How science shows us how warming makes heat waves, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires more likely or more severe — and why this science is becoming a major public-policy battleground.
It seems to me that heat distribution - El Niño / La Niña - is warping the Northern Polar Vortex, causing a geographic shift resulting in distortions of where rain falls, or where tropical cyclones move. Is that too localized or too recent for models to attribute to Global Warming? That is, if 80 Cyclones per year is steady, but they shift in geography by a few hundred miles eastward in the north or westward in the south, due to weeks-long wobbles in the polar vortex, is that a calculable change?
There are indeed several aspects of hurricanes that might change due to climate change. E.g., the latitude of landfall, latitude of peak intensity, translation speed, etc. See section 11.7.1.5 of the last IPCC WG1 report if you're interested in the details.
Check how you treat probabilities of temperatures. You can only talk about probabilities of a temperature between two values. Your treatment of this is technically not correct.
It's all about excited molecules. The heat 🥵 makes them want to party to cool off. Any storm is a molecular party. The music is blasting loud with climate change.
The fossil fuel industries, their supporters and the politicians that further their cause all have responsibility for the increases in extreme weather events (heat domes, overland floods, prolonged drought, infrastructure destruction from erosion). Thank you for the objective information.
You note that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor but that warmer temperatures also produce a drier atmosphere. You might want to elaborate as some readers might interpret these as contradictory statements. (Also thank you for this great explanation of the science!)
Yes, that's a mistake. I've edited the text to clarify. Thanks for pointing this out. No matter how many times you read it, some mistakes will get by you.
I still remember the time when the founding fathers of realclimate.com would admit that no single event can be attributed to climate change.
We don't have answers to questions 1 and 2. You can build various models to attempt answering these questions but this is not the same as really answering them. There is no way to know what this day would be in the absence of CC for the same reason we can't predict weather a month ahead. The attributions must be only statistical, period.
You can call blue curve counterfactual, this is not untrue, that's one way of saying it, but that's not the whole story. We can't really calculate it, there are no reliable ways to do it. The true shape of this curve is unknown and I suspect unknowable - that's another way to express it.
As for hurricanes, there are no discernable trends:
Your entitled to your opinion about counterfactuals, just realize that the scientific community disagrees.
As far as hurricane frequency, I agree! There are no trends in numbers! But intensity, rainfall, etc. are different metrics. Climate change is having an effect on them. This is, I think, well discussed in the post.
Excellent blog, as ever Andrew, thank you. One thing that I would like to understand better is whether the science predicts that the bell curve not only shifts to the right as the climate warms, but also flattens out, making the extremes more likely and the 'normal' temperatures slightly less likely. This is seen in the Houston graph, but you don't explain if that is also predicted or just a statistical phenomenon. All the best, and many thanks again.
This is an excellent chapter, thank you.
It seems to me that heat distribution - El Niño / La Niña - is warping the Northern Polar Vortex, causing a geographic shift resulting in distortions of where rain falls, or where tropical cyclones move. Is that too localized or too recent for models to attribute to Global Warming? That is, if 80 Cyclones per year is steady, but they shift in geography by a few hundred miles eastward in the north or westward in the south, due to weeks-long wobbles in the polar vortex, is that a calculable change?
There are indeed several aspects of hurricanes that might change due to climate change. E.g., the latitude of landfall, latitude of peak intensity, translation speed, etc. See section 11.7.1.5 of the last IPCC WG1 report if you're interested in the details.
Thank you. 🙏 There are lots of moving parts to this. 🤔
Excellent writeup. Thank you.
Check how you treat probabilities of temperatures. You can only talk about probabilities of a temperature between two values. Your treatment of this is technically not correct.
https://youtu.be/gHBL5Zau3NE
It's all about excited molecules. The heat 🥵 makes them want to party to cool off. Any storm is a molecular party. The music is blasting loud with climate change.
Dr Sheinstein
The fossil fuel industries, their supporters and the politicians that further their cause all have responsibility for the increases in extreme weather events (heat domes, overland floods, prolonged drought, infrastructure destruction from erosion). Thank you for the objective information.
You note that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor but that warmer temperatures also produce a drier atmosphere. You might want to elaborate as some readers might interpret these as contradictory statements. (Also thank you for this great explanation of the science!)
Yes, that's a mistake. I've edited the text to clarify. Thanks for pointing this out. No matter how many times you read it, some mistakes will get by you.
I still remember the time when the founding fathers of realclimate.com would admit that no single event can be attributed to climate change.
We don't have answers to questions 1 and 2. You can build various models to attempt answering these questions but this is not the same as really answering them. There is no way to know what this day would be in the absence of CC for the same reason we can't predict weather a month ahead. The attributions must be only statistical, period.
You can call blue curve counterfactual, this is not untrue, that's one way of saying it, but that's not the whole story. We can't really calculate it, there are no reliable ways to do it. The true shape of this curve is unknown and I suspect unknowable - that's another way to express it.
As for hurricanes, there are no discernable trends:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/frequency-north-atlantic-hurricanes
Your entitled to your opinion about counterfactuals, just realize that the scientific community disagrees.
As far as hurricane frequency, I agree! There are no trends in numbers! But intensity, rainfall, etc. are different metrics. Climate change is having an effect on them. This is, I think, well discussed in the post.
Excellent blog, as ever Andrew, thank you. One thing that I would like to understand better is whether the science predicts that the bell curve not only shifts to the right as the climate warms, but also flattens out, making the extremes more likely and the 'normal' temperatures slightly less likely. This is seen in the Houston graph, but you don't explain if that is also predicted or just a statistical phenomenon. All the best, and many thanks again.
The evidence on changes in the shape of the distribution are equivocal, e.g., https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2016jd025292 or https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212094716300512.
Thank you!