The paradoxes of a climate crisis
The year 2022 was a tough year around the world in terms of climate disaster, something that the just exploded "bomb cyclone" seemed to punctuate with an exclamation point as the storm crippled much of the nation in a sub-zero deep freeze and led to the death of at least 40 people in western New York.
Fortunately, we were spared the theatrics of misleading statements and snowballs in the halls of Congress as scientists explained how rapid warming of the Arctic may have led to the major disruption of the "polar vortex" allowing the dramatic escape of winter Arctic air to wreak havoc far to the south.
A record-deadly blizzard stands as a bone-chilling paradox in the face of the much more deadly poster child of climate change record-breaking heat waves supercharged by climate change. And 2022 saw lots of these.
Close to home, summer once again brought record heat across much of the United States, extreme heat that continued to worsen megadrought in the Southwest and wildfire disaster and health risks across a wider swath of the western United States.
However, bad as the heat wave impacts in the United States were in 2022, they were dwarfed by the expanse of heat extremes around much of the planet.
Brutal record-breaking heat waves hit much of Europe, southern Asia and China this past year, creating a circum-Northern Hemisphere crisis of searing heat, economic troubles and human suffering. Further south, Argentina and Paraguay saw record climate change-worsened heat, while record heat waves also continued to scorch Australia and help stoke a growing humanitarian crisis in East Africa.
Even in a year with yet anoth- er major "polar vortex" cold event, concern continues to grow that some parts of the world may eventually become largely uninhabitable due to climate-change-aggravated
high heat extremes.
Droughts are often exacerbated by record heat because a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, and as a result can demand more moisture from snow, water bodies, vegetation and soil. In 2022, we saw this scenario play out in the United States, Europe, China and East Africa. Another paradox of climate change is that the global surge in hot drought around the world is happening at the same time the planet is also seeing many more cases of extreme rainfall and associated flooding.
In these cases, the greater water-holding capacity of a warming atmosphere also means that when it does rain it can rain more and harder. In the United States, Hurricane Ian provided a costly example of how climate change is not only able to generate bigger, more powerful storms, but also storms that can rain harder with devastating flooding as a result.
Extreme rainfall disasters were even worse globally in 2022.
Australia's biggest threat a couple years ago was heatenhanced unprecedented drought and ruinous "Black Summer" wildfires, but in 2022 record-breaking rainfall, flooding and increased risk of mosquito-borne disease was the biggest challenge.
As long anticipated by scientists, climate change means the water cycle can produce both more devastating dry and wet extremes.
Sadly, the worst 2022 example of the latter crippled Pakistan in an almost apocalyptic manner when climate change intensified summer monsoon rains coincided with extreme mountain heat and glacier melting to cause unprecedented flooding that killed thousands and affected tens of millions.
Extreme rainfall also killed hundreds and affected millions in West Africa in 2022.
Yet, another climate change paradox went largely unnoticed by the media in 2022.
On one hand, media attention did focus on how the ongoing slow yet relentless rate of sea-level rise is already starting to wreak havoc on some coastlines, and how a couple feet of sea-level rise could submerge hundreds of thousands of individual, privately owned coastal properties in the United States by mid-century.