Catastrophic climate change is happening now and will only get worse
Introduction:
It isn’t just super tornadoes.
It is monsoons in Pakistan that rendered six million homeless. It is the flooded Mississippi such that the whole levee system must be broken down and rebuilt in order to save major cities. It is the drought in Texas. It is the fact, due to climate, that there is a 10 cent raise in grain prices here but a doubling of the cost of rice in Indonesia. It was a heatwave in Europe that killed over 20,000. The heatwave in Pakistan reached sustained temps over 120 F. It is the very heavy snowfalls and rains further north from lake effects and the shut down of the thermo-haline conveyor.
All of these things were predicted for years. All of these things form a clear and consistent picture. All of these things are happening now or did happen recently.
Extreme weather events is what the climate literature usually calls such things.
Extreme Weather Events…
When I was a graduate student, it was part of physics humor that a thermonuclear blast is “bad” and that megawatt lasers “present a hazard.” We used to giggle at the understatement. After all, it is funny to use such muted language if you can calculate the effects of such things. The detached and dispassionate language that scientists use in the journals often hides the reality from those who don’t know how to translate. The people in Joplin Mo, Alabama and Texas (this year) Pakistan (last year) and Europe (two years ago) are learning first hand what these cold calculations, dry models and dispassionate words mean in human terms.
So please pause and think about what “extreme” means in practice.
Now consider a Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society issue called “beyond dangerous climate change.” What does it mean when scientists use words like “catastrophic?” All of the disasters above are still merely “extreme weather events.” The process accelerates. It gets vastly worse from here.
The predictions past and present:
Note: References I give here will be for lay people from good sources. If anyone desires a catalog of journal research papers, please feel free to ask and I will happily give many links on that level, with all of the mathematics and methodology.
Here for example, are some climate model results and animations from Princeton Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory that cover many of the things discussed:
The science of climate in terms of any individual part is actually very easy to put into basic terms and easy to understand in a conceptual way. There are many parts and people have to be patient enough to look at the big picture to see the whole. It is after all, a global system by definition. But again, these things can be broken down and understood by anyone if they are simply patient enough to look and think.
For example:
Hot water vapor rises from the oceans, lakes and out of the soil. As it rises it cools, then it condenses and it rains (or snows). This is the water cycle that hopefully everyone learned about in grade-school. There are no hidden tricks. Yes the math is complex, but to simply understand the basic phenomena is easy.
So what happens if the oceans and the atmosphere are warmer?
Warmer oceans, lakes and soil mean that more water vapor gets put into the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere means that more water vapor will stay vapor longer, and that as a whole, the atmosphere will absorb more water vapor. A warmer atmosphere also means that the vapor will rise higher and stay up longer to be moved around by air streams greater distances before it can cool enough to condense.
When all that suspended water vapor finally does hit a cold front, there is a lot more water to come down. This means already hot places get drier and other places get very extreme precipitation.
Right now, you see how the droughts in the South are linked to the flooding of the Mississippi. Right now you see how the monsoons in Pakistan that followed a prolonged and massive heatwave with temps over 120 F were terrible enough to put six million people out of their homes and kill countless thousands.
And some more about heat waves and impacts in the US.
Water vapor itself is a potent greenhouse gas, so there is a feed back that warms things even more.
Now what of the droughts…
This is from NCAR and UCAR:
If you have an already dry region get warmer, what happens? There is much more hot air coming off of baked land and the soil dries out more. Of course, the wet air is much warmer and goes further away until it can hit a cold front to cause a large rainstorm over there.
Of course, crops die and even less water is then retained in the region.
So droughts get worse and spread further, the hotter it gets. In fact, large areas turn to desert. There will be a dustbowl in the American Midwest. It will not be pretty.
Here is a summary of this from NOAA in lay terms:
This is happening now. It gets much worse. It is all going as predicted.
What of winter and the North East?
The melting polar caps - which are going four times faster than expected in 2009, are shutting down ocean currents that carried warm water up the American East coast in winter. Paradoxically, this makes the American NE, cooler and wetter for a time. However, the great lakes are warmer overall, give up more water vapor, and in winter, this causes massive snow storms when that water vapor hits a cold front.
This too is happening now and has been predicted for some time.
Here is a great video about this from Greenman:
And finally storms, terrible storms:
Does it make sense that heat is energy and that the more energy in the atmosphere, the more it can do things like make violent storms? It should.
This has been a key prediction of climate science for over two decades.
Tornadoes in particular are caused when a super cell storm develops what is called a rear flank down draft. The important thing to note from this is that tornadoes are fed by warm moist air rapidly descending. If you have more moist warm air available from the region that feeds the system (in the US, the gulf of Mexico) you will have larger tornadoes.
Missouri and Alabama are feeling it this year. The season is not over yet. There will be more. It gets much worse.
Here is the full report of the United States Global Change Research Program. You can look at impacts region by region.
The point that I hope my reader takes from this, is that there are simple mechanisms to understand. We are tweaking those mechanisms in understandable ways and understandable things are happening. Of course those things are bad things. I mean bad in the physics sense. They will become catastrophic if we do not change course. I mean catastrophic in the physics sense also.
