Editorial: Crazy weather

(collage by the blogger)

In the past 12 and a half months great areas of the world have experienced extreme, crazy and topsy-turvy weather. Both the western and eastern worlds suffered a midsummer breakdown:

The hottest summer (more than 100 degrees F for the first time) in Russia, sparking wildfires and blanketing Moscow with toxic smog;

The heaviest monsoon rains in Pakistan, causing rivers to rampage over the countryside, flooding thousands of villages, killing 1,500 people and leaving 14 million homeless;

The worst floods in China in decades which, together with landslides, killed at least 1,100 people and left more than 600 missing;

The wettest midsummer (some call it "Nashville's `Katrina'") in Iowa in 127 years of record-keeping, floodwaters forcing hundreds from their homes;

The calving off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland's northwest of a 100-square-mile chunk of ice.

Winter in the West (the cold season in the East) has been especially harsh. A "Snowmaggeddon" has blanketed huge areas of the United States. From extreme, brain-cooking heat during the summer, the weather has turned to the other extreme, with record snowfalls being experienced in areas that usually saw mild, gentle winters in the past.

And the end is not yet in sight. In the first half of January devastating floods have hit Australia; a tsunami-like wall of water ripped through Queensland's Lockyer Valley, tossing cars like toys, lifting houses from their foundations, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people (very reminiscent of "Ondoy"!). Thousands of kilometers away, in Brazil, more than 500 people have died in mudslides near Rio de Janeiro. In the Philippines, heavy rains have lashed the Bicol region, the Visayas and Mindanao, killing scores of people, displacing hundreds of thousands and causing billions of pesos in damage to crops, public works and private property.

Why the freakish, crazy weather? Scientists are hotly debating the issue, but the great majority say that it is caused by global warming. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves and more intense rainfalls. The IPCC's most recent assessment report says, "It is now more likely than not that human activity has contributed to observed increases in heat waves, intense precipitation events and the intensity of tropical cyclones."

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has reported that 2010 was "the hottest meteorological year." For über-meteorologist Dr. Jess Masters of Weather Underground, 2010 was the year of living dangerously (insofar as the weather was concerned): "The stunning extremes we witnessed give me concern that our climate is showing early signs of instability."

Masters continued: "…I suspect that crazy weather years like 2010 will become the norm a decade from now, as the climate continues to adjust to the steady build-up of heat-trapping gasses we are pumping into the air… Forty years from now, the crazy weather of 2010 will seem pretty tame… This year's wild ride was just the beginning."

It was extremely fatal, destructive and frightening in many parts of the world, and yet, for a weather expert "it was just the beginning." Wild, wild 2010 should make all nations take more aggressive steps to try to control global warming. And everyone should contribute to the effort, from the poorest country to the richest, which are among those who are producing the greatest volume of greenhouse gases.

Governments and the private sector will have to study and adopt strong measures to control emissions; promote the use of human-friendly sources of power such as solar, wind, geothermal and ocean wave; curb deforestation; make rational land use plans; and resettle the poor who are always vulnerable on flood plains. Bold, aggressive measures have to be adopted, and the richer nations, which cause the most pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, have the moral obligation to provide funds to the poorer ones to help them cope with the problem.

We are now really seeing and experiencing "the dark side of climate change." Unless we begin solving the problem now, we will be condemning our children, and our children's children to a very harsh future, and probably, even to an early death.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer at http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/editorial/view/20110118-315066/Crazy-weather

2010: Global climate hotter, wettest

The new figures confirm that 2010 will go down as one of the more exceptional years in the annals of climatology. Last year saw prodigious snowstorms that broke seasonal records in the United States and Europe; a record-shattering summer heat wave that scorched Russia; strong floods that drove people from their homes in places like Pakistan, Australia, California and Tennessee; a severe die-off of coral reefs; and a continuation in the global trend of a warming climate.

Two US agencies—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—reported on Wednesday that the global average surface temperature for 2010 had tied the record set in 2005.

The analyses differ slightly: In the NOAA version, the 2010 temperature was 0.62 degree Celsius (1.12 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for the 20th century, which is 14 degrees Celsius (57 Fahrenheit).

Climate experts have become increasingly concerned about rising global temperatures over the last century. A large majority of climatologists attribute global warming to industrial processes and gasoline-burning engines that release heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“The warmth this year reinforces the notion that we are seeing climate change,” said David Easterling, chief of scientific services at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

Warmest years

It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th century average; the last below-average year was 1976. More remarkable, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 2001.

Easterling said the temperature readings collected at land stations and from ships and buoys at sea “unequivocally” disproved claims that climate warming ended in 2005.

“If the warming trend continues, as is expected, if greenhouse gases continue to increase, the 2010 record will not stand for long,” said James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Bob Ward at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science said the US data showed “that the Earth is warming and its temperature is at record levels.”

Last year’s data “also showed that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 390 parts per million, its highest level for at least 800,000 years and almost 40 percent higher than the level before the start of the Industrial Revolution when humans started to burn fossil fuels in increasing amounts,” Ward said.

“The evidence is overwhelming that human activities are driving climate change,” he added.

Wettest year

Last year was also the wettest on record, according to NOAA which cited a report of the Global Historical Climatology Network that made the calculation based on global average precipitation.

A warmer atmosphere holds more water, which in general can result in more floods, Easterling explained.

The NOAA analysis tracked weather changes that contributed to massive floods in Pakistan and a heat wave in Russia, saying an “unusually strong jet stream” from June to August was to blame.

“The jet stream remained locked in place for weeks, bringing an unprecedented two-month heat wave to Russia and contributing to devastating floods in Pakistan at the end of July,” the agency said.

As various crops were scorched and countless farms were inundated, global food prices rose to record levels and threatened to lead to food riots like those seen in 2008.

When it came to hurricanes and storms, the Pacific Ocean saw the fewest number of hurricanes and named storms, three and seven respectively, since the 1960s.

Shrinking sea ice

But the Atlantic Ocean told a different story, with 12 hurricanes and 19 named storms, marking the second highest number of hurricanes on record and third highest for storms.

NASA analysts said the shrinking sea ice in the Arctic may have made winters in Europe and Canada warmer than usual.

“Winter weather patterns are notoriously chaotic, and the analysis finds seven of the last 10 European winters warmer than the average from 1951 to 1980,” NASA said in a statement.

“The unusual cold in the past two winters has caused scientists to begin to speculate about a potential connection to sea ice changes,” it said.

“Arctic sea ice acts like a blanket, insulating the atmosphere from the ocean’s heat. Take away that blanket, and the heat can escape into the atmosphere, increasing local surface temperatures. Regions in northeast Canada were several degrees warmer than normal in December.”

The United States was wetter and hotter last year than the average values for the 20th century, but overall the year was not as exceptional in this country as for the world as a whole.

Still, some remarkable events occurred at a regional scale, including snowstorms last February that shattered seasonal records in cities like Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. In the summer, a heat wave broke records in the South and along much of the East Coast.

Future weather

The NASA and NOAA reports did not predict weather in the future.

But the UN climate science panel said the weather was likely to be more extreme this century because of a buildup of gases released by burning fossil fuels and forest destruction.

Jay Gulledge, the senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said farmers and others may be able to adjust to expected warmer temperatures, but preparing for extreme weather would be harder.

“We’ve got really immense potential right now to have even bigger impacts from the direct effects of extreme events,” he said.

As the weather warmed, the world did not do enough to prevent future climate change, scientists said.

At the UN climate talks in Cancun late last year, nearly 200 countries agreed to set a target of limiting a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) over preindustrial times.

But promised emissions curbs by big polluters such as China and the United States are not enough to achieve that goal and tougher actions are needed, climate scientists said.

Paradox

Frigid winters in parts of Europe and the United States in 2010 may be a paradoxical side effect of climate change, some scientists said.

Rising temperatures mean a shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic, heating the region and pushing cold air southward during the winter, according to a study last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Warming of the air over the Barents and Kara seas, for instance, seems to bring cold winter winds to Europe.

“This is not what one would expect,” said Vladimir Petoukhov, lead author of the study and climate scientist at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Whoever thinks that the shrinking of some far away sea-ice won’t bother him could be wrong.”

The release of the NOAA report itself was delayed one day by an unusually hard snowstorm in North Carolina.

“These anomalies could triple the probability of cold winter extremes in Europe and northern Asia,” Petoukhov said. “Recent severe winters like last year’s ... do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it.” Reports from The New York Times, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer Online at http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20110114-314309/Global-climate-hotter-wettest