From Peter Sinclair, with Yale Climate Connections.
Category Archives: Severe Weather and Other Disasters
Bjorn Lomborg’s Little Idea
Bjorn Lomborg is famous for downplaying the importance of climate change, and the urgency of acting on it. I don’t know anyone who quite understands why he does this. If you want to know more about him, click here.
You will remember his comment a while back about how sea levels actually went down for a while, but nobody ever talks about that. He was wrong. Sea levels are rising over time, but they do go up and down within that larger framework. His sea level comment prompted me to create the following graphic:
Lomborg’s latest is to make the incorrect claim that the recent and ongoing unprecedented, traumatic, and destructive fires in Australia are just kind of average. Nothing to see here. His claim is based on a misrepresentation of cherry picked data. Australia does have a lot of fire, so it is easy to find a way to describe this year’s as not abnormal. What is different, and worse, this year is where the fires happened, the kind of habitat that burned, and the timing. (See this.) The Twitter thread that Lomborg started, and many others chimed in on, is here.
And, here is the graphic I could not resist making in response. I’ve replaced the Picard Face-palm with the Greta Stern Look. This might be a thing from now on.
The graphic used in that image is a screen shot from this video:
The Worst Fire Season Ever Recorded: An Apocalypse
Hurricanes may start stalling more, and that is bad.
The tempo of storms has changed with global warming. A single storm that might drop X amount of water across a zone one thousand miles in length and hundreds of miles wide may now drop that same amount of water over a zone that is only a few hundred miles in length. Major floods in Calgary, Boulder, Southeastern Minnesota, Duluth, and other very wet rainfall events are now on record as examples of this, and the cause is quasi-resonant Rosbey waves. Continue reading Hurricanes may start stalling more, and that is bad.
Greta Thunberg’s Testimony to Congress, Unabridged.
A Portrait of Dorian
UPDATE: Everything below is still current, but right now at about 10PM eastern Aug 31, Dorian is a Cat 5. Just figured you’d like to know
Original post: Continue reading A Portrait of Dorian
Dorian: All those people who evacuated north? Oops
There was always a chance that Dorian was going to make a right turn. In fact, it wasn’t just “a chance” but a very high probability. But a day or so ago, it was reasonable to say that Dorian would likely, but not necessarily, make that turn AFTER coming ashore in Florida.It now looks like Dorian may make that turn sooner, while still at sea.
We have already seen major news outlets walking all over their own tongues trying to describe that might happen, and thus quite possibly misleading people in a dangerous way. Here, I’ll focus on a new way of explaining the Dorian dilemma.
First, think of a hurricane as a car. The driver is the eye. Perhaps imagine a car where the driver sits more in the middle, like this one: Continue reading Dorian: All those people who evacuated north? Oops
Dorian Could Be A Big Problem IMPORTANT UPDATES
UPDATE for Friday 20 Aug AM:
The information below is still pretty accurate for Dorian, except a few important details. Continue reading Dorian Could Be A Big Problem IMPORTANT UPDATES
“Am I going to have access to food or water when I’m 30?” — the question your kids are asking now.
If you do not understand that this is a valid question, then you do not actually deserve to be breathing our chemically-altered air right now. No excuses.
A Hurricane Named Dorian Likely To Hit Florida UPDATED
Dorian is a poorly to moderately organized tropical storm just west of the northern reach of the Leeward Islands, expected to affect Puerto Rico by the end of the day today, then to move into the Southwest North Atlantic, where it will likely become a hurricane between 36 and 48 hours from now.
It is highly likely that Dorian will strike the US 48 this weekend or Monday, somewhere, as some kind of storm. There is a very good chance this will be Florida as a
The cold spot caused by global warming and why it should scare you
You saw the film The Day After Tomorrow. This is that. Not like in the movie, but still…
Warming causes melting of ice, adding fresh water into the North Atlantic, which interferes with a major current system that at present warms Europe.
Consequence: The planet warms dangerously, while at the same time, large parts of Europe become much cooler, to the extent that people may not be able to live there in the manner they do now, or produce very much food there. Gibraltar would have a climate similar to the coast of Maine, and Berlin would have a climate similar to the Northwest Territories or northern Hudson Bay.
The models have predicted this, but it now seems that they’ve under-predicted it. It appears to be happening faster, and more furiously, than expected.
Chantal, Welcome to Storm World
Chantal is the next name in line to be use for an Atlantic tropical storm or hurricane name. I’m going to go out on a limb (where I will be duly chastised by my friends and colleagues who are tropical storm experts or meteorologists), and say that a storm currently brewing in the Caribbean has a very good chance of becoming Chantal. Continue reading Chantal, Welcome to Storm World
ALERT: Hurricane Barry May Hit Gulf Coast Very Soon
If the current large wet spot in the norther Gulf does develop into a named storm, it will end up being one of the stranger storms we’ve seen.
This feature began as a depression over land, not over the sea. It then moved south over the Gulf, where it sits off the coast. Several different models have it developing to something wind wind speeds of 60 knots or more over the next several hours. The National weather service has it as a Category 1 hurricane by mid day Saturday. That is also when it is expected to push over the coast west of New Orleans.
Continue reading ALERT: Hurricane Barry May Hit Gulf Coast Very Soon
State of the climate, 2019
The year 2018 was warm, but since previous years had been super warm, it may have seemed a bit cooler. There was indeed a downswing, but only a little one.
However, 2019 is looking like an upswing year. It will not be as warm as the recent El Nino year, but it will be close, and it will follow the predicted upward course of global warming caused by our release of greenhouse gasses and the effect of those gasses on delicate and critically important atmospheric chemistry.
Climate Central has a a State of the Climate report here.
Note that the various predictions for the activity level of the 2019 hurricane season suggest an average year. The most common midpoint of estimates for the number of actual hurricanes is five, with 2 major ones, in the Atlantic. The long term average for those numbers is 6.4 and 2.7. However, the estimate for the total number of named storms is a bit higher than the average of 12.1, suggesting between 10 and 14 or so. We have already had one, before the official start of the season, but the Atlantic has been relatively quiet since then.
This Spring’s unprecedented flooding is of course directly related to climate change, and there isn’t a sane person on the Earth who doesn’t accept that as truth. You will have a harder time finding people accepting a link between tornado activity, which has been very high this year, and global warming, but it is also true that a) there has been a very well entrenched and active non-acceptance of that relationship for years in the meteorological community and b) it seems that having a few bad years in a row, as we have had with hurricanes, is required before enough people put their thinking caps on and think. So, I await a possible shift in position on tornadoes and global warming.
A New Book On Drought by NASA GISS’s Ben Cook
Drought: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
The relationship between rainfall, groundwater, evaporation and transpiration, vegetation, bodies of water, animal distribution, agriculture, humans, and atmospheric conditions (not to mention oceanic factors and topography) underlie many different realms of academia and policy. Almost nothing I’ve ever done in my anthropological research didn’t include the hydrologic cycle, climate, and related issues. The weather weirding we are currently watching across the globe, including the current heavy rains and tornadoes, are part of this, and the long lived California Drought, the one that ended just recently, is as well.
In Drought: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Cook covers the hydrologic cycle and the relationship between the hydrologic cycle and climatology. He defines the sometimes confusing concepts and measurements known as “drought” in a non-confusing and detailed way. I’ve found that in many discussions of drought, self defined experts who also happen to be climate change deniers tend to talk past (or over or around) others, making it difficult for the average non-expert to avoid frustration. Cook will arm you with the knowledge to stand up to such shenanigans!
Cook covers drought in the Holocene, and the relationship between climate change and drought. He provides two key detailed case studies (the American dust bowl, and droughts in the Sahel of Africa). He covers landscape degradation and desertification, and irrigation.
Drought: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Ben Cook is a research scientist at NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and he teaches at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies.