Summer 2021 has changed our understanding of extreme weather

https://theconversation.com/how-summer-2021-has-changed-our-understanding-of-extreme-weather-165268

by heldsteel7 • 5 years ago

118 86 5 years ago

ozzythecat• 5 years ago

There have been serious floods in China and western Europe, heatwaves and drought in North America and wildfires in the sub-Arctic.

The remainder of the article never considers any region or country not mentioned in that statement.

What about African nations? How about Southeast Asian countries such as Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh? How about the former Soviet satellite countries?

There are plenty of countries where the entire population doesn’t have full access to electricity. Air conditioning is a luxury, and central air is unheard of.

Not to sound all doom and gloom, but I’m concerned about mass migrations from the developing world, which politicians will use to instigate fear of foreigners and further divide people.

Will the nations who are the largest contributors to climate change pick up the bill? Unlikely.

tenpies• 5 years ago

I’m concerned about mass migrations from the developing world

I'm actually looking forward to a complete reversal of this trend as self-destructive policies in the developed world make them unappealing places to live in.

Add chronic weather anomalies which increase food scarcity, and compound with the policies in place that will cause a serious decline in QoL, and suddenly an exodus to the developing world seems much more likely. There is more arable land there, energy will be cheaper, and the policies in place will not sacrifice humanity for the environment.

To what degree this changes in the West as the populace realizes that the way the West becomes "green" is by rewinding their QoL by 100 years is yet to be seen. The indoctrination is strong, the propaganda machine in place, and the elites have no problem flying to Davos while the people they claim to represent cannot even drive to the grocery store because energy prices are so high.

onion2k• 5 years ago

I'm actually looking forward to a complete reversal of this trend as self-destructive policies in the developed world make them unappealing places to live in.

It doesn't matter how unappealing somewhere is if your current location has no water and makes growing food impossible. Climate change will drive hundreds of millions of people to move from regions around the equator to the Northern hemisphere.

bobthepanda2• 5 years ago

The developing world stands to fare much worse as it is, with areas in the tropics predicted to get to deadly wet-bulb temperatures.

eCa• 5 years ago

It seems like you are more focused on (unspecified) policies in the west creating mass emigration than what forces the ongoing climate change can bring.

I think the climate driven migrations will far exceed all migration in the other direction.

Zababa3• 5 years ago

Not to sound all doom and gloom, but I’m concerned about mass migrations from the developing world, which politicians will use to instigate fear of foreigners and further divide people.

I don't think they need to be used by politicians to create a divide. Currently in France we haven't been able to intergrate the last immigrations waves. I'm worried about what will happen if we get even more.

toiletaccount• 5 years ago

I can't help but think that 2021 is going to be the year a lot of people look back at as the turning point from where global warming was somebody else's problem to their problem.

Animats• 5 years ago

2020 was the year in India.

bch• 5 years ago

I can't help but think that 2021 is going to be the year a lot of people […]

Let’s hope it’s a critical mass. 2021 is the year I saw a lot of apparent idiots running what looked like trivial errands in their cars in 50°C weather and “beating the heat” by leaving their cars idling while they left and shopped so the A/C would keep their car cool for their return.

unanswered• 5 years ago

Do you have evidence this is worse than allowing the greenhouse effect to rule in the interior, than having to run the vehicle with the windows down and/or run the A/C harder and/or idle before leaving to cool off surfaces like steering wheel and shifter? Or is it just frustration at a lack of performative emissions reductions?

meristohm2• 5 years ago

Please, when you read about climate change, let care and compassion for other lives guide your actions. The path of selfishness and fear (the mind-killer) is easier, but I doubt you’ll ultimately thank yourself for taking it.

It’s less what any one of us does than what we do together. Considering where we’ll be in ten thousand years helps guide my actions.

Enforceable regulations seem useful. How do we adjust culture to accept and support this without feeling like we’re living in a deeper dystopia?

ggm2• 5 years ago

Enforceable regulations seem useful. How do we adjust culture to accept and support this without feeling like we’re living in a deeper dystopia?

Replace the current generation of politicians with a newer one. If they won't move aside voluntarily, then there are some expedient approaches but they have consequences.

