May 16
„Currently the unspoken plan is to wait until the situation is catastrophic and then respond.“
-Orrin Pilkey, taken from : Angry Weather by Friederike Otto
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„Currently the unspoken plan is to wait until the situation is catastrophic and then respond.“
-Orrin Pilkey, taken from : Angry Weather by Friederike Otto
The work "could be very useful for establishing potential liability,” says one of its authors.
Excerpt from this story from Mother Jones:
Carbon emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies have been directly linked to dozens of deadly heatwaves for the first time, according to a new analysis. The research has been hailed as a “leap forward” in the legal battle to hold big oil accountable for the damages being caused by the climate crisis.
The research found that the emissions from any one of the 14 biggest companies were by themselves enough to cause more than 50 heatwaves that would otherwise have been virtually impossible. The study shows, in effect, that those emissions caused the heatwaves.
The carbon pollution from ExxonMobil’s fossil fuels, for example, made 51 heatwaves at least 10,000 times more likely than in an unheated world, the researchers found, as did the emissions from Saudi Aramco.
Global heating is making heatwaves more frequent and more intense across the globe, contributing to at least 500,000 heat-related deaths a year. The searing heatwave that struck the Pacific Northwest in 2021 was made almost 3C hotter, for example.
The new research found that the total emissions from the 180 “carbon major” companies included in the analysis were responsible for about half the increase in intensity, with emissions due to forest destruction making up most of the rest. It also found that the 213 heatwaves studied became 200 times more likely on average from 2010 to 2019 owing to the climate crisis.
“Being able to trace back the contribution of these single [carbon major] emitters and quantify their contribution could be very useful for establishing potential liability,” said Prof Sonia Seneviratne, at ETH Zurich university in Switzerland, a senior author of the report.
Dr Davide Faranda, a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and not part of the study team, said: “This study adds a crucial new step: it connects the dots between specific climate disasters and the companies whose emissions made them possible. This bridge could become a cornerstone for legal and policy action to hold polluters accountable.”
Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said: “We can now point to specific heatwaves and say, ‘Saudi Aramco did this. ExxonMobil did this.’ When their emissions alone are triggering heatwaves that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, we’re talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms.”
The research, published in the journal Nature, used a type of analysis called attribution. This compares the hotter world today with the world before mass burning of fossil fuels to assess how emissions have driven up temperatures, using weather data and computer models.
New research shows the links between human-caused warming and rising fire risks in Europe, and offers a path toward a more resilient future.
Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
A new attribution report published Thursday shows that global warming made the extreme hot and dry conditions preceding this summer’s wildfires in Portugal and Spain 40 times more likely and 30 percent more intense than in pre-industrial climate conditions.
The fires have killed at least eight people, and tens of thousands were evacuated as health-damaging smoke spread over France and as far as the United Kingdom and Scandinavia.
Science indicates that the challenges will intensify in the coming decades with further warming, and researchers are clear that the highest priority is reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
The researchers who studied the Iberian fires are “very confident” that climate change is the most significant factor driving the extreme fire weather, compared to any possible natural variability, said Friederike Otto, lead scientist with World Weather Attribution, an international research group focused on the links between human-caused warming and climate extremes.
Two decades after Katrina, scientists can more easily quantify how global warming is intensifying hurricanes - and how it shaped past storms
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
Two decades ago, Hurricane Katrina spun up like a massive atmospheric engine, using warm ocean water as fuel. Making landfall as a Category 3 storm with maximum sustained winds of 125 mph, it devastated New Orleans — surging seawater over levees, killing nearly 1,400 people, and causing more than $150 billion in damage. Even though engineers have since significantly bolstered those levees, their ability to withstand climate-supercharged cyclones remains uncertain.
In the past 20 years, researchers have gotten ever better at determining how much human-caused climate change has contributed to extreme weather — a field called attribution science — thanks to more data and better modeling. On the 20th anniversary of Katrina, a new report from the research group Climate Central looks back and crunches the numbers, finding that the monster storm fed on waters made 0.9 degrees Celsius, or 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter by climate change. That boost of fuel accelerated the maximum sustained wind speed by 5 mph.
