Current:Home > Invest2017’s Extreme Heat, Flooding Carried Clear Fingerprints of Climate Change -Secure Growth Solutions
2017’s Extreme Heat, Flooding Carried Clear Fingerprints of Climate Change
View
Date:2025-04-16 10:35:50
Many of the world’s most extreme weather events witnessed in 2017, from Europe’s “Lucifer” heat wave to Hurricane Harvey’s record-breaking rainfall, were made much more likely by the influence of the global warming caused by human activities, meteorologists reported on Monday.
In a series of studies published in the American Meteorological Society’s annual review of climate attribution science, the scientists found that some of the year’s heat waves, flooding and other extremes that occurred only rarely in the past are now two or three times more likely than in a world without warming.
Without the underlying trends of global climate change, some notable recent disasters would have been virtually impossible, they said. Now, some of these extremes can be expected to hit every few years.
For example, heat waves like the one known as “Lucifer” that wracked Europe with dangerous record temperatures, are now three times more likely than they were in 1950, and in any given year there’s now a one-in-10 chance of an event like that.
In China, where record-breaking heat also struck in 2017, that kind of episode can be expected once every five years thanks to climate change.
Civilization Out of Sync with Changing Climate
This was the seventh annual compilation of this kind of research by the American Meteorological Society, published in the group’s peer-reviewed Bulletin. Its editors said this year’s collection displays their increased confidence in the attribution of individual weather extremes to human causes—namely the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“A warming Earth is continuing to send us new and more extreme weather events every year,” said Jeff Rosenfeld, the Bulletin’s editor-in -chief. “Our civilization is increasingly out of sync with our changing climate.”
Martin Hoerling, a NOAA researcher who edited this year’s collection, said the arrival of these damages has been forecast for nearly 30 years, since the first IPCC report predicted that “radical departures from 20th century weather and climate would be happening now.”
Not every weather extreme carries the same global warming fingerprint. For example, the drought in the U.S. High Plains in 2017, which did extensive damage to farming and affected regional water supplies, chiefly reflected low rainfall that was within the norms of natural variability—not clearly a result of warming.
Even so, the dry weather in those months was magnified by evaporation and transpiration due to warmer temperatures, so the drought’s overall intensity was amplified by the warming climate.
Warnings Can Help Guide Government Planners
Even when there’s little doubt that climate change is contributing to weather extremes, the nuances are worth heeding, because what’s most important about studies like these may be the lessons they hold for government planners as they prepare for worse to come.
That was the point of an essay that examined the near-failure of the Oroville Dam in Northern California and the calamitous flooding around Houston when Harvey stalled and dumped more than 4 feet of rain.
Those storms “exposed dangerous weaknesses” in water management and land-use practices, said the authors, most from government agencies.
What hit Oroville was not a single big rain storm but an unusual pattern of several storms, adding up to “record-breaking cumulative precipitation totals that were hard to manage and threatened infrastructure throughout northern California,” the authors said.
Thus the near-disaster, as is often the case, wasn’t purely the result of extreme weather, but also of engineering compromises and such risk factors as people building homes below the dam.
In Houston, where homes had been built inside a normally dry reservoir, “although the extraordinary precipitation amounts surely drove the disaster, impacts were magnified by land-use decisions decades in the making, decisions that placed people, homes and infrastructures in harm’s way,” the authors said.
Attribution studies should not just place the blame on pollution-driven climate change for increasingly likely weather extremes, the authors said. They should help society “better navigate such unprecedented extremes.”
veryGood! (93565)
Related
- The seven biggest college football quarterback competitions include Michigan, Ohio State
- Despite prohibition, would-be buyers trying to snap up land burned in Maui wildfires
- Iowa State starting lineman Jake Remsburg suspended 6 games by the NCAA for gambling
- Eminem sends Vivek Ramaswamy cease-and-desist letter asking that he stop performing Lose Yourself
- Krispy Kreme offers a free dozen Grinch green doughnuts: When to get the deal
- Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers says Giants' Jihad Ward is 'making (expletive) up'
- Billionaires want to build a new city in rural California. They must convince voters first
- Stakes are high for Michigan Wolverines QB J.J. McCarthy after playoff appearance
- $1 Frostys: Wendy's celebrates end of summer with sweet deal
- New Mexico reports man in Valencia County is first West Nile virus fatality of the year
Ranking
- 'As foretold in the prophecy': Elon Musk and internet react as Tesla stock hits $420 all
- Adam Driver slams major studios amid strike at Venice Film Festival 'Ferrari' premiere
- Puerto Rico and the 2024 Republican presidential primaries
- What's Making Us Happy: A guide to your weekend viewing, reading and listening
- Clay Aiken's son Parker, 15, makes his TV debut, looks like his father's twin
- NYPD to use drones to monitor backyard parties this weekend, spurring privacy concerns
- Family in central Mexico struggles to preserve the natural way of producing intense red dye
- 'I never win': College student cashes in on half a million dollars playing Virginia scratch-off game
Recommendation
Matt Damon remembers pal Robin Williams: 'He was a very deep, deep river'
Proud Boys members Dominic Pezzola and Ethan Nordean sentenced in Jan. 6 case
Virgo season is here! These books will please even the most discerning of the earth sign
For at least a day, all the world is ‘Margaritaville’ in homage to Jimmy Buffett
A steeplechase record at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Then a proposal. (He said yes.)
Before summer ends, let's squeeze in one last trip to 'Our Pool'
Suspect arrested after break-in at home of UFC president Dana White
Sister Wives Previews Heated Argument That Led to Janelle and Kody Brown's Breakup