ClIMATE CHANGE ACCELERATES IN 2022
ClIMATE CHANGE ACCELERATES IN 2022
Some touchingly optimistic souls may have thought that things would surely come back closer to “normal” after the climate chaos of 2021. Unfortunately 2022 is shaping up to be even worse.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, after a post pandemic rebound in 2021, concentrations of GHG continued to increase in first half 2022. More precisely, latest research data from the Global Carbon Project found that global carbon emissions were 1.2% higher again in the first five months of 2022 compared with 2019.
For the NCEI's Global Annual Temperature Rankings Outlook, there is a greater than 99% chance 2022 will rank among the 10-warmest years on record but an 11% chance the year will rank among the top five. In fact, 2022 was the world’s sixth-hottest July on record, according to NOAA.
What follows is a brief look at some examples:
POLAR & GLACIER ICE: A GROWING DANGER
In March alarming heat waves hit Arctic and Antarctica. Antarctic sea ice coverage plunged to a record low for a 2nd consecutive month. One result was a number of confused penguins, but a block of ice the size of New York City also fell off Antarctica into the Southern Sea.
According to a government study, US sea level will rise as much in the next 30 years as it did in the past 100 -- increasing frequency of high-tide flooding, pushing storm surge to the extreme and inundating vulnerable coastal infrastructure. Of course things could get much worse: If all glaciers were to melt, global sea level would rise 70 meters, flooding every coastal city on the planet.
· Arctic ice meting fast
Human-caused climate change has been warming the Arctic nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979, researchers in Finland said in a new study. According to the scientists: "Thus, we caution that referring to Arctic warming as to being twice as fast as the global warming, as frequently stated in literature, is a clear underestimation of the situation during the last 43 years since the start of the satellite observations."
According to Andrew Freedman, a climate and energy reporter for Axios: “Arctic climate change affects the entire world by altering the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole.… The loss of sea ice induces a positive climate feedback that in turn warms the region even more rapidly, and can speed the melt of land-based ice sheets as well.”
· Melting glaciers and greenhouse gases
The Greenland Ice Sheet – the top contributor to global sea level rise - saw a sharp spike in the rate and extent of melting in July, with 18 billion tons of water running into the North Atlantic in just three days. The uptick in ice loss during the July 15-17 period sent enough water careening off the ice sheet to fill 2.4 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, said Ted Scambos, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.
The July melt was followed by another massive melt event over Greenland on 3 & 4 September. 2022. Nasa’s Earth Observatory wrote on September 5 that “vast areas” of Greenland’s ice sheet had melted “the most on record for any September”. According to the Canadian climate scientist Julian Brimelow “This would be considered a significant melt event at the peak of the melt season...but in early September!?”
Record ice sheet melting in Greenland was identified in September, among the planetary tipping points - self-reinforcing and irreversible negative changes - that scientists warned about.
Freedman continues: “Scientists study the region closely because what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. The region's permafrost stores vast amounts of greenhouse gases that, if released, would significantly speed and sharply escalate the amount of global warming. This is considered one of many tipping points in the climate system.”
The greater the emissions, the more vulnerable the ice sheets will become. According to scientists, we’re already in a new reality at the poles.
NORTH AMERICA
There were numerous weather extremes across the United States in the the summer, from torrential rains and flash flooding to record-breaking heat and drought.
July 2022 will go down in the history as the third-hottest July on record for the U.S., according to the NOAA. Drought conditions intensified or expanded across parts of the U.S., while others were hit by historic rainfall that led to catastrophic flooding.
In less than two months at least four historic flood events occurred across the United States. Yellowstone flooded in mid-June, followed by torrential flooding in the US heartland (first St Louis, then Kentucky). In early August major flooding hit Death Valley where the rain that fell in a few hours on August 5 made it the second-wettest day since records started.
Since misery loves company, a long, intense wave of excessive heat then began to hit much of the Western U.S. in early August. The National Weather Service said that the region should anticipate "a prolonged and possibly record breaking heat wave," with little relief overnight, In addition to risks of overheating, drought and wildfires, the electrical grid will be placed under tremendous strain. “Given the combined intensity and duration of the September 2022 event” scientist Glynn Hulley said, “it will likely rank as one of the worst heat waves of the past four decades.” As indeed it did.
Looking ahead, the West is running out of water. Lakes Mead and Shasta are running dry. According to the US Bureau of Reclamation, water levels in the two largest reservoirs in the US could dip to critically-low levels in the next five years, jeopardizing the flow of Colorado River water that more than 40 million people rely on. Entire cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix will be in danger, not to mention California’s agriculture. It could get worse. The most recent update to the U.S. Drought Monitor revealed a startling figure: Nearly 82 percent of the country is facing at least abnormally dry conditions — the highest percentage since the drought monitor launched in 2000.
Finally, the Atlantic hurricane season which usually begins in August was surprisingly calm, but that ended in September.
After striking hard both Guadalupe and Puerto Rico, a violent hurricane named Fiona turned north and hit the Atlantic coastline of Canada with waves reaching 12 meters and winds of 170 km/hour, blowing over trees and power lines and leaving hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without electricity.
“The breadth of the damage caused by the powerful storm Fiona that ravaged Canada’s Atlantic coast on Saturday has never been seen before, and it will take months to rebuild the critical infrastructure that was destroyed,” Canada's emergency preparedness minister said.
“Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, Tropical Storm Ian was predicted to rapidly strengthen and hit Cuba early Tuesday (and) southern Florida on Wednesday or Thursday, the US National Hurricane Center said.” As expected, Ian strengthened to Category 4 “extremely dangerous” hurricane status, before slamming into Florida on Wednesday September 28.
