Get Out Your Biggest Umbrella!
New report says more extreme weather on the way
For anyone who still has their ostrich head buried in the snow, here’s yet another study saying that the climate is changing and even more wacky weather is on the way.
This time it’s from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their full report isn’t due out for another month, but the Associated Press got the gist of it from an early draft, and it’s now all over the news. The bottom line:
“Scientists are ‘virtually certain’ – 99 percent – that the world will have more extreme spells of heat and fewer of cold.
In a nutshell:
The world will have more extreme spells of heat and fewer of cold. Heat waves could peak as much as 5 degrees hotter by mid-century and even 9 degrees hotter by the end of the century.
This will lead to more floods, more heat waves, more droughts and greater costs to deal with them.
Intense, single-day rainstorms that typically happen once every 20 years will probably happen about twice a decade.
Droughts such as the stubbornly long dry spell gripping Texas will also happen more often as the world warms.
More intense monsoons. Warmer air can hold more water and impart more energy to weather systems, changing the dynamics of storms and where and how they hit. (The latest of these is in Thailand, which is now coping with massive flooding from monsoonal rains.
Hurricanes and other tropical cyclones will have stronger winds.
Scientists who have looked at the report say that this is in fact the least of it, and that the report understates what’s going to be happening, in order not to scare off the governments to whom it’s addressed. University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver said the report was written to be “so bland” that it may not matter to world leaders.
None of this should be news by now. Just last week, another study reached the same conclusions. And what was news about that one was that it was funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, who are – or at least were – climate change deniers.
See the A.P. story here.