1 January 2018, Independent, Arctic warming linked to wet summers and snowy winters in the UK, scientists warn. Record wet summers and severe snowy weather in winter seen in recent years in the UK could be linked to Arctic warming, scientists have said. The UK has been hit by a number of extreme weather events in the past decade, including heavy rain in summer 2007 and 2012, the record wet and stormy winter of 2013/14 and cold and snowy winters in 2009/10 and 2010/11. Researchers compared data of recent UK extremes with the position of the North Atlantic polar atmospheric “jet stream” – a giant current of air – using a measure called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index which indicates shifts north and south. The exceptional wet summers, snowy cold snaps and mild stormy winters all corresponded with pronounced negative or positive spikes in readings of the index, showing more extreme north and southward movements of the jet stream. The researchers also linked the jet stream’s altered path – its increasing “waviness” – with a rise in summer months of areas of high pressure remaining largely stationary over Greenland, distorting the path of storms across the North Atlantic. Read More here
Category Archives: The Science
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
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.