The Number and Cost of Weather Disasters is Increasing in the U.S.
Climate change is increasing the trend in weather and climate extremes in the U.S. A NOAA/NCEI report indicates that through September, the U.S. has had 15 individual billion-dollar weather disasters in 2017. Only 2011 had more billion-dollar disasters with 16, and that was through the entire year.
http://www.gci.org.uk/CBAT_AUBREY/CBAT/index.html#domain-4
http://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/natural-human-caused-coastal-flood-days-in-the-us1
It’s official: 2017 was the costliest year on record for natural disasters in the United States, with a price tag of at least $306 billion.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/28/16795490/natural-disasters-2017-hurricanes-wildfires-heat-climate-change-cost-deaths
10 Hurricanes in 10 Weeks: With Ophelia, a 124-Year-Old Record is Matched
https://waa.ai/aodA
More tornadoes in the most extreme U.S. tornado outbreaks
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6318/1419
2017 Was the Most Costly Weather Disaster Year in the United States
At a Glance
A total of 16 billion-dollar weather disasters occurred in the U.S. during 2017.
The total cost of those disasters is the most for any single year on record.
Hurricane Harvey was the most expensive disaster.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-15/natural-disasters-are-costing-farming-billions-of-dollars-a-year
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/climate-change/news/article.cfm?c_id=26&objectid=12031183
Floods Are Getting Worse, and 2,500 Chemical Sites Lie in the Water’s Path
Are the heatwaves caused by climate change?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/08/are-the-heatwaves-caused-by-climate-change/Reinsurance company Munich Re provides data about the number of annual disasters, and the frequency of these events is indeed rising:
"For thunderstorm-related losses the analysis reveals increasing volatility and a significant long-term upward trend in the normalized figures over the last 40 years. These figures have been adjusted to account for factors such as increasing values, population growth and inflation ... In all likelihood, we have to regard this finding as an initial climate-change footprint in our US loss data from the last four decades."
"Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America. The study shows a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events in North America for the past three decades, compared with an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe and 1.5 in South America. Anthropogenic climate change is believed to contribute to this trend, though it influences various perils in different ways."
It's also not surprising that hurricanes would now be doing more damage, because research has shown that the most intense hurricanes are already occurring more often as a result of human-caused global warming.
This, combined with rising sea levels, has also led to larger storm surges and the costs of the damage that goes with them. As Grinsted et al. (2013)concluded,
"we have probably crossed the threshold where Katrina magnitude hurricane surges are more likely caused by global warming than not."
Global warming also adds moisture to the atmosphere, with the increase in precipitation also adding to the flooding associated with these storms, and the damages they cause. The bottom line is that many types of extreme weather are being intensified by human-caused global warming, and that will continue in the future. And there is evidence that climate change is adding to the costs of extreme weather damage.
The ferocious “frankenstorm” known as Sandy that ripped through greater New York City five years ago remains one for the record books. Like this year’s hurricane season, it racked up tens of billions of dollars in economic damages.
Superstorm Sandy had another close, yet underappreciated, similarity to this year’s hurricanes: less affluent groups of people suffered more, both in the initial damage and recovery.
An analysis by a team I led at Stony Brook University shows that Sandy’s destructive path across Long Island, from Brooklyn to the Hamptons, was not as even-handed as media coverage often made it seem, both in its initial impact and people’s recovery.
The storm season of 2017 has already left behind an even more dramatic version of this story: Following Hurricane Harvey, Houston quickly switched water and electricity back on and emptied most emergency shelters. Meanwhile, several weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, much of the island is still in “survival mode.” Both hurricane seasons expose the close ties between severe weather events and social inequality.
https://theconversation.com/storms-hit-poorer-people-harder-from-superstorm-sandy-to-hurricane-maria-87658?utm_content=buffercd52b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer Human influence on tropical cyclone intensity
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes-figures/
https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/socialenterprise/sites/socialenterprise/files/Adam%20Sobel_Research1.pdf
“As the 21st century proceeds, we expect greenhouse gas warming to further outpace aerosol cooling and PI increases to exceed those observed to date. TC intensities at any given fixed location should increase accordingly, on average; simulations suggest trends on the order of 1ms–1 decade–1 at the high end. If poleward shifts continue, these increases will be manifest in increases in activity at the poleward margins of TC basins, as well as in the occurrence of more intense storms (if perhaps fewer storms overall) in the historical cores of the basins.”
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/pix/user_images/tk/global_warm_hurr/Adjust_TS_Count.png
Powerful hurricanes strengthen faster now than 30 years ago
Hurricanes that intensify rapidly—a characteristic of almost all powerful hurricanes—do so more strongly and quickly now than they did 30 years ago, according to a study published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-powerful-hurricanes-faster-years.html#jCp
As global surface temperatures have increased, heatwaves are becoming more frequent. Coumou, Robinson, and Rahmstorf 2013 found that record-breaking monthly temperature records are already occurring five times more often than they would in the absence of human-caused global warming. This means that there is an 80% chance that any monthly heat record today is due to human-caused global warming.
https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-012-0668-1
https://www.skepticalscience.com/heatwaves-past-global-warming-climate-change-intermediate.htm
Amatørfornektere har de sedvanlige løgnversjonene gående:
Nate
Silver has launched a new FiveThirtyEight blog with the intent of
applying his data-driven approach to a wide variety of subjects. The
problem is that Nate Silver
is himself only one man, so FiveThirtyEight has hired a variety of
contributors to write about the subjects that are outside his expertise and comfort zone.
For the topic of climate change, Silver decided to hire the renowned obfuscator Roger Pielke, Jr.
This was immediately disappointing for those familiar with Pielke's work, because FiveThirtyEight is a statistics site, and frankly Pielke is not good at statistics.
Instead, Pielke is known for taking a selective view of the peer-reviewed scientific literature in order to downplay the connection between human-caused global warming and extreme weather.
Predictably, Pielke's first two posts at FiveThirtyEight did exactly that, and included a litany of errors:
Forest fires:
"For all ecoregions combined, the number of large fires increased at a rate of seven fires per year, while total fire area increased at a rate of 355 km2 per year. Continuing changes in climate, invasive species, and consequences of past fire management, added to the impacts of larger, more frequent fires, will drive further disruptions to fire regimes of the western U.S. and other fire-prone regions of the world."
Large wildfire trends in the western United States, 1984–2011
GRL
DOI: 10.1002/2014GL059576
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2014GL059576
And
"We show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km2 (25.3%) of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in global mean fire weather season length. We also show a doubling (108.1% increase) of global burnable area affected by long fire weather seasons (>1.0 σ above the historical mean) and an increased global frequency of long fire weather seasons across 62.4 million km2 (53.4%) during the second half of the study period."
Climate-induced variations in global wildfire danger from 1979 to 2013
NATURE
doi:10.1038/ncomms8537
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8537
"Anthropogenic increases in temperature and vapor pressure deficit significantly enhanced fuel aridity across western US forests over the past several decades and, during 2000–2015, contributed to 75% more forested area experiencing high (>1 σ) fire-season fuel aridity and an average of nine additional days per year of high fire potential.
Anthropogenic climate change accounted for ∼55% of observed increases in fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 across western US forests, highlighting both anthropogenic climate change and natural climate variability as important contributors to increased wildfire potential in recent decades.
We estimate that human-caused climate change contributed to an additional 4.2 million ha of forest fire area during 1984–2015, nearly doubling the forest fire area expected in its absence.
Natural climate variability will continue to alternate between modulating and compounding anthropogenic increases in fuel aridity, but anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a driver of increased forest fire activity and should continue to do so while fuels are not limiting."
Abatzoglou and Williams 2016 - Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests
PNAS
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1607171113"
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770
“Forest fires in the western United States have been increasing in size (1) and possibly severity (2) for several decades. The increase in fire has prompted multiple investigations into both the causes (3, 4) and consequences of this shift for communities, ecosystems, and climate (5). Climate changes and human activities have both contributed to the observed changes in fire...
