impact on El Nino itself," Mann said.
And this effect has manifested itself in other places besides the UK. A spree of deadly tornadoes in the southern and midwestern U.S. last week, for instance, has been potentially linked to the severity of this year's El Nino event. And the same goes for record flooding in South America, as well as the less dramatic but nevertheless unusual warm winter temperatures in the northeastern U.S. this season.
The combination of both human-caused climate change on the one hand, and El Nino on the other, can lead to dramatic upticks in these types of extreme weather events, Mann said in his email.
Scientists believe that the unusual weather patterns will persist into 2016, which some have predicted will be the warmest year on record. While uncharacteristically warm years frequently follow strong El Nino events, it should be noted that 2014 and 2015 both broke records as the warmest years recorded. Should 2016 join the series, it will also be an unmistakable symptom of a long-term pattern of human-caused global warming.
And while this season's El Nino event will subside soon enough, the effects of climate change are expected to continue making themselves apparent in the coming years - meaning crazy weather is something we may need to start getting used to.
Last edited by Goose (1/04/2016 7:06 am)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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Thread Starter- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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Re: World Weather Anomalies
I think that the key point here is that natural weather events and even climate change processes will continue as they always have. But human caused climate change will be superimposed upon those natural processes. The chances of extreme weather events will increase. Insurance companies are already adjusting their business models to a world with more risk of property and crop damage. And they have no political ax to grind. They acknowledge climate change, and will adjust their affairs accordingly, because they have to in order to sustain their businesses.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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Thread Starter