Climate Crisis

“We’re now in the prelude to WWIII precisely when humanity should rebuild its economy towards the rapid goal of decarbonization.” 

President Gustavo Petro of Columbia

Taken from his comments made as part of the international response to Iran’s attack on Israel April 14, 2024 

PART 2 --DROUGHTS AND FLOODS (Part 1 follows)

The worldwide “We” still has its collective foot on the gas. That means the effects from the carbon-driven, over- heated, wet atmosphere will not disappear. If fact, experts predict that these dangerous climatic events will become more savage and more frequent. 

For example, as I type this, Ms. Beryl, the earliest Category 5 hurricane in recorded history, threatens Texas. 

Of course you must prepare. But in order to properly prepare, you need to know what we are preparing for. Are you protecting your property from damage caused by a climate-change caused event, or damage from another cause.

Here’s an example: For the first time in three generations, your house near the river flooded after a record rainfall. The swollen river breached the nearby dam, and the old public drainage system could not handle the volume. The questions are would the property have flooded if the river did not breach the dam or if the septic system had been improved as your neighbor hood grew? Those answers may help you prepare for the next major rain event.

Hopefully this series of articles will help you sort out you risks from climate change. Since I wrote about hurricanes and tornados last month, I discovered the United Nations’ report IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. I will use to follow up with droughts and floods this month because it appears to be an unbiased  report of many experts and it indicates the UN’s confidence in the findings.

I will give you the material as written rather than paraphrasing the material and will provide a link to the report. I highlighted key findings.

DROUGHT

Similar to many other extreme events, droughts occur as a combination of thermodynamic and dynamic processes (Box 11.1). Thermodynamic processes contributing to drought, which are modified by greenhouse gas forcing both at global and regional scales, are mostly related to heat and moisture exchanges, and are also partly modulated by plant coverage and physiology. They affect, for instance, atmospheric humidity, temperature, and radiation, which in turn affect precipitation and/or evapotranspiration in some regions and time frames. However, dynamic processes are particularly important to explain drought variability on different time scales, from a few weeks (flash droughts) to multiannual (megadroughts). There is low confidence in the effects of greenhouse gas forcing on changes in atmospheric dynamic (Section 2.4; Section 4.3.3), and on associated changes in drought occurrence. Thermodynamic processes are thus the main driver of drought changes in a warming climate (high confidence).

FLOODS

Experts recognize three types of floods: pluvial. surface water and flash floods; river, and coastal. I will write on coastal flooding in a later post.

Pluvial (High confidence increase)

The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have likely increased at the global scale over a majority of land regions with good observational coverage. Heavy precipitation has likely increased on the continental scale over three continents: North America, Europe, and Asia. Regional increases in the frequency and/or intensity of heavy precipitation have been observed with at least medium confidence for nearly half of AR6 regions, including WSAF, ESAF, WSB, SAS, ESB, RFE, WCA, ECA, TIB, EAS, SEA, NAU, NEU, EEU, GIC, WCE, SES, CNA, and ENA. {11.4, 11.9}

Human influence, in particular greenhouse gas emissions, is likely the main driver of the observed global-scale intensification of heavy precipitation over land regions. It is likely that human-induced climate change has contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation at the continental scale in North America, Europe and Asia. Evidence of a human influence on heavy precipitation has emerged in some regions (high confidence). {11.4, 11.9, Table 11.1}

Heavy precipitation will generally become more frequent and more intense with additional global warming. At a global warming level of 4°C relative to the pre-industrial level, very rare (e.g., one in 10 or more years) heavy precipitation events would become more frequent and more intense than in the recent past, on the global scale (virtually certain ) and in all continents and AR6 regions. The increase in frequency and intensity is extremely likely for most continents and very likely for most AR6 regions. At the global scale, the intensification of heavy precipitation will follow the rate of increase in the maximum amount of moisture that the atmosphere can hold as it warms (high confidence), of about 7% per 1°C of global warming. The increase in the frequency of heavy precipitation events will be non-linear with more warming and will be higher for rarer events (high confidence), with a likely doubling and tripling in the frequency of 10-year and 50-year events, respectively, compared to the recent past at 4°C of global warming. Increases in the intensity of extreme precipitation at regional scales will vary, depending on the amount of regional warming, changes in atmospheric circulation and storm dynamics (high confidence). {11.4, Box 11.1}