“As sea surface temperatures go up, the fuel sources provided are going up, and that allows the hurricane to spin faster,” said Daniel Gilford, a climate scientist at Climate Central. “We have the strong confidence now that we can say human-caused climate change is influencing hurricanes in very specific ways.”
Unfortunately for New Orleans and any other city that finds itself in the path of a tropical cyclone, the ocean is really good at absorbing heat: 90 percent of the warming from humanity’s emissions has gone into the seas. The Gulf of Mexico in particular has been running extra hot, creating an expansive pool of fuel for tempests, which grow in strength as water evaporates and transfers energy into the atmosphere. In a separate analysis released last year, Climate Central found that climate change worsened all 11 of 2024’s hurricanes by raising ocean temperatures, boosting maximum sustained wind speeds by 9 to 28 mph.
“Just a little bit of warming in the ocean — 1 degree C, for example — can make a huge impact in the amount of energy these storms can pick up,” said Zachary Zobel, associate director of the risk program at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who wasn’t involved in the new report. “And I think Katrina was really the wake-up call.”
To be clear, no one is saying that climate change created these storms, just that it exacerbated them. And while ocean temperatures provide the fuel for a hurricane engine, they’re not the only component. They also need favorable atmospheric conditions, like the absence of vertical wind shear — or winds moving in different directions at different altitudes — to spin up.
They also require humidity, as dry air will discourage their formation. And the warmer the atmosphere gets, the more moisture it can hold, boosting humidity and increasing the amount of rain that can fall. “If the hurricane is like a sponge, and it’s squeezing out its water, you can imagine when it spins faster, the ringing of the sponge is more intense,” Gilford said. “So more rain can come out. Not only do you have more water to begin with, but you can more effectively squeeze it out of the storm.”
POLITICO discussed the emergence of attribution science and the human fingerprints on Helene and Milton with Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton Uni
Scientists can now identify the influence of climate change on tropical cyclones. It's a field called attribution science.
Known as attribution science, the technique measures the likelihood of extreme weather events occurring against a range of scenarios — including one without all the planet-heating gases from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas that scientists say have been the primary reason for the 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperatures since the mid-19th century. POLITICO discussed the emergence of attribution science and the human fingerprints on Helene and Milton with Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton University professor of geosciences who contributed to an analysis of Helene as part of World Weather Attribution, a collective of climate scientists and researchers. Vecchi said all the “telltale signs” of climate change were present for both Helene and Milton: abnormally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico that fueled the cyclones’ energy and rapid intensification from smaller tropical storms to massive hurricanes. That aligns with recent scientific literature that climate change makes it more likely for hurricanes to become stronger whenever they form. “Milton went up from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in less than 10 hours,” Vecchi said. “That’s sort of outlandish. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.” The WWA’s analysis released on Friday estimated that climate change boosted Milton’s rainfall between 20 and 30 percent and wind speed by 10 percent.
This probably won't stop twits like Marjorie Taylor Greene from claiming the government is creating hurricanes with Jewish space lasers. But it's now easier to connect the use of fossil fuels to the increasing number of extreme weather events.
The field of attribution science is 20 years old this year, and scientists’ ability to detect the fingerprints of climate change in extreme
Excerpt from this story from Yale Climate Connections:
“Once upon a time, the only thing we could say about a particular weather event was that it was ‘consistent with climate change,’” Yale Climate Connections Meteorologist Bob Henson said to kick off a webinar on climate attribution science on May 3, 2024.
In the last 20 years, the field of attribution science, which is dedicated to analyzing the effects of climate change on specific weather events, has gained steam. Nowadays, scientists can tell with much more certainty how much climate change influences the severity and intensity of heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and more, by comparing weather data from the real world to a counterfactual, modeled world where climate change has not occurred.
Such studies enable scientists to communicate with more confidence, for example, that a particular heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of human-caused climate change.
Pershing and Singh both said that some types of extreme weather are more complicated to attribute to climate change than others. Heat waves, for example, are relatively easy, while individual wildfires — with all kinds of complex factors like temperature, wind, and pyrotechnic gender-reveal parties — are more difficult to link directly to climate change.
“Climate change is an important factor in many, if not most weather events,” Pershing said. “It’s really just a matter of how finely can we diagnose the cause and effect.”
Singh, who has analyzed droughts, floods, and more, said there can be gaps in the data available for attribution models. Solid historical data for temperature, precipitation, and other weather events in a region are important inputs in the scientists’ calculations, but they aren’t always available.
“When we don’t find an effect of climate change, one [reason] is that it could be that climate change has not contributed to making that event worse,” she said. “The other reason that we cannot attribute certain types of events, especially in parts of the world that we don’t have a good observational record, is that our data isn’t good.”
Winter storm and flood alerts continue this week for millions of Americans following a weekend of flash floods in states such as Pennsylvani
Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
Winter storm and flood alerts continue this week for millions of Americans following a weekend of flash floods in states such as Pennsylvania and Illinois, where many residents were forced to evacuate their homes as they took on water. It’s the third weekend this month when large swaths of the country have been doused with extreme wintry conditions—a trend that’s becoming increasingly more likely because of climate change, recent analyses show.
In northeastern Illinois, unseasonably warm temperatures destabilized a pileup of ice on the Kankakee River and unleashed major flooding, prompting evacuations of about 200 homes. “There’s always ice backups this time of year, but I’ve never seen it this bad,” one resident told a local news station.
Several residents in the Pittsburgh metro area were also forced to evacuate on Sunday—one person by ladder—after the state saw record rainfall as a coastal storm drenched much of the Northeast. At one point, some 15 million Americans in the region were under flood watch that day, with another eight million facing winter and snow alerts, ABC News reported.
Arkansas residents also found themselves inundated by flash floods after record-high water levels on the Cache River led to a levee failure Sunday evening. Winter storms over the prior weekend brought freezing rain to northern and central parts of the state, and the National Weather Service said the river was at its highest water levels in six years.
The weekend floods top off a month that has been especially active with winter storms, which recent reports suggest are being driven largely by human-caused climate change.
ClimaMeter, an international consortium of climate scientists, released a rapid attribution analysis last week that examined the winter storm systems that occurred Jan. 12-14 across large swaths of the United States. The report found that January saw increased precipitation largely due to climate change, with natural climate variability playing a modest role.
A growing field called attribution science is helping researchers rapidly assess the links between global warming and weather disasters.
Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:
Pakistan began receiving abnormally heavy rain in mid-June, and, by late August, drenching downpours were declared a national emergency. The southern part of the Indus River, which traverses the length of the country, became a vast lake. Villages have become islands, surrounded by putrid water that stretches to the horizon. More than 1,500 people have died. Floodwaters could take months to recede.
The deluges were made worse by global warming caused by greenhouse-gas emissions, scientists said Thursday, drawing upon a fast-growing field of research that gauges the influence of climate change on specific extreme weather events soon after they occur — and while societies are still dealing with their shattering consequences.
As climate scientists’ techniques improve, they can assess, with ever-greater confidence and specificity, how human-induced changes in Earth’s chemistry are affecting the severe weather outside our windows, adding weight and urgency to questions about how nations should adapt.
The floods in Pakistan are the deadliest in a recent string of eye-popping weather extremes across the Northern Hemisphere: relentless droughts in the Horn of Africa, Mexico and China; flash floods in West and Central Africa, Iran and the inland United States; searing heat waves in India, Japan, California, Britain and Europe.
Scientists have warned for decades that some kinds of extreme weather are becoming more frequent and intense as more heat-trapping gases get pumped into the atmosphere. As the planet warms, more water evaporates from the oceans. Hotter air also holds more moisture. So storms like those that come with the South Asian monsoon can pack a bigger punch.
But Pakistan’s monsoon rains have long varied wildly from year to year, which made it hard to pin down precisely how much more severe this season was because of climate change, the authors of the new study said. Still, most of their computer models indicated that human-caused warming had intensified the rainfall to some extent, convincing them that it was a contributing factor.
The country might have experienced disastrously high rainfall this year even without global warming, said the study’s lead author, Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “But it’s worse because of climate change,” Dr. Otto said. “And especially in these highly vulnerable regions, small changes matter a lot.”