Climate Change, Storms and Heat Waves: From the Here and Now to the Present and the Future of Climate Change Forecasts and Extreme Weather Warnings
The leaders of Pakistan and two other countries pointed the finger at Climate change and devastating floods, storms and heat waves. And in a speech at the conference, President Joe Biden said more severe hurricanes and wildfires are wreaking havoc in the United States.
Thanks to the work of extreme-event attribution, the connection between climate warming and extreme weather is now clearer than ever. The ability for scientists to describe how bad a particular flood is because of global warming is something that cannot be described by other means.
If weather forecasts mention how climate change could make hurricanes more severe, it will be better for the storm.
But including climate context in real-time weather warnings is easier said than done, says Sarah Kapnick, the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Kapnick has a background as a research scientist, and has worked on extreme-event attribution studies.
The public is clamoring to hear about climate change, and so the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration is looking into how it gets the word out.
He said that there are more assets and targets for the storms to hit. Even if you remove climate change from the equation, we still have an issue of human and societal vulnerability.
The acting director of the storm center appeared on CNN where he was asked how climate change might affect the storm’s strength. He responded, “We can come back and talk about climate change at a later time. I want to look at the here and now.
Indeed, a preliminary analysis by Wehner and other climate scientists in the days after Ian made landfall estimated that climate change caused the storm to drop at least 10% more rain than it would have without global warming.
Climate Change and the Historical Nature of the Kentucky December 2021 “Tornado” Event: When a Pair of Dice Becomes More Diverse
There is interest in doing things like flood-proofing your home while there is more support for electric vehicles.
After a climate-driven disaster, it’s not clear how long those attitudes will last. Figuring that out is an active area of research. The time is right to help people understand the risks of climate change, according to Wong-Parodi.
“I think that’s really important as we move forward, because it has implications for how we may want to communicate to the public about these types of events,” says Wong-Parodi.
Among the cocktail of extreme weather events that plow through the United States, tornadoes can be the most destructive and the most deadly especially for those unprepared for what’s to come.
When a series of twisters uprooted trees, tore down infrastructure and killed dozens of people in Kentucky in December 2021, for instance, meteorologists and climate scientists — careful not to attribute the cause to climate change — underscored the “historic” nature of the tornadic outbreak.
Think of a pair of dice, he said. The change to the value of five to six raises the chances of you rolling the pair of dice and getting the value 12. Although you can’t immediately attribute that value of 12 to the change you made, you just altered the probability of that event occurring.
How frequent is the greatest tornadoes in the world? Evidence of atmospheric pollution from a 50-year meteorological observational data release by Gensini
“It’s also very common when you have La Niña in place to see this eastward shift in highest tornado frequency,” Gensini said. “But if you look at the past 40 years, the research I’ve done … has shown that places like Nashville, Tennessee, for example, or Mayfield, Kentucky … their frequency of tornadoes, their risk of having a tornado has increased over the last 40 years.”
Scientists warn that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the weather to behave oddly because of the fast-flowing air currents in the upper atmosphere.
This is backed by a 2021 report from the World Meteorological Organization that found an extreme weather event or climate disaster has occurred every day, on average, somewhere in the world over the last 50 years, marking a five-fold increase over that period and exacting an economic toll that has climbed seven-fold since the 1970s.