The projected increase in the intensity of extreme precipitation translates to an increase in the frequency and magnitude of pluvial floods – surface water and flash floods – (high confidence), as pluvial flooding results from precipitation intensity exceeding the capacity of natural and artificial drainage systems. {11.4

River (Medium confidence increase)

Significant trends in peak streamflow have been observed in some regions over the past decades (high confidence). The seasonality of river floods has changed in cold regions where snow-melt is involved, with an earlier occurrence of peak streamflow (high confidence). {11.5}

Global hydrological models project a larger fraction of land areas to be affected by an increase in river floods than by a decrease in river floods (medium confidence). Regional changes in river floods are more uncertain than changes in pluvial floods because complex hydrological processes and forcings, including land cover change and human water management, are involved. {11.5}.

All this information and materials come from Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/#11.4.5 

July 2024

Does Climate Change truly cause every unfavorable event from agricultural calamity to volcanic eruption on climate change? Over the next few issues, I will sort fact from fiction according to  the latest scientific explanations from respectable sources beginning with tornados and hurricanes 

TORNADOS

NO.

Many people rank a possible tornado blowing their house apart at 3 a.m. as their number one fearful weather event. I agree. But should we blame climate change?

Not yet, according to a recent article in The National Geographic.

"It really comes down to two ingredients in the atmosphere, in the environment in which storms form," says Jeff Trapp, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University.
 

The first ingredient needed to make a tornado, he explains, is energy in the form of warm, moist, unstable air. We're adding energy to the atmosphere by trapping heat with greenhouse gases,
 

The second ingredient is wind shear—a measure of how much the wind changes speed and direction between the ground and higher levels of the atmosphere. Wind shear causes the warm, rising air inside a supercell to start rotating, a necessary condition for organizing the storm and allowing it to spawn funnel clouds.

And that gets to the nub of the question surrounding a potential nexus between warming and tornadoes: Although climate change is increasing the energy in the atmosphere, it's also expected to reduce wind shear.

Global warming may well end up making them more frequent or intense, as our intuition would tell us. But it might also actually suppress them—the science just isn't clear yet.
 

Neither is the historical record.
 

There is no real historic or scientific evidence that tornadoes are happening more often at this time..

Link to National Geographic article

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/tornadoes-and-global-warming-there-connection/

HURRICANES

( ‘Tis the Season. Beware the weather ghouls’ false preachings.)

YES AND NO.

More intense hurricanes, but not more in number.

According to NASA studies, the increased amount of moisture in the air caused by climate change will create more dangerous tropical storms(hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones).

However, Since the 1980s, the hurricane record has shown a more active period in the North Atlantic Ocean. On average, there have been more storms, stronger hurricanes, and an increase in hurricanes that rapidly intensify. Thus far, most of these increases are from natural climate variations. The frequency of hurricanes making U.S. landfall (a subset of North Atlantic hurricanes) has not increased since 1900, despite significant global warming and the heating of the tropical Atlantic Ocean.

This information  comes from “A Force of Nature: Hurricanes in a Changing Climate” by Angela Colbert Ph D,  NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Hurricanes need four main ingredients to form and strengthen:

• warm ocean water
• lots of moisture in the air
• low vertical wind shear
• a pre-existing disturbance (e.g., a cluster of thunderstorms)

NASA scientists use sophisticated global climate models, scientific understanding of how hurricanes form and evolve, and expanding observational records of past hurricane activity to determine the effect of climate change on hurricanes.

These are the key findings according to Dr. Colbert’s article:

· Increased rainfall

According to Dr. Colbert’s  article scientists have long predicted that climate change would increase extreme rainfall events. In a warmer world, there is simply more moisture in the air in the form of gaseous water vapor. Think of heating up a pot of water on the stove. Once the liquid water becomes hot enough, it boils and creates steam (or hot water vapor). This process is called “evaporation,” or when a liquid changes to a gas.

A similar process happens at Earth’s surface. As surface temperatures rise, more liquid water evaporates from the land and ocean. Evaporation adds moisture to the air. How much water vapor the air can hold is based on its temperature. Warmer air temperatures can hold more water vapor. The increased moisture in the air leads to more intense rainfall, especially during extreme events.

In a hurricane, spiraling winds draw moist air toward the center, fueling the towering thunderstorms that surround it. As the air continues to warm due to climate change, hurricanes can hold more water vapor, producing more intense rainfall rates in a storm.

· Increased rainfall plus rising seas will increase coastal flooding

· Increased wind speed that will increase the number higher category hurricanes.

Most models show that climate change brings a slight increase in hurricane wind intensity. This change is likely related to warming ocean temperatures and more moisture in the air, both of which fuel hurricanes. 

Iink to this Article https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/a-force-of-nature-hurricanes-in-a-changing-climate/ 

June 2024

 Humanity's Climate Emergency 

Steven H. Johnson 2451johnson@gmail.com 

"Doesn't our Earth's Climate Emergency now require all of us to take our countries off fossil fuels? ENTIRELY OFF?" The world's climate scientists have gotten their diagnosis roughly right. The more fossil fuel energy we consume, the more we overheat the Earth's climate. And what does a diagnosis like that tell us we should do? It tells us that we should replace fossil fuels as the foundation of all our national energy systems with energy systems that are Climate-Safe. Solar Energy. Wind Energy, Wave Energy, and perhaps modest amounts of nuclear energy, and the Electric Energy such power sources create. We now find ourselves facing a reckoning. Powerful interest groups will use propaganda to dispute this finding. There's one thing to remember about propaganda. Wealthy sponsors fund it in hope of tricking us into embracing ideas that serve their self-interest but NOT OUR SELF-INTEREST! In other words, propagandists aren't paid to help us find responsible answers. They are paid to convince us that we shouldn't bother searching for responsible answers. What's the best way to think about our way forward? It was our misunderstanding of the cause-and-effect world we live in that got us into the Climate Emergency we're now experiencing. Only a proper understanding of the cause-and-effect journey that's ahead will rescue us from the Climate Emergency that we've created. We don't have a proper name for this sort of process. I have a name to recommend. It's time to commit ourselves to the practice of Responsibility Politics. Do we want our great-grandkids to live on an Earth with a Healthy Climate? Responsibility Politics will take us there. That being said, what is it we now have to know about the Earth's climate? Let's start by recognizing the fact that our Earth has both a Natural Heating System and also a Natural Cooling System. 2 Heat energy from the sun arrives from space, as photons in the visible light portion of the spectrum whiz through the atmosphere and bathe the Earth in solar energy That's the Earth's "Natural Heating System." Our Earth then sheds its excess heat by turning it into infrared photons and radiating those photons through the atmosphere and off into space. That's the Earth's "Natural Cooling System." The Earth’s method for cooling itself is exactly like the method a hot pan in your kitchen will use once you remove it from the stove and set it on a counter. It will immediately transform its heat energy into infrared photons and shoot them at the speed of light (er, the speed of photons) away from itself and into your kitchen. A few minutes later, the pan will be a lot cooler and its shower of infrared photons will come to an end. Well, as with the pan in your kitchen, so too with our Earth. Our Earth sheds heat by radiating infrared photons into space. And that works well, provided that its heat-carrying photons succeed in making it through the atmosphere without being intercepted by CO2 molecules. Unfortunately, the efficiency of the Earth’s Natural Cooling System has been damaged by all the Carbon Dioxide that the burning of hydrocarbon fuels has pumped into the atmosphere. For the first 200 years of our “Fossil Fuel Era” – from Watt’s 1766 steam engine all the way to the decade of the 1960s – adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere didn’t affect the Earth’s climate. Over those first 200 years, atmospheric CO2 levels rose from 280 Parts Per Million to ~ 320 Parts Per Million. There are two graphs of what’s been happening to our Earth’s temperature and our Earth’s atmosphere that can help us anchor our understanding of where we are.