Note: I am a member of that older cohort generationally speaking. I don't think my confreres in power appreciate how strongly they are speaking to the past, rather than the future. I fear for the future (noting that Fear is the mind-killer)

TedDoesntTalk• 5 years ago

Replace the current generation of politicians with a newer one.

Won’t that happen naturally as they age and die?

thehappypm2• 5 years ago

What are you personally doing? I see a lot of these appeal-to-emotion type posts, especially among my friend on the West coast, then they all buy Subarus, eat meat every day, fly to Hawaii, and buy big houses.

meristohm2• 5 years ago

What I’m personally doing matters less, far less, than what we collectively do. Per the How to Save a Planet podcast (by one of the editors of All We Can Save), the percentage of vegetarians in the USA hasn’t changed in thirty-some years. Better would be for 95 percent of people to eat a little less meat.

Still, it is helpful when both efforts align.

Since I like talking about what I do as I learn and grow alongside my toddler, here you go: - No alcohol, coffee, or chocolate, because of mental health reasons and they are expensive to make. A stronger-willed person might enjoy these as the rare luxuries they are, but zero is what I find least stressful.

- Cold water for everything but some laundry and the dishwasher. Cold showers feel wonderful, afterwards, and use a lot less water.

- Meat maybe once a week, and then mostly for our child. I like beans, tofu, tempeh, nuts and seeds, sourdough flatbread (I don’t scrap any, I just set aside and feed a little for next time, and make a dough with the rest, letting it sit a day or so, then adding some baking soda or nixtamalized corn to cut the acid a bit, then heating it in a pan until it holds together enough) for protein. We eat eggs from neighbor farms and splurge on cheese because my spouse loves it. I know those are luxuries, too. We’re not completely ascetic.

- We have a garden for food and are converting the yard (which we never water anyway) to native-ish prairie. We compost all our scraps (we don’t have any meat waste, and I crush all the eggshells), along with cardboard and yard/garden waste. I add nearly all of my urine to the invasive-weed compost to help kill those plants and add nitrogen for when the pile is ready for the garden. Not yet ready to compost poop.

- Transportation by car (50-60mpg) for medical appointments for our child, and I pick up food in the same trip. Spouse works from home most of the year, and I’m parent/homemaker. This limited interaction with others is a privilege I am thankful for. Being able to make time to respond to you is a luxury in its own way. I didn’t own a vehicle until my late 20s, preferring a bicycle.

- We’re against owning more than one home. We don’t own more than one. For most of our lives we’ve owned zero. Housing would be better considered a human right, and cultural adjustments made to accommodate this.

- Heating and cooling: no air conditioning, and we keep the house 16-17 Celsius in the winter, with a mix of electric and wood heat. I keep warm by moving and breathing, and cool with shade and not moving so much.

- Buying things is a tough one, since we have a child and I’m one of two parents. I buy most of my clothes second-hand, and for kid, too. I prefer to buy quality tools and maintain them. My self-worth is less and less tied to spending money on things.

That about covers the big stuff? I’m kinda stuck with some things because I want to stay in my current relationship with my spouse and our child. I got a vasectomy to decrease the risk of making another human, since we’re almost entirely responsible for environmental damage over the last hundreds of years, and Americans tend to have large carbon footprints.

I’m an asshole about lights on in unoccupied rooms, and I accept that’s a distraction from the big draws in family residences: heating/cooling, transportation, and food.

Again, I acknowledge (to the extent I’m aware) my many privileges in all this, and am thankful to so many people, and I want our culture to shift so that so many more might live in greater harmony and reciprocity with the land.

tuatoru• 5 years ago

Some scientists are beginning to worry they might have underestimated how quickly the climate will change. Or have we just misunderstood extreme weather events and how our warming climate will influence them?

James Hansen pointed out long ago (eight years? more?) that the variance of the PDF of temperature difference from climatological average increases, not just the central location.

(In layman's terms: not only is the bell-shaped curve shifting over to the right, it's also getting squashed down flatter and wider.)

So you don't just get proportionately more extreme weather events: you get a lot more than that. As well as many, many more extreme heat-related events, we can expect to see extreme cold events at a similar rate as in the past (or perhaps slightly more of them). Like Texas's this year.

I think this point is not widely appreciated.

actually_a_dog2• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, I think it is widely appreciated: by people who use it to mock the term “global warming.” I know it’s outdated terminology, but one still sