29 December 2017, The Conversation, 2017: the year in extreme weather. Overall 2017 will be the warmest non-El Niño year on record globally, and over the past 12 months we have seen plenty of extreme weather, both here in Australia and across the world. Here I’ll round up some of this year’s wild weather, and look forward to 2018 to see what’s around the corner. Drought and flooding rains… again It feels as if Australia has had all manner of extreme weather events in 2017. We had severe heat at both the start and end of the year. Casting our minds back to last summer, both Sydney and Brisbane experienced their hottest summers on record, while parts of inland New South Wales and Queensland endured extended periods of very high temperatures. More recently Australia had an unusually dry June and its warmest winter daytime temperatures on record. The record winter warmth was made substantially more likely by human-caused climate change. The end of the year brought more than its fair share of extreme weather, especially in the southeast. Tasmania had by far its warmest November on record, beating the previous statewide record by more than half a degree. Melbourne had a topsy-turvy November with temperatures not hitting the 20℃ mark until the 9th, but a record 12 days above 30℃ after that. November was rounded off by warnings for very severe weather that was forecast to strike Victoria. Melbourne missed the worst of the rains, although it still had a very wet weekend on December 2-3. Meanwhile, northern parts of the state were deluged, with many places recording two or three times the December average rainfall in just a couple of days. Read More here
Category Archives: The Science
19 December 2017, DeSmog, Pruitt’s Plan to Debate Climate Science Paused as Science Confirms Human Link to Extreme Weather. The same week that a slew of new scientific reports confirmed just how much humans are changing the climate, and in turn, the rest of the planet, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt’s plans for a “Red Team, Blue Team” debate of this very same science were put on hold. The military-style exercise that would falsely pit the overwhelming majority of climate scientists against a handful of non-experts is an eight-year-old talking point of the notorious climate-denying think tank the Heartland Institute (which is likely not surprised by this development). Meanwhile, last week in New Orleans, several groups of prominent climate scientists shared their latest findings at the world’s largest gathering of Earth and planetary scientists. The roughly 25,000 attendees of the American Geophysical Union annual meeting included scientific leaders from academia, government, and the private sector. Clear and Present Climate Science These peer-reviewed reports make it clear that any meaningful climate debate in the future should not be over the degree of humanity’s role in climate change, but to what degree the climate has changed already and what can be done to stop it. The American Meteorological Society’s 2016 “State of the Climate” report offers the first examples of extreme weather events not possible in a preindustrial climate. “Climate change was a necessary condition for some of these events in 2016, in order for them to happen,” Jeff Rosenfeld, editor in chief of the Bulletin of the American Metrological Society, said at a press conference. “These are new weather extremes made possible by a new climate. They were impossible in the old climate.” Read more here
13 December 2017, World Weather Attribution, Climate Change Fingerprints Confirmed in Hurricane Harvey’s Record-Shattering Rainfall. Scientist with World Weather Attribution (WWA) find that human-caused climate change made the record rainfall that fell over Houston during Hurricane Harvey roughly three times more likely and 15 percent more intense. WWA is releasing the findings of its new analysis regarding the role of human-induced climate change on Hurricane Harvey’s devastating rains that is published in the peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Research Letters (ERL). The findings are being released jointly with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in a joint press release and at a press conference on Wednesday, December 13 at 2:30 p.m. CT at the annual AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans. The paper can be found on our website and in Environmental Research Letters.
13 December 2017, American Meteorological Society, Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective. This Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) special report presents assessments of how human-caused climate change may have affected the strength and likelihood of individual extreme events. This sixth edition of explaining extreme events of the previous year (2016) from a climate perspective is the first of these reports to find that some extreme events were not possible in a preindustrial climate. The events were the 2016 record global heat, the heat across Asia, as well as a marine heat wave off the coast of Alaska. While these results are novel, they were not unexpected. Climate attribution scientists have been predicting that eventually the influence of human-caused climate change would become sufficiently strong as to push events beyond the bounds of natural variability alone. It was also predicted that we would first observe this phenomenon for heat events where the climate change influence is most pronounced. Additional retrospective analysis will reveal if, in fact, these are the first events of their kind or were simply some of the first to be discovered. Read More here
Related links
- Scientists Can Now Blame Individual Natural Disasters on Climate Change
- State of the Climate in 216: Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 98, No. 8, August 2017
- Pruitt’s Plan to Debate Climate Science Paused as Science Confirms Human Link to Extreme Weather
- Munich RE: Rapid attribution: Is climate change involved in an extreme weather event? and access full report – Natural catastrophes 2016 Analyses, assessments, positions 2017 issue – at bottom of page “Further Information”
- Three 2016 extremes ‘not … possible’ without human warming
- Global Warming Index update and A real-time Global Warming Index report and New index of warming due to human influence on climate released