So extreme, it cannot be explained by global warming models!
From the Columbia Climate School and “Have you checked the accuracy and location of thermometers” and “weather not climate” department comes this new study that is hilarious in its lameness. It’s like these people have never heard of weather, and are only in the climate headspace. – Anthony
Earth’s hottest year on record was 2023, with temperatures 2.12 degrees F above the 20th century average. This surpassed the previous record set in 2016. To date, the 10 hottest annual average temperatures have occurred in the past decade. And, with the hottest summer ever and the hottest single day ever, 2024 is on track to set another record.
All of this may not be news to everyone, but amid the march of rising average temperatures, a surprising new phenomenon is emerging: different regions are seeing repeated extreme heat waves, which cannot be predicted by the models global warming. or explain. A new study provides the first worldwide map of the region, which appears on every continent except Antarctica like giant, angry patches of skin. In recent years, these heat waves have killed tens of thousands of people, dried up crops and forests, and caused devastating forest fires.
“The large and unexpected margin of new-scale regional extremes has been broken before records have raised questions about the degree to which climate models can provide adequate estimates of the relationship between global average temperature changes and regional climate risks,” said the study.
“This is about extreme trends that are the result of physical interactions that may not be known,” said lead author Kai Kornhuber, an adjunct scientist at the Columbia School of Climate’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “This area is a temporary hot house.” Kornhuber is also a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
The study has just been published in a journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study looked at heatwaves over the past 65 years, identifying regions with extremely hot temperatures accelerating faster than more moderate temperatures. This often results in maximum temperatures that have been repeatedly broken due to their size, sometimes surprisingly. For example, the nine-day wave that hit the Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada in June 2021 broke the daily record in some localities by 30 degrees C, or 54 F. This included the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada, 121.3 F, in Lytton, British Columbia. The city burned to the ground the next day in a wildfire led in large part by the drying of the vegetation in the extraordinary heat. In Oregon and Washington states, hundreds of people have died from heat stroke and other health conditions.
These extreme heat waves have mostly occurred in the past five years, although some occurred in the early 2000s or earlier. The most severe areas include central China, Japan, Korea, the Arabian peninsula, eastern Australia and scattered parts of Africa. Others include the Northwest Territories of Canada and the High Arctic islands, northern Greenland, the southern tip of South America and scattered areas of Siberia. The regions of Texas and New Mexico appear on the map, although they are not at the extreme end.
According to the report, the strongest and most consistent signal comes from northwestern Europe, where a sequence of heat waves caused about 60,000 deaths in 2022 and 47,000 deaths in 2023. This happened in Germany, France, England, the Netherlands and other countries. . Here, in recent years, the hottest day of the year has warmed twice as fast as the average summer temperature. These areas are particularly vulnerable because, unlike places like the United States, few people have air conditioning, as they usually hardly need it. The plague has continued; as recently as September, new maximum temperature records were set in Austria, France, Hungary, Slovenia, Norway and Sweden.
The researchers call the statistical trend “tail-widening” — that is, the occurrence of temperature anomalies at the upper end of, or beyond, what would be expected with a simple upward shift in average summer temperatures. But the phenomenon does not happen everywhere; The study shows that the maximum temperature of many other regions is actually lower than what the model would predict. It covers a wide area in the north-central United States and south-central Canada, parts of the interior of South America, much of Siberia, northern Africa and northern Australia. Heat is also increasing in these regions, but the extremes are increasing at the same or lower rate than the average change.
Rising overall temperatures are causing more frequent heat waves, but the cause of extreme heat outbreaks is unclear. In Europe and Russia, earlier studies led by Kornhuber blamed heat waves and droughts on wobbles in the jet stream, a fast-moving river of air that constantly circles the northern hemisphere. Followed by high temperatures in the north and warmer temperatures in the south, the jet stream generally covers a narrow band. But the Arctic is warming on average faster than other parts of the Earth, and this seems to disrupt the stability of the jet stream, causing the development of Rossby waves, which suck warm air from the south and park it at moderate temperatures. areas that usually do not see extreme heat for days or weeks at a time.
This is only one hypothesis, and it does not seem to explain all the extremes. A study of the 2021 Pacific Northwest/Southwestern Canada heat wave led by Lamont-Doherty graduate student Samuel Bartusek (also a co-author on the latest paper) identified a confluence of factors. Some appear to be related to long-term climate change, others to chance. The study identified disturbances in the jet stream similar to Rossby waves that are thought to be affecting Europe and Russia. It has also been found that several decades of slowly rising temperatures have dried up the region’s vegetation, so that when hot weather arrives, plants have less water reserves to evaporate into the air, a process that helps moderate the heat. A third factor: a series of small-scale atmospheric waves that collect heat from the surface of the Pacific Ocean and transport it eastward onto land. As in Europe, few people in this region have air conditioning, as most do not need it, and this may increase the death toll.
Heat waves “are so extreme, it’s tempting to label them ‘black swan’ events, which are unpredictable,” Bartusek said. “But there is a boundary between the unpredictable, the predictable and the desirable that is difficult to categorize. I would call this more than a gray swan.
While the wealthy United States is better prepared than many other places, extreme heat kills more people than all other causes of weather combined, including hurricanes, tornadoes and floods. According to a study last August, the annual death rate has doubled since 1999, with 2,325 heat-related deaths in 2023. public awareness and government motivation to prepare.
“Because of its unprecedented nature, these heat waves are usually associated with severe health impacts, and can be harmful to agriculture, vegetation and infrastructure,” said Kornhuber. “We weren’t built for them, and maybe can’t adapt quickly.”
The study was also co-authored by 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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