severe weather

The magnitude of drought and floods will increase with climate change

A very good article in the Washington Post lays out the problem we face.

"Global warming will intensify drought, and it will intensify floods," explains Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author for the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Why?

As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That's settled science ... You are going to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.

The droughts will be especially bad. How bad?

Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s.

Writing about Mooney, writing about storms

I reviewed Chris Mooney’s new book, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, for The American Prospect, and it’s up today. Gristmiller Kit Stolz reviewed it here a while ago, but uh, mine is … longer. Anyway, the book is good, though not the galvanizing polemic that made his first book, The […]

Hansen gives a talk in Iowa about climate change impacts

Hansen writes faster than I can blog. He has posted a "talk given at Des Moines last Sunday, with description of Declaration of Stewardship slightly edited for clarity." He talks about the "three major consequences of global warming, if we go down the business-as-usual path, with fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions continuing to increase":

Only cyclists and walkers remain calm

At around 4:30am today, a powerful storm swept through New York City and surrounding areas, dumping nearly two inches of rain over Central Park in just one hour before spinning into "tornado-like" gusts in Brooklyn.

The downpour was over soon enough, but the sudden surge of water flooded our subway system, causing every major line to be shut down. Service on buses and trains into the city was either suspended or delayed, right in the midst of rush hour on a sweltering hot day.

By now, most people have either made it to work or given up trying, and at City Room, a blog in the NY Times regional section, many are weighing in about their morning commutes.

In a devastating new magazine piece

Speaking of newsmagazine pieces with refreshingly strong points of view, don’t miss the always excellent Michael Grunwald’s cover story in the current issue of Time: "The Threatening Storm." It’s a detailed, enraging indictment of the Army Corps of Engineers — its incompetence before Katrina and its ongoing failure to protect the Gulf coast from future […]

More evidence of the link to climate change

The weather is getting more extreme thanks to human-caused climate change (as I've pointed out many times, see here, here, and here).

Now the World Meteorological Organization reports more evidence:

In January and April 2007 it is likely that global land surface temperatures ranked warmest since records began in 1880, 1.89°C warmer than average for January and 1.37°C warmer than average for April. Several regions have experienced extremely heavy precipitation, leading to severe floods. The Fourth Assessment Report of the WMO/UNEP Intergovernmental Group on Climate Change (IPCC) notes an increasing trend in extreme events observed during the last 50 years. IPCC further projects it to be very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.

They might be coming sooner than you think

From a NASA's Earth Observatory:

Hurricanes need two basic ingredients to develop: warm, moist air and a relatively calm atmosphere. Late summer over the Atlantic Ocean provides both things. Ocean waters above about 27 degrees Celsius (80 Fahrenheit) give rise to the warm, moist air that fuels tropical storms, and winds that could tear a storm apart are light during the summer. Typically, the Atlantic is primed for hurricanes by early August, and the height of the hurricane season comes in September, though the official hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30.

They have a great figure showing that the Gulf of Mexico is now warm and hurricane-ready. Get ready. It might be an interesting August.

New book on hurricanes and global warming

On his site, science writer Chris Mooney recently posted a fascinating pair of graphs, courtesy of collaborator Matt Nisbet, which chart public interest in global warming.

As the years march by, the charts show what happens when scientific reports are released, when politics intervene -- and when hurricanes strike, as measured by coverage at the Washington Post and the New York Times.

What the graphs show is that in these thoughtful newspapers, political and scientific developments can spur stories, but when hurricanes strike, global warming coverage -- and, presumably public interest -- soars.

This is why Mooney's new book, Storm World, matters -- even though the writer takes every possible opportunity to remind readers that we cannot definitively link global warming to any hurricane.

The book matters because our fears as a nation do link global warming and hurricanes, and when it comes to modern-day hurricanes the size of Texas, as we saw in 2005, our eyes open wide.

Literally

The International Rivers Network has a new study out, “Before the Deluge: Coping with Floods in a Changing Climate,” which details the failures of flood control techniques like dams and levees and presents other options for areas that may face flooding from severe weather and rising shorelines. Turns out traditional flood control measures like embankments […]