2820. Extreme Weather Explicitly Blamed on Humans for the First Time

By The Editors, Nature, December 19, 2017

Aerial view of the Coffey Park neighborhood burned in the October 2017 wildfires. Photo: Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times.

The weird weather just keeps on coming. An oppressive heatwave dubbed Lucifer stifled Europe in August, then a series of powerful Atlantic hurricanes hammered the Americas. Now, unseasonably hot and dry conditions are driving wildfires in California. During and after such events, the same question always arises: is global warming to blame?

Basic theory suggests that climate change will lead to more extreme weather, but making the link to individual events is difficult. There was a time when the typical answer was something along the lines of, ‘Perhaps, but it’s hard to say.’ The science has advanced over the past several years, and scientists have identified global warming’s relative contribution to many extreme weather events. Now, for the first time, climate researchers are reporting that some weather events would have been outright impossible without the warming influence of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

This kind of confident assertion rarely makes its way into the scientific literature. Yet it appeared in three studies included in a special annual edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) dedicated to attributing the causes of extreme weather events. If these results hold up, the implications would be profound and unsettling: humanity has already pushed the global climate into a new regime. To be clear, natural variability will always have a major role, but the blame for some of the most extreme weather phenomena — as well as some of the resulting impacts — would rest squarely on our own shoulders.

Released on 13 December, the research in question focused on 2016, the hottest year on record. One modelling study, led by scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, compared the temperature record to a simulated baseline climate without human greenhouse-gas emissions (T. R. Knutson et al. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc.99, S11–S15; 2018). In baseline simulations of some 24,000 years of weather from seven climate models, nothing like the record warmth of 2016 ever occurred. Greenhouse-gas emissions, chiefly those from fossil-fuel use, are a prerequisite for this kind of heat. What’s more, the paper indicates that greenhouse gases began to push the climate outside the realm of natural variability around 1980.

These conclusions necessarily assume that today’s climate models are sufficiently robust to capture the full range of natural variability. Others will certainly weigh in on the question, but the results suggest that we may need to reframe how we think about extreme events. The epic El Niño warming event in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean in 2015–16, for example, might have pushed global temperatures to record levels, but only because it was amplified by more than a century of greenhouse-gas emissions. From this perspective, global warming might also be to blame for many of the impacts that we normally attribute to El Niño itself, which roils weather patterns across the globe.

Indeed, a second study in the special issue identified global warming as the culprit behind heatwaves that gripped much of southeast Asia in 2016 (Y. Imada et al. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 99, S97–S101; 2018). In India, the heat killed at least 580 people from March to May. Thailand recorded its highest temperature ever — 44.6 °C — on 28 April, and energy consumption across the region hit record levels as people turned on air conditioners for relief. El Niño might have exacerbated the situation, says the study, but the temperatures “would never have happened without the anthropogenic warming”.

Researchers came to the same conclusion in a third study, focused on marine warming in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea that began in 2014 and climaxed last year (J. E. Walsh et al. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 99,S39–S43; 2018). El Niño might have been involved, but global warming set the stage, with far-reaching consequences. Ice on Alaskan rivers broke up earlier than ever; a lack of sea ice affected fishing; and toxic plankton blooms reduced shellfish harvests. Tens of thousands of seabirds were found dead, probably starved.

Extreme weather would be expected from time to time, regardless of global warming. In fact, of the 131 papers investigating extreme events that BAMS has published over the past 6 years, 35% found that global warming played no appreciable part. Nevertheless, the latest results suggest that the climate is entering uncharted territory, and that would mean that weather will increasingly fall outside the historical norm. From this perspective, humanity hasn’t just loaded the dice. We have replaced them with a whole new type that behave in ways we don’t fully understand.

The solution has been clear for more than two decades: governments need to take aggressive action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. By attributing real-world impacts to global warming, scientists are providing citizens and political leaders with further evidence that climate change is a clear and present danger, not a distant threat to future generations. Perhaps in 2018, policymakers will finally realize which way the wind is blowing.

2115. United Kingdom: Storm of Ignorance

By George Monbiot, monbiot.com, December 8, 2015

George Monbiot

It’s as if it had come to remind us of what’s at stake. While the climate negotiations in Paris trudge their dreary road, Storm Desmond takes a great boot to our backsides. Yet still we fail to make the connection. The news records the spectacle and ignores the implications.

Rainfall on this scale used to be described as a one-in-100 year, or 200-year, or 1000-year event. But in Cumbria, where some 30cm of rain fell in 24 hours, this is the third such catastrophe since 2005. Exceptional events are, perhaps, no longer exceptional.

If so, we should scarcely be surprised. More heat means more energy in the system, and more moisture in the atmosphere. An analysis by scientists at the Met Office, published last month, found that global warming raised the odds – by a factor of seven – that a string of storms of the kind the UK suffered two winters ago would result in exceptionally wet weather.

Just as remarkable is the collective lack of interest in what happens when rain hits the ground. The government boasts that “we are spending £3.2 billion in flood management and defences over the course of this parliament – half a billion pounds more than in the previous parliament.” Yet almost all the money devoted to freshwater flood relief is being spent at the bottom of river catchments. This means waiting until the wall of water arrives before seeking to contain it; a perfect formula for disappointment.

A rational policy would aim to prevent the flood from gathering in the first place. It would address the problem, literally and metaphorically, upstream. A study in mid-Wales suggests that rainwater’s infiltration rate into the soil is 67 times higher under trees than under sheep pasture. Rain that percolates into the soil is released more slowly than rain that flashes over the surface. But Cumbria’s hills are almost entirely treeless, and taxpayers, through the subsidy regime, pay farmers to keep them that way.

Rivers that have been dredged and canalised to protect farmland rush the water instead into the nearest town. Engineering works of this kind were removed a few years ago from the River Liza in Ennerdale. It was allowed to braid, meander and accumulate logs and stones. When the last great storm hit Cumbria, in 2009, the Liza remained clear and fordable the following day, while other rivers roared into furious spate. The Liza’s obstructions held the water back, filtered it and released it slowly. Had all the rivers of Cumbria been rewilded in this way, there might have been no floods, then or now.

During the last deluge, in the winter of 2013-2014, the government’s Environment Agency published a presentation called River Dredging and Flood Defence. It remarked that “Dredging of river channels does NOT prevent flooding during extreme river flows.” Dredging, it noted, makes rivers more dangerous, destabilises bridges, banks and weirs and requires endless expense to maintain.

All copies of this presentation have now been deleted from the web (we republish it exclusively on the Guardian’s site today). It is not hard to see why. In June 2014, in pursuit of its primary mission – appeasing the farming industry – the environment department proposed to deregulate dredging, allowing landowners to strip the structure and wildlife habitat out of ditches and rivers. It will also permit them, with minimal oversight, to extract gravel from the riverbed and to build culverts. There could be no better formula for disaster downstream. Once water is in the rivers, it has to go somewhere. If you don’t hold it back in the fields, it will bowl up instead in people’s homes.

But no one in power seems interested in the causes; all focus is on the outcomes. For the past three years, Cumbria’s two most prominent MPs, Rory Stewart, now a minister at the environment department, and Tim Farron, leader of the Lib Dems, have denounced those who call for the better management of watersheds to prevent flooding. In 2013, Rory Stewart blasted the National Trust because it “allows water to ruin the lowland pastures of their small tenant farms, apparently on the advice of the Environment Agency.” In 2014, he mocked the RSPB and the water company United Utilities for managing their land “in a way that ‘increased biodiversity, decreased flooding, increased carbon capture.’”

In 2013, Tim Farron pronounced himself “delighted that Natural England are readjusting their approach to the uplands, with the recent dropping of their Uplands Vision”. This vision (called Vital Uplands) proposed that there should be more vegetation in the hills to reduce “the risk of downstream flooding”. It noted that “Intensive grazing can cause soil erosion and compaction, and prevent regeneration of scrub and trees, thus speeding water run-off.” The report was publicly denounced by the head of the government body that had commissioned it, Natural England, who happened to make his living as a farmer. Once again, the online version was deleted and the hard copies were pulped. Is this how democracies behave?

Now Messrs Stewart and Farron wring their hands and wring out their clothes, lamenting this inexplicable act of God. On Saturday, Tim Farron was trapped in the floodwaters while driving his car, and had to be rescued. The car, apparently, is a write-off. There is relief that he and his four children came to no harm. Still, parables have been told about men like him.

Meanwhile the talks in Paris have become a festival of empty gestures. The pledges governments have brought fall short of those required to prevent disasters on a much greater scale, and even they are broken as they are made. By pursuing a new dash for gas, while closing down its carbon capture and storage, renewable power and energy efficiency programmes, David Cameron’s government makes a mockery of its promises. Worse still, the collective refusal even to discuss keeping fossil fuels in the ground condemns the talks to futility.

Nothing is learnt, crucial discussions are avoided or buried. We are drowning in ignorance; ignorance manufactured by an illiterate media and a hostile government. Every time disaster strikes we respond with bewilderment. Our understanding of what confronts us seems scarcely to have advanced since we responded to catastrophe by burning old women.

1899. Risk of Extreme Weather From Climate Change to Rise Over Next Century, Report Says

By Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times, June 22, 2015

Source: Indur M. Goklany and Julian Morris, 2011

WASHINGTON — More people will be exposed to floods, droughts, heat waves and other extreme weather associated with climate change over the next century than previously thought, according to a new report in the British medical journal The Lancet.

The report, published online Monday, analyzes the health effects of recent episodes of severe weather that scientists have linked to climate change. It provides estimates of the number of people who are likely to experience the effects of climate change in coming decades, based on projections of population and demographic changes.

The report estimates that the exposure of people to extreme rainfall will more than quadruple and the exposure of people to drought will triple compared to the 1990s. In the same time span, the exposure of the older people to heat waves is expected to go up by a factor of 12, according to Peter Cox, one of the authors, who is a professor of climate-system dynamics at the University of Exeter in Britain.

Climate projections typically are expressed as averages over large areas, including vast expanses, like oceans, where people do not live. The report calculates the risk to people by overlaying areas of the highest risk for climate events with expected human population increases. It also takes into account aging populations — for example, heat waves pose a greater health risk to old people.

The report is part of a series of efforts to analyze how climate change might affect human health. Other major climate reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global document, and the National Climate Assessment in the United States, have addressed the issue. But Professor Cox said the new report was the first large-scale effort to quantify the effects that different types of extreme weather would have on people.

“We are saying, let’s look at climate change from the perspective of what people are going to experience, rather than as averages across the globe,” he said. “We have to move away from thinking of this as a problem in atmospheric physics. It is a problem for people.”

The Lancet first convened scientists on the topic in 2009, and produced a report that declared climate change was “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” Monday’s report notes that global carbon emission rates have risen above the worst-case scenarios used in 2009, and that in the absence of any major international agreement on cutting those rates, projections of mortality and illness and other effects, like famine, have worsened.

“Everything that was predicted in 2009 is already happening,” said Nick Watts, a public health expert at the Institute for Global Health at University College London, who led the team of more than 40 scientists from Europe, Africa and China that produced the report. “Now we need to take a further step forward. The science has substantially moved on.”

For years, climate change was presented in terms of natural habitats and the environment, but more recently, experts have been looking at how it might change life on earth for people. Scientists and some governments are trying to frame the dangers of climate change in health terms in order to persuade people that the topic is urgent, not simply a distant matter for scientists. Governments around the world are preparing for a United Nations summit meeting on climate change in Paris in December to discuss new policies to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.

The report measures the increase over time in “exposure events,” which it defines as the number of times people experience any given extreme weather event.

By the end of the century, the report estimates, the exposure to heat waves each year for older people around the world is expected to be around 3 billion more cases than in 1990. The number of times people of all ages are exposed to drought would increase by more than a billion a year. The rise in exposures to extreme rain would be around 2 billion a year by the end of the century, in part because populations are growing.

Even without climate change, the health problems that come along with economic development are significant, the authors note. About 1.2 million people died from illnesses related to air pollution in China in 2010, the report said.

Most broad climate reports do not go further than explaining the science, but much of the Lancet report is dedicated to policy prescriptions to slow or stop climate change and mute its effects on health. It notes that using fewer fossil fuels “is no longer primarily a technical or economic question — it is now a political one,” and urges governments to enact changes that would accomplish that.

1898. Hundreds Die of Heat Wave in Southern Pakistan

By Zia ul-Rahman and Salman Massood, The New York Times, June 22, 2015

The morgue in Karachi, Pakistan, has had to bury 45 unclaimed bodies to make room for more victims of an intense heat wave.Credit Shahzaib Akber/European Pressphoto Agency

KARACHI, Pakistan — An intense heat wave has left at least 260 people dead over three days in southern Pakistan, mostly here in the port city of Karachi, officials said Monday, prompting the government to declare an emergency at hospitals and to ask the military to help respond to the crisis.

Unusually high temperatures, reaching up to 111 degrees Fahrenheit, or 43.8 degrees Celsius here, have led to heatstroke, dehydration, stomach-related pains and low blood pressure among residents, hospital officials said. Most of the dead were men 50 and older. Hardest hit were those living in slums and other impoverished neighborhoods in this city of 20 million, Pakistan’s financial and economic hub.

“We are still receiving dead bodies of the people who died of heat and gastro-related problems,” said Dr. Seemi Jamali, the head of the emergency department at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, a state-run hospital.

The provincial government has canceled time off for doctors and other medical staff and increased stocks of medical supplies, health officials said. Hundreds of people were being treated for heat-related illnesses.

Anwar Kazmi, a spokesman for the city’s only morgue, which is run by Edhi Foundation, a nongovernment charity, said families were still bringing bodies there.

“We have buried, unclaimed, 45 bodies to make space in the facility,” he said, adding that many of those victims were elderly or children.

Frequent power failures in several parts of the city made the soaring temperatures even more unbearable, leading to angry protests here. A large number of people spent Sunday night at Karachi’s parks and beaches because of the electricity losses. Local news media reported that the failures also affected the city’s water supply. And the University of Karachi postponed its examinations because of the extreme weather.

Pakistan has experienced a debilitating energy crisis in recent years as successive governments have struggled to cope with a surging demand for power and an aging, heavily strained grid system.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif expressed grief over the weather-related deaths and asked the National Disaster Management Authority to assist in relief efforts. The Pakistan Rangers (Sindh), a paramilitary force that otherwise fights crime in Karachi, has set up 10 heatstroke relief centers across the city.

On Monday, a light rain fell in some parts of Karachi, and meteorologists said that the extreme weather was expected to subside in the coming days.

1861. Sweltering Heat Kills More Than 1,300 in India

By Nida Najar, The New York Times, May 27, 2015

NEW DELHI — Large swaths of India were baking again on Wednesday under intense heat that has killed more than 1,300 people and left the government scrambling to warn an often unheeding population about the dangers of stepping outside in the blazing midday sun.

Temperatures surpassed 116 degrees in some places in recent days, and were higher than normal even in coastal districts that are typically cooled by easterly winds.

Most of the deaths were reported in southern India, in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with more than 1,000 people killed in Andhra Pradesh alone since May 18, said Pusuli Rani, an official with the state’s Disaster Management Department.

May is typically one of the hottest months of the year in India, with the heat building before the onset of the cooling monsoon season. Yet every year the heat seems to catch residents and the government by surprise.

The high temperatures are the result of hot winds blowing in from the west, leading one local news channel to call the phenomenon a “heat bomb” from Pakistan. B. P. Yadav, of the India Meteorological Department, said the winds had made things worse this year, and contributed to delaying much needed rains in the south. New Delhi, he said, will cool down over the coming days, but heat up again by the end of the month.

The government in Telangana was working with local nongovernmental organizations to provide buttermilk and drinking water to residents through village councils. In Andhra Pradesh, government warnings were broadcast on television and radio urging people to stay inside, especially between noon and 4 p.m.

“It has been quite unbearable,” said L. V. Subramanyam, the special chief secretary of Andhra Pradesh, adding that most of the deaths were among the elderly, laborers and the homeless.

“We cannot restrict people’s movements over a month,” Mr. Subramanyam said.

In Delhi, which has suffered days of unrelenting heat, with temperatures reaching a high of 113 degrees on Monday, people clutched well-worn plastic juice bottles, refilled at public drinking fountains in temples and mosques. A vendor splashed water from a construction site on his tower of fresh coconut pieces; a beggar bathed his leathery forearms in water from a plastic bottle; and vegetable sellers smothered their stock in wet gunny sacks, doused every 15 minutes.

At the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, one of Delhi’s largest public hospitals, families arrived with patients from villages all over the country, waiting for appointments inside the gate. Respite from the heat became a cat-and-mouse game with elusive shade. Kamla Prashad Ahirwal, who rolls crude cigarettes, called beedis, said the worst came at night, when the hospital cut off access to the water fountain and he was forced to gulp down progressively hotter water.

“Even as I’m drinking the water, I can’t feel it,” he said. “I’m still thirsty.”

Dr. Gaurav Muvalia, a resident in the hospital’s emergency room, said patients suffering from heatstroke typically came in with fevers and delirium. “They’re not in their right mind; they don’t know what they’re saying,” he said.

Hospital staff members wrap the patients in wet sheets to bring down their body temperatures, Dr. Muvalia said. In a previous summer, one cycle rickshaw driver, he recalled, came in with a fever of 104. He was wiped down with cold sponges and given intravenous fluids.

Many people built their own defenses against the inescapable weather. A group of unemployed day laborers in south Delhi were bathing three times a day in a leaking pipe that sprayed a fountain of cold water.

Some lucky Delhi residents had air coolers — a downscale variety consisting of a metal box, wet straw, and a fan.

Privthi Raj, 50, a day laborer, said he would not return to work until the monsoons come, which could be a while. At night, he said, he sleeps under a gazebo in a public park.

“I only think about sleeping next to a cooler,” he said. “If somehow I could get a cooler, I could get some relief.”

1745. Boston's Winter from Hell

By E. J. Graff, The New York Times, February 20, 2015

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — BY now you’ve seen the starkly beautiful shots of Boston buried under snow: the panoramic city under a white blanket; snowbanks so high they crest over parked cars; piercing icicles glinting for two full stories from gutters dammed with ice; coat-muffled people dwarfed by snow-walled corridors that once were sidewalks.

You may have seen the funny images as well: the man snowboarding down an all-but-empty major boulevard, pulled by his friend’s snowmobile; drunk men diving out of second-floor windows into six-foot snowbanks; windows that merely frame a wall of snow.

But for those of us living here, it’s not a pretty picture. We are being devastated by a slow-motion natural disaster of historic proportions. The disaster is eerily quiet. There are no floating bodies or vistas of destroyed homes. But there’s no denying that this is a catastrophe.

In just three weeks, between Jan. 27 and Feb. 15, we have had four epic blizzards — seven feet of precipitation over three weeks — which crushed roofs, burst gutters, destroyed roads and sidewalks, closed schools and businesses, shut down highways, crippled public transit and trapped people in their homes. The infamous Blizzard of 1978 brought around 27 inches of snow and shut down the region for a week. In less than a month, we’ve seen more than three times as much snow. The temperature has hovered between 5 and 25 degrees, so the snow and ice haven’t melted.

Decades of underinvestment and alleged mismanagement of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, known as the T, have meant that the nation’s oldest subway system has been partly or entirely halted for nearly a month. (The head of the agency abruptly resigned last week amid criticism.)

On Twitter, a satirical map of the transit system has circulated, with entire subway and bus lines scribbled out with a black line, marked with “LOL,” and “Don’t even.” Across the region, mile-long lines of people stand for an hour or more, freezing in bitter winds, waiting for shuttle buses that are supposed to replace the trains and trolleys. Some have given up and walked home.

For workers paid by the hour, the impossibility of getting to work means disaster, especially since high housing prices have pushed poor people out of the city to outlying communities like Brockton, Lawrence and beyond. When I commiserated with a checkout clerk at my grocery store yesterday — he’s been missing work when the buses break down or just don’t come — thinly veiled panic showed in his eyes. “People will be losing their houses,” he said.

Even if you have a car, you can’t rely on it. Not everyone is spending the hours needed to dig it out, over and over again. Driving is a game of blind chicken, because the intersections are blocked by 12-foot mounds of plowed snow.

All roads are narrowed by plowed snow walls and snowed-under cars and deep slush that just can’t get cleared fast enough. And once a car turns into a putatively two-way street that’s now just one lane, who’s going to back up into traffic to let the other through? Once you arrive, where do you park?

Think about how annoying it is when one or two of your usual routes is temporarily shut down. That’s happened to every street here — with no end in sight. Car insurance companies are swamped with accident calls. Walking is treacherous: The Massachusetts Avenue Bridge over the Charles River, a major pedestrian artery that links Boston and Cambridge, is still inches deep with snow, but you can’t reach the railings because they are lined with snowbanks plowed in from earlier blizzards.

Working parents are desperate: When classes were canceled, they had to stay home, leave their kids alone or scramble to find child care. Even when the schools are open, many parents can’t work a full day: You drop off the child, spend two hours driving to work and have to leave early to get the child before after-school programs close.

But everybody is desperate. We’re all having to spend time and money we don’t have on plowing, car and house repairs, and heating because of the record-low temperatures. People who survive by holding down additional part-time jobs have had to skip those extra shifts.

Businesses have been hammered: Who’s going out to eat, shop or see a movie? How can businesses manufacture and deliver products or arrange deals if their workers just can’t show up? Some companies can let people work from home occasionally, but not every day for a month. Snow-removal services, roofers, chiropractors, and auto mechanics and body shops will profit — but that can’t possibly make up for what is drained from nearly every other business and household.

And it’s devastating for state and local governments. The City of Boston has spent $35 million on snow removal, more than twice what it had budgeted. That doesn’t include Cambridge or any of the surrounding towns, or the state. It doesn’t include how much it will cost to repair the devastated roads, sidewalks and bridges that will have been worn away by snow, freezing, salt and rust. Incoming tax revenues will fall because business and personal incomes are down. The state government expects to see a drop of $30 million in the next months.

Sure, it’s not the same as an earthquake: The snow will melt, eventually. But that will bring more woes. The flooding will hurt the T, ruin roofs and basements and clog roads still more.

Where are the federal disaster funds, the presidential visit, Anderson Cooper interviewing victims, volunteers flying in, goods and services donated after hurricanes and tornadoes? The pictures may be pretty. But we need help, now.

It’s snowing as I write this. We’re expecting more, along with freezing rain, this weekend. And the misery won’t end even when it all melts.

E. J. Graff is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.