According to the Guardian, “Hurricane Ian, one of the most powerful storms ever to strike the US mainland, has battered south-west Florida with high winds, rain and storm surges as it weakened and moved inland. More than 2m homes and businesses were left without power as the storm swept ashore in south-west Florida on Wednesday afternoon, with 250 km per hour winds and a deadly storm surge.“ As of Friday September 30, Ian again intensified over the Atlantic and barreled towards South and North Carolina, which were “forecast to be pummeled by life-threatening storm surge and hurricane conditions….”
While neither storm can be directly attributed to climate change, scientists have warned us to expect increasingly violent hurricanes as the oceans warm. This hurricane season may have started a bit late, but it will probably be very dangerous.
A SUMMER FROM HELL IN EUROPE
“This summer was the hottest on record in Europe, according to data from EU satellite monitoring. A series of extreme heat waves and a long running drought saw June, July and August shatter the previous high mark. The Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s Earth observation program, said the data showed August in Europe was the warmest on record by "a substantial margin."
“In fact, the continent has seen record heat several times over the past five years”, says Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist at Columbia University in Nature magazine.… “Western Europe (is) particularly prone to heat waves. Over the past four decades, extreme heat has been increasing at rates three to four times faster there than in other mid-latitude regions in the Northern Hemisphere.”
Tp make matters worse, according to Copernicus, the total number of wildfires in the EU since the beginning of 2022 is almost four times the 15-year average for the same time period. Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, France and Germany have all lost thousands of hectares of land to wildfires, amid Europe's record breaking 2022 heat waves. The accompanying drought, which affected half of the continent, is said by experts to be the worst European drought in the last 500 years
Let’s take a closer look at how all this played out in two major countries.
· United Kingdom: “unprecedented” heat waves
The extreme summer temperatures in the UK were “unprecedented” in recorded history, a word that the British do not use lightly.
The record-breaking UK heatwave of 18-19 July 2022 was made “at least 10 times more likely” by human-caused climate change, a new “rapid-attribution” study finds. Observations indicate that the 19 July maximum temperatures are a one-in-1,000 year event in the present-day climate, meaning that “such an event would have been almost impossible in a world without climate change”, the study finds
· France: record breaking heat and severe drought
Météo France has designated 2022 as the country’s hottest summer since 2003 and drought was the most severe ever recorded. In addition, the surface of the Mediterranean heated to 6°C over normal, unleashing violent thunderstorms on Corsica. This heating is exactly the same reason that hurricanes are getting stronger!
Météo France called the summer of 2022 a “bande annonce” for the summer weather the country should expect – but generally worse - in the years to come. In the short term, given the overheated Sea, meteorologists are expecting violent storms in the autumn of 2022, not just on the French coast but all around the Mediterranean basin.
SOUTH ASIA CLIMATE CATASTROPHE
· India & Pakistan: a blistering heat wave and a severe electricity shortage
The early 2022 heat wave in India and Pakistan was remarkable both in its severity and its persistence. High temperatures lasted from March through May and broke many all-time high daily records, not to mention a severe drought, with rainfall being only a quarter to a third of normal. Analysis by the World Weather Attribution found that the heat wave was made at least 30 times more likely due to climate change.
India faced its worst electricity shortage in more than six years, and demand due to the heat wave strained the electric grid in the country. Scorching temperatures forced early closures of schools and some states reduced power allocated to industry.
The world now has come face to face with a terrifying irony of climate change. Unbearable heat drives up demand for power, forcing nations who depend on fossil fuels (especially coal) for electricity generation to burn more, pouring still more greenhouse gases into the air. In effect, they are feeding the monster of climate change simply to survive.
· Pakistan: “monsoon season on steroids”
After experiencing its hottest months in 61 years in April and May, Pakistan was hit by a “monsoon season on steroids,” according to U.N. chief Antonio Guterres.
At the end of August, the news broke that “One-third of Pakistan has been completely submerged by historic flooding”, according to Climate Minister Sherry Rehman. "It's all one big ocean…a crisis of unimaginable proportions."
According to the Climate Minister, “Pakistan has never seen weeks of non-stop torrents that left huge swathes of the country under water. This is no normal season, this is a deluge from all sides, impacting 33 million plus people.”
In the NY Times, Pakistani climate scientist Fahad Saeed evoked the relation between the torrential flooding and the phenomenal heat waves of April and May. The hot atmosphere is flood prone, because warmer air can hold considerably more water.
The intense heat also melted glaciers in mountainous regions, increasing the amount of water flowing into tributaries into the mighty, country spanning Indus River, said Athar Hussain, a climate scientist in Nature magazine. The heat waves also coincided with a depression in the Arabian Sea, which brought heavy rain to Pakistan’s coastal provinces as early as June. “We rarely have large-scale depression systems arriving there,” said Hussain.
In addition to leaving a third of Pakistan under water, damages included:
o Over 1500 people dead and 33 million displaced
o 2 million acres of crops destroyed and 800,000 livestock died
o Over 1 million homes damaged or destroyed since the heavy rains began in mid-June, as well as 3,451km of roads and 149 bridges.
o Massive disruption to the education system: 19000 schools destroyed and thousands more fully shuttered
According to the United Nations, “health facilities have been heavily impacted too, leaving the most vulnerable at risk. The timing couldn’t be worse, as aid agencies have warned of an uptick in waterborne and deadly diseases, such as diarrhea, cholera, dengue, or malaria.”
In our opinion, given the incalculable human suffering and the massive physical damages, the 2022 Pakistan flooding is the single worst climate change disaster the world has ever seen, since the beginning of the industrial age.
Poor Pakistan. They are responsible at most for about 1% of GHG emissions, and yet Pakistan is the country that gets clobbered the worst. At least, so far…
© UNICEF/Asad Zaidi A flooded village in Matiari, in the Sindh province of Pakistan.
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