Extreme climate hitting US hard

NEW DELHI : Even as the US has been reiterating its decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement, the American Meteorological Society has concluded that 2017 was a year of climate extremes and US is among those worst affected.

The report, published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is a compilation of 17 peer-reviewed research papers on extreme events in six continents in 2017 and is a timely reminder of climate impacts while the climate negotiations (COP 24) are underway at Katowice in Poland.

It states that droughts in the northern plains of US and East Africa, floods in South America, China and Bangladesh and heat waves in China and the Mediterranean in 2017 were all caused due to human activity induced climate change. The report also states that intense marine heat waves in the Tasman Sea off Australia in 2017 and 2018 were “virtually impossible” without climate change.

“These attribution studies are telling us that a warming earth is continuing to send us new and more extreme weather events every year,” said Jeff Rosenfeld, editor in chief of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. “Scientific evidence supports increasing confidence that human activity is driving a variety of extreme events now. These are having large economic impacts across the United States and around the world,” said Martin Hoerling, a national oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) research meteorologist.

The report linked the hurricane Harvey, an emergency spillway at Oroville dam and the droughts in the northern plains of US to climate change. Hurricane Harvey broke US precipitation records, both in peak intensity and geographic extent, since records began in the 1880s, maximum precipitation totals exceeded 1500 mm at several sites with over 500 mm falling in only 24 hours near Houston. Even in case of the widespread droughts over Montana and Dakotas extreme drought sparked wildfires and reduced agricultural production with the last comparable such even in 1987-89.

Meanwhile, progress on the Paris rulebook, which will spell out how various provisions of the Paris Agreement will be operationalised has been very slow at COP 24. The Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) which is analysing the COP 24 developments said its heading towards a weak outcome. “The disagreements at Katowice run across the entire rulebook. Major points of contest relate to the issue of differentiation between developed and developing countries,” CSE said in a statement.