Extreme Climate Change in the Pacific during the 2023 Hot Years: The Loss of Lake Mead, the Death Valley, and the Rise of Hurricanes
In 2023, the relentless increase in global heating will continue, bringing ever more disruptive weather that is the signature calling card of accelerating climate breakdown.
According to NASA, 2022 was one of the hottest years ever recorded on Earth. This is extraordinary, because the recurrent climate pattern across the tropical Pacific—known as ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation)—was in its cool phase. During this phase, called La Niña, the waters of the equatorial Pacific are noticeably cooler than normal, which influences weather patterns around the world.
One consequence of La Niña is that it helps keep a lid on global temperatures. We were spared the worst despite the recent heat waves and wildfires. There is a fear that the end of La Nia will coincide with the arrival of the El Nio, which will see the waters of the Pacific becoming much warmer. The extreme weather that has raged across our planet in the past two years will pale into insignificance when it does.
What will this mean? I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the record for the highest recorded temperature—currently 54.4°C (129.9°F) in California’s Death Valley—shattered. This could well happen somewhere in the Middle East or South Asia, where temperatures could climb above 55°C. The heat could exceed the blistering 40°C mark again in the UK, and for the first time, top 50°C in parts of Europe.
One of the worst-affected regions will be the Southwest United States. Here, the longest drought in at least 1,200 years has persisted for 22 years so far, reducing the level of Lake Mead on the Colorado River so much that power generation capacity at the Hoover Dam has fallen by almost half. Upstream, the Glen Canyon Dam, on the rapidly shrinking Lake Powell, is forecast to stop generating power in 2023 if the drought continues. The Hoover Dam could follow suit in a few years. Water and power are available for many people in seven states, including California. This supply would be catastrophic for the agriculture, industry and populations of the region.
Hurricane development can pick up as La Nia ends in the Atlantic, since it tends to limit the growth of hurricanes. The higher global temperatures expected in 2023 could see extreme heating of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico surface waters. This would favor the formation and persistence of super-hurricanes, powering winds and storm surges capable of wiping out a major US city, should they strike land. Direct hits, rather than a glancing blow, are rare—the closest in recent decades being Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which made landfall immediately south of Miami, obliterating more than 60,000 homes and damaging 125,000 more. Hurricanes today are both more powerful and wetter, so that the consequences of a city getting in the way of a superstorm in 2023 would likely be cataclysmic.
On July 19 of 2022, the UK experienced a taste of the weather to come. Temperatures reached 40.3 degrees Celsius—soaring past the previous record by more than one-and-a-half degrees. Dozens of homes were destroyed by fires in east London, while other areas of the country were hit hard by the heat. The Office for National Statistics estimates that there were more 2,800 excess deaths among older adults in the summer heat waves of 2022, which was the deadliest year for heat in the past decade.
The findings revealed the unprecedented scale of the record-breaking temperatures. Otto and his team estimated that the UK heat wave would be at least ten times more likely due to climate change, and that in a world without warming peak temperatures would be around 2 degrees Celsius lower. The weather was so unusual that, in a world without climate change, it would have been statistically impossible to reach such high temperatures in two out of the three weather stations the scientists studied. This is close to a smoking gun when it comes to climate attribution science. Otto says people always want the number, and sometimes they can’t give a very satisfactory number. This time, however, Otto had no shortage of numbers to share with the reporters who were ringing her up.
Every week, a contact at the Red Cross sends Otto and her colleagues at World Weather Attribution a list of floods, heat waves, and other extreme weather events across the globe. Often there are six or eight crises listed in the email—far too many for Otto’s small team to tackle—so the scientists narrow their focus to weather that is impacting millions of people, selecting roughly one event every six weeks, from storms in Europe to flooding in Pakistan.
At least one highway in drought-mired California looked more like a river because of torrential rain from what is technically called an atmospheric river of moisture. The Northern Hemisphere on Wednesday was more than 2 degrees hotter than the 20th century average, and the United States East was more than 1 degree hotter. The air in the northern part of the country was cold enough to create a Christmas mess.
In addition to La Nina, a different natural temporary weather event called the Madden-Julian Oscillation enhances storms in the western Pacific, Maue said.
Sacramento-La-Nina Bomb Cycloone Weather Cycle: Rain and Snow as a Jump Rope across the Pacific, Weather Tracker Maximiliano Herrera
More than 5 inches of rain fell on Saturday in the Sacramento area and California braced for bigger storms Wednesday and Thursday. As of Wednesday, snowpack was third highest in 40 years, more than 170% of normal.
Francis points to a “blob” of warm sea water off the Aleutian Islands, a phenomena that is happening more often, and a ”crazy warm” Arctic — Wednesday it was 5.8 degrees warmer than the 1979-2000 average — as part of what’s juicing up the Pacific.
“You can think of it like a jump rope. When you start to flick it at one end, that ripple goes through the whole jump rope eventually,” Francis said Wednesday. It could be that the waving could be seen across Europe, being driven in the Pacific.
On the first day of the year, a weather station on the French side of Delemont set a new record with an average daily temperature of over 65 degrees. In January of this year it broke a record at 63 degrees. and it was 64.2 Fahrenheit in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, according to extreme weather tracker Maximiliano Herrera.
With the record heat in Europe in January helping to ease winter heating fuel crunch caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there has been a silver lining to the extreme weather. And California, where there’s been a more than 20-year megadrought that worsens wildfires, is getting much-needed rain and snow — too much of it, actually.
Roads and levees in California were washed out early in the week. More than 8,000 bags of sand were given out as schools were closed in the San Francisco area. There were no flights to and fro.
“Excessive rainfall over already saturated soils will result in rapid rises on creeks, streams and rivers as well as flooding in urban areas,” forecasters said in a report.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/05/1147116000/la-nina-climate-change-california-bomb-cyclone-winter-heat-wave
Climate Change Does Not Make It Unusual, But It Causes It,” says Victor Gensini, a meteorologist at the Northern Illinois University
Except for the impressive record heat in Europe, “which is yet another example of the manifestation of human-induced climate change,” Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini said he finds nothing too unusual.
Weather is naturally extreme “so the recent events we’ve been seeing can occur naturally,” said Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters now at Yale Climate Connections. “But with the disruption to global weather patterns that climate change is bringing the probability of seeing unusual weather events in any season increases.”