Climate set to serve up more misery
A record amount of California is burning, spurred by a nearly 20-year mega-drought. To the north, parts of Oregon that don’t usually catch fire are in flames.
Meanwhile, the Atlantic’s 16th and 17th named tropical storms are swirling, a record number for this time of year. Typhoon Haishen lashed Japan and the Korean Peninsula this week. Last month it hit 55 degrees C in Death Valley, the hottest Earth has been in nearly a century.
Siberia hit 38C earlier this year, accompanied by wildfires. Before that, Australia and the Amazon were in flames.
Freak natural disasters – most of which scientists say are likely to have a climate change connection – seem to be everywhere in 2020. But experts say we’ll probably look back and say those were the good old days.
‘‘It’s going to get a lot worse,’’ Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb said yesterday.
Colorado University environmental sciences chief Waleed Abdalati, Nasa’s former chief scientist, said the trajectory of worsening disasters and climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas was clear.
‘‘I strongly believe we’re going to look back in 10 years, certainly 20 and definitely 50 and say, ‘Wow, 2020 was a crazy year, but I miss it’,’’ Abdalati said.
That’s because what’s happening now is just the type of crazy climate scientists anticipated 10 or 20 years ago.
‘‘A year like 2020 could have been the subject of a marvellous science fiction film in 2000,’’ Cobb said. ‘‘Now we have to watch and digest real-time disaster after disaster after disaster, on top of a pandemic. The outlook could not be any more grim. It’s just a horrifying prospect.
‘‘The 2030s are going to be noticeably worse than the 2020s,’’ she said.
University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist, said that
in 30 years, because of the climate change already baked into the atmosphere, ‘‘we’re pretty much guaranteed that we’ll have double what we have now’’.
Expect stronger winds, more drought, more heavy downpours and floods, Abdalati said.
‘‘We have injected more energy into the system because we have trapped more heat into the atmosphere,’’ said World Meteorological Organisation
secretary-general Petteri Taalas. That means more energy for tropical storms as well as changes to rainfall patterns that bring drought to some places and heavy rainfall to others.
Scientists also make direct connections between heatwaves and climate change.
Some disasters at the moment couldn’t be directly linked to man-made warming, Overpeck said. But looking at the big pic
ture over time showed the problem – one that comes down to the basic physics of trapped heat energy.
But Overpeck is also optimistic about what future generations will think when they look back at the wild and dangerous weather of 2020. ‘‘I hope we look back and say it got crazy enough that it motivated us to act on climate change in the United States,’’ he said. – AP