So extreme that it cannot be explained by global warming models!
The new study, from the Columbia Climate School and Have You Checked Your Thermometer's Accuracy and Position and Weather Not Climate, is hilariously lame. It's like these people have never heard of weather before, they only exist in a climate headspace. ——Anthony
The hottest year on Earth's record will be 2023, with temperatures 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 20th century average. This surpassed the record set in 2016. And, with the hottest summer and hottest day yet, 2024 is on track to set another record.
All of this may not be news to everyone, but as average temperatures continue to rise, a striking new phenomenon is emerging: Different regions are experiencing recurring extreme heat waves, the extent of which far exceeds any global The range of warming model projections. A new study provides the first global map of such areas, which appear as giant, angry blobs of skin on every continent except Antarctica. In recent years, these heat waves have killed tens of thousands of people, withered crops and forests, and sparked devastating wildfires.
“Recent regional-scale extreme events have shattered earlier records by being large and unexpected, raising questions about the extent to which climate models can adequately estimate the relationship between global mean temperature changes and regional climate risks,” the study said. question.
“This is about extreme trends that are the result of physical interactions that we may not fully understand,” said Kai Kornhuber, an adjunct scientist at the Columbia Climatological Institute's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “These areas become temporary greenhouses.” Kornhuber is also a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
The research has just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study looked at heat waves over the past 65 years and identified areas where extreme heat accelerated significantly faster than mild temperatures. This often results in maximum temperatures being repeatedly exceeded by huge, sometimes alarming, amounts. For example, the nine-day wave that hit the U.S. Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada in June 2021 broke daily records in some areas and increased temperatures by 30 degrees Celsius (54 degrees Fahrenheit). The highest temperature was 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit in British Columbia. The next day, the town was razed by a wildfire, caused in large part by the drying out of vegetation in the heat. Hundreds of people died from heat stroke and other health problems in Oregon and Washington states.
These extreme heat waves have mostly occurred in the past five years or so, but some have occurred in the early 2000s or earlier. The worst-hit areas include densely populated central China, Japan, South Korea, the Arabian Peninsula, eastern Australia and scattered parts of Africa. Other areas include Canada's Northwest Territories and its High Arctic islands, northern Greenland, the southern tip of South America, and scattered areas of Siberia. The areas of Texas and New Mexico appear on the map, although they are not at the extreme ends.
The report said the strongest and consistent signal came from northwestern Europe, where a series of heat waves killed about 60,000 people in 2022 and 47,000 in 2023. In recent years, the hottest days of the year here have heated up twice as fast as the average summer temperature. The region is particularly vulnerable, in part because unlike places like the United States, few people have air conditioning, where it has traditionally been rarely needed. The epidemic is still ongoing; just this September, Austria, France, Hungary, Slovenia, Norway and Sweden set new maximum temperature records.
The researchers call the statistical trend “tail broadening,” in which temperature anomalies appear at the highest end, or beyond what would be expected from a simple increase in average summer temperatures. But this phenomenon doesn't happen everywhere. Studies show that maximum temperatures in many other areas are actually lower than model predictions. These include vast areas of the north-central United States and south-central Canada, interior South America, much of Siberia, North Africa, and northern Australia. Heat is also increasing in these areas, but temperature extremes are increasing at rates similar to or slower than those shown by average changes.
In many cases, rising temperatures overall make heat waves more likely, but the causes of extreme heat outbreaks are not fully understood. In Europe and Russia, an early study led by Kornhuber blamed heat waves and droughts on the swings of the jet stream, a fast-moving river of air that constantly circles the northern hemisphere. The jet stream typically limits itself to a narrow range, bounded by historically cold temperatures in the far north and much warmer temperatures further south. But the Arctic is warming on average much faster than most other regions on Earth, which appears to be destabilizing the jet stream, causing it to create what's known as a Rossby wave, which pulls hot air from the south and holds it in the temperate zone for typically days. or areas that don’t experience extreme heat for weeks.
This is just a hypothesis and does not seem to explain all extreme cases. A study of the deadly 2021 Pacific Northwest/Southwestern Canada heat wave, led by Lamont-Doherty graduate student Samuel Bartusek and a co-author of the latest paper, found a combination of factors. Some of these appear to be related to long-term climate change, and some to chance. The study found disturbances in the jet stream, similar to Rossby waves thought to affect Europe and Russia. The study also found that decades of slowly rising temperatures have dried out vegetation in the area, so when a period of hot weather arrives, plants have less water stored to evaporate into the air, a process that helps Temper the heat. The third factor: a series of smaller-scale atmospheric waves that collect heat from the Pacific Ocean's surface and transport it east toward the land. As in Europe, few people in the region have air conditioning because it is generally not needed, which could increase the death toll.
The heat wave “is so extreme that it could easily be labeled a 'black swan' event, an event that is impossible to predict,” Bartusek said. “But one that is completely unpredictable, plausible and completely expected. There is a line between them that is difficult to classify. I prefer to call them gray swans.
Although wealthy America is better prepared than many other places, overheating still kills more people than all other weather-related causes combined, including hurricanes, tornadoes and floods. Annual death rates have more than doubled since 1999, with 2,325 heat-related deaths expected by 2023, according to a study released last August. hurricanes to increase mortality.
“Due to their unprecedented nature, these heat waves are often associated with very severe Severe health effects, potentially catastrophic for agriculture, vegetation and infrastructure,” Kornhuber said. “We're not built for them, we might Can't adapt quickly enough.
Co-authors of the study are Richard Seager and Mingfang Ting of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and HJ Schellnhuber of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
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