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Environment and Climate Change
How Extreme Weather Like Libya’s Flooding Linked to Climate Change
You probably heard people and scientists proclaim that climate change is here and have seen the news of disasters around the world. Well, there is also a recently emerged science branch studying just that. Extreme event attribution connects global warming with severe weather episodes in a quantitative manner. Turns out, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and droughts are all attributed to climate change.
Heat waves are the most direct connection to greenhouse gas effect we have at the moment. Moreover, dry weather, wind, dust, and excessive heat make wildfires much more likely to occur, and scientists claim that the wildfires observed in Western US and Australia were made much worse by climate change.
Warm water and moist air - another consequence of global warming, are also creating tropical cyclones aka hurricanes and typhoons more intense and severe.
According to a count maintained by CarbonBrief.org, a UK-based nonprofit that covers developments in climate science, 70% of extreme weather events reviewed by researchers since 2011 were shown to be more likely to occur, or were made more severe, because of global warming.
All that heat and disruption are making winters and blizzards shorter. Earth’s poles are warming faster than elsewhere, with the North Pole heating up more than twice as fast as the rest of Earth for the last 30 years. This has caused a decrease in the contrast between the heat of the equator and the cold of the North Pole, and that has consequences.
The record cold that crippled the Texas power grid in February 2021, for example, was the result of the polar vortex — a girdle of winds that typically keeps cold bottled in the Arctic — buckling and releasing cold air across much of the US.
Some recent examples of climate driven disasters:
At least 5,000 people were killed in Libya in the Mediterranean storm Daniel in mid-September.
The summer brought severe wildfires to Greece and neighboring countries, including the most devastating one on record in the European Union.
A wildfire on the Hawaiian island Maui killed at least 115 people.
In July, at least 100 people died in India in monsoon flooding, a month after a heat wave killed nearly 200 people.
In May, Tropical Cyclone Mocha killed at least 145 people in Myanmar.
Freddy, one of the longest lasting tropical cyclones on record, killed more than 1,000 people in southeast Africa in the early part of 2023.
The world has warmed more than 1.1 degrees Celsius since the mid-19th century, according to the most authoritative source on the matter, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At the current pace, that increase will reach 1.5 degrees — the level at which global warming becomes extra dangerous, in the view of climate scientists — as soon as the 2030s. From there, the intensity of extreme weather grows exponentially, doubling if global warming reaches 2 degrees and quadrupling at 3 degrees, the IPCC says.
More than 5 million people die each year globally because of excessive temperatures, and deaths tied to heat in particular are rising, according to a study in the Lancet Planetary Health.
In addition to changing living conditions fundamentally, climate change is affecting many financial calculations, since huge parts of the global economy including agriculture, travel and insurance face risks tied to the weather. The bulk of those costs were from natural catastrophes, including hurricanes Laura and Sally.
Environment and Health
El Nino’s Fierce Heat Carries New Risk of Resurgent Deadly Viruses
El Nino, a climate pattern that describes the unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean every couple of years. This year brought extreme weather, economical disruption, and resurgence of tropical viruses.
The World Health Organization sounded the alarm in a press conference earlier this week, when Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the weather phenomenon “could increase transmission of dengue and other so-called arboviruses such as Zika and chikungunya.”
Mosquitoes that transmit such viruses flourish in the warmer weather that El Niño is set to bring to many parts of the world.
Regions from South America to Asia are already grappling with surges in tropical diseases. Peru has declared a state of emergency over its worst recorded dengue outbreak on record, with about 150,000 suspected cases reported so far this year.
Meanwhile, Thailand has seen its highest number of dengue cases in three years, with 19,503 reported by local health authorities from the start of 2023 through the first week of June. Cases are also on the rise in Malaysia and Cambodia, according to the WHO, while Singapore authorities warned earlier in the year about the potential for a surge in cases between June and October.
Paraguay has reported at least 40 deaths from an ongoing outbreak of chikungunya that began last year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Environment and Weather
Hurricane Lee to Push Unusual Cape Cod Bay Surge
Hurricane Lee’s winds are dropping but its size continues to swell as it comes north toward New England and the Canadian Maritimes where the storm will bring coastal flooding and possible widespread power outages through the weekend.
Lee’s top winds dropped to 100 miles per hour, making it a Category 2 hurricane on the five-step, Saffir-Simpson scale, the US National Hurricane Center said in an early Thursday advisory. Tropical storm and hurricane watches reach from Rhode Island to Nova Scotia.
As it move past Massachusetts the hurricane’s counter-clockwise motion will push storm surge into Cape Cod Bay threatening communities south of Boston, said Rob Carolan, a Bloomberg Radio forecaster.
Winds will start to pick up across southern New England, including Boston, about 8 p.m. Friday and about 3 a.m. Saturday in eastern Maine and New Brunswick, where it is likely to come ashore later in the day.
Wind shear and dry air will continue to weaken Lee as it comes north, but the storm had reached Category 5 power on Sept. 8 with 165-mph winds, making it 2023’s strongest Atlantic storm. It is likely that Lee will transition into a post-tropical storm as it comes ashore in Canada, however it will still be dangerous despite its changed structure.
Climate Tidbits
The team that won this year’s The Ocean Race, one of the most grueling round-the-world sailing competitions, has a bit more to show for their victory. The sailors collected environmental DNA — for the first time during a race — bringing new sources of data to scientists trying to understand how this year’s record hot oceans are impacting marine life.
The non-profit media organization Fossil Free Media has unveiled a series of billboards calling out oil and gas companies for their role in fueling climate disasters. Installed in cities hit hard by recent heatwaves, the ads feature a map of temperature records broken across the country this summer, and read: “Brought to you by Big Oil.” You can see it driving down the highways of Phoenix, Arizona; Austin, Texas; or Fresno, California, this week.
Six young people are preparing to appear at the European court of human rights to try to compel 32 nations to rapidly escalate their emissions reductions in the world’s largest climate legal action to date.
Aged from 11 to 24, the six Portuguese claimants, say they were driven to act by their experiences in the wildfires that ripped through the Leiria region in 2017, killing 66 people and destroying 20,000 hectares of forest.