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-powerful-hurricanes-faster-years.html#jCp
As global surface temperatures have increased, heatwaves are becoming more frequent. Coumou, Robinson, and Rahmstorf 2013 found that record-breaking monthly temperature records are already occurring five times more often than they would in the absence of human-caused global warming. This means that there is an 80% chance that any monthly heat record today is due to human-caused global warming.
https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-012-0668-1
https://www.skepticalscience.com/heatwaves-past-global-warming-climate-change-intermediate.htm
Amatørfornektere har de sedvanlige løgnversjonene gående:
For the topic of climate change, Silver decided to hire the renowned obfuscator Roger Pielke, Jr.
This was immediately disappointing for those familiar with Pielke's work, because FiveThirtyEight is a statistics site, and frankly Pielke is not good at statistics.
Instead, Pielke is known for taking a selective view of the peer-reviewed scientific literature in order to downplay the connection between human-caused global warming and extreme weather.
Predictably, Pielke's first two posts at FiveThirtyEight did exactly that, and included a litany of errors:
- The headline and main point of his post are wrong.
- He misrepresents his own research.
- The references he provides don't say what he claims and don't support his argument.
- Research he neglects contradicts his conclusions.
- He doesn't include all available data.
- He incorrectly claims that weather-related disasters aren't becoming more frequent.
- He fails to account for the costs of improved technology and the damages they prevent.
- He considers only land-falling hurricanes whose damages are highly variable.
- His conclusions are contradicted by the increased intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes, and global warming's contribution to their storm surges and flooding.
Forest fires:
"For all ecoregions combined, the number of large fires increased at a rate of seven fires per year, while total fire area increased at a rate of 355 km2 per year. Continuing changes in climate, invasive species, and consequences of past fire management, added to the impacts of larger, more frequent fires, will drive further disruptions to fire regimes of the western U.S. and other fire-prone regions of the world."
Large wildfire trends in the western United States, 1984–2011
GRL
DOI: 10.1002/2014GL059576
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2014GL059576
And
"We show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km2 (25.3%) of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in global mean fire weather season length. We also show a doubling (108.1% increase) of global burnable area affected by long fire weather seasons (>1.0 σ above the historical mean) and an increased global frequency of long fire weather seasons across 62.4 million km2 (53.4%) during the second half of the study period."
Climate-induced variations in global wildfire danger from 1979 to 2013
NATURE
doi:10.1038/ncomms8537
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8537
"Anthropogenic increases in temperature and vapor pressure deficit significantly enhanced fuel aridity across western US forests over the past several decades and, during 2000–2015, contributed to 75% more forested area experiencing high (>1 σ) fire-season fuel aridity and an average of nine additional days per year of high fire potential.
Anthropogenic climate change accounted for ∼55% of observed increases in fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 across western US forests, highlighting both anthropogenic climate change and natural climate variability as important contributors to increased wildfire potential in recent decades.
We estimate that human-caused climate change contributed to an additional 4.2 million ha of forest fire area during 1984–2015, nearly doubling the forest fire area expected in its absence.
Natural climate variability will continue to alternate between modulating and compounding anthropogenic increases in fuel aridity, but anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a driver of increased forest fire activity and should continue to do so while fuels are not limiting."
Abatzoglou and Williams 2016 - Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests
PNAS
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1607171113"
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770
“Forest fires in the western United States have been increasing in size (1) and possibly severity (2) for several decades. The increase in fire has prompted multiple investigations into both the causes (3, 4) and consequences of this shift for communities, ecosystems, and climate (5). Climate changes and human activities have both contributed to the observed changes in fire...
The data do suggest however that even modest increases in temperature and drought (relative to those being projected for the 21st century) are able to perturb the level of biomass burning as much as large-scale industrialized human impacts on fire.
More dramatic increases in temperature or drought are likely to produce a response in fire regimes that are beyond those observed during the past 3,000 y.
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