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scientificamerican.com

Major Report: Some Extreme Weather

Can Only Be Blamed on Humans
Annie Sneed
6-7 minutos

A high-profile science panel finds several severe events in 2016

could not have naturally occurred

Hurricane Harvey Destruction Path. Credit: Getty Images

Wildfires are still raging across southern California, marking the end
of a destructive year of extreme weather events around the world.
In the U.S. alone historic floods hit Missouri and Arkansas in May,
drought parched the Dakotas and Montana from spring through fall

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and autumn hurricanes ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast, Florida and
the Caribbean.

Scientists have long predicted such extreme events (pdf) would

become more frequent or intense, and sometimes both, due to
human-influenced climate change. And as extreme as this year
seems, it turns out last years events were already a landmark of
sorts. This week the Bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society published an assessment of the connection between
climate change and extreme events in 2016, the societys sixth
annual report on the topic. The report selects a handful of extreme
events from the previous year and disentangles anthropogenic
climate changes effects from natural variability (meaning what we
would expect to happen without human influence). For the first time
in the reports history, scientists said that they have found that
several of the events could not have occurred if the planet was not
heating up.

Climate change was a necessary condition for some of these

events in 2016, in order for them to happen, Bulletin Editor in Chief
Jeff Rosenfeld said in a presentation at the American Geophysical
Union (AGU) conference in New Orleans this week. These are
new weather extremes made possible by a new climate. They were
impossible in the old climate.

According to the new report, three human-caused extreme events

in 2016 were: the overall global temperature increase; record heat
in Asia, with crises like the dangerous heat wave that hit Thailand in
April 2016; and finally, marine hot spots in the Gulf of Alaska,
Bering Sea and off the coast of northern Australia. Areas of the
Bering Sea became part of a mysterious mass of warm ocean
water dubbed the Bloba phenomenon that cannot be explained

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without anthropogenic climate warming, according to a press

release from the Bulletin.

Of course, many other extreme weather events struck the world in

2016, and scientists found climate change played a role in most of
themeven though they did not find it was an absolutely necessary
condition for them to occur. The report lists examples such as
unusually warm temperatures in the Arctic in November and
December 2016 and abnormally dry air on the U.S. west coast,
which helped drive wildfires that year. It further notes southern
Africas flash droughts and record-breaking rainfall in places such
as Wuhan, China. The report adds that climate change also
intensified heat waves around the planet and strengthened El Nio,
with the latter resulting in problems such as food shortages in
southern Africa.

The report also identified three events apparently not connected to

global warming, including Winter Storm Jonas, a massive blizzard
that hit the mid-Atlantic states in 2016. But researchers say this
does not necessarily rule out the possible influence of human-
caused climate change in such events; some scientists say they
simply may not have the tools to detect a human factor.

It will be awhile before experts can make such definitive statements

about 2017. To do analyses of [these] connections requires a lot of
detailed analysis, trying to separate the natural factors [from human
influence], says Donald Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric
science at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.
Scientists have already identified some climate change trends
sweeping across the U.S. over the past decades, however. They
have found heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense
whereas the number of cold waves has dropped. Extreme rainfall

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events are rising in frequency and strength; the risk of floods is

climbing in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest. More large wildfires
are hitting places such as western Alaska and Atlantic hurricanes
are intensifying. These findings came from this years Climate
Science Special Report, written by the U.S. Global Change
Research Program, and Wuebbles presented them this week at the
AGU conference.

Scientists do have some results for at least one big event this year,
though: Hurricane Harvey, which swamped the Houston area in
August. Two new studies found climate change likely strengthened
Harveys rainfall. Warm water in the oceans helps drive a large
hurricane like that. These storms are picking up huge amounts of
water as they would not have done 40 years ago, Wuebbles says.
There are studies really showing the human connection to this big
storm that was devastating.

All this means anthropogenic climate changes effects on extreme

weather are becoming increasingly obvious to scientistseven for
some individual events. Climate change is influencing weather in
almost all aspects, Wuebbles says. He cites the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration records (pdf) of U.S. climate
disasters that do $1 billion or more [adjusted] in damages and
costs. In the 1980s we were getting two extreme events [that cost
$1 billion], now we're getting 10, he notes. This year there will
probably be 17 or 18. Were seeing a lot more of these billion-dollar
events, and finding some ties to climate change in almost all of
them. The billion-dollar disaster list already cites 15 extreme
events for 2017and the year has yet to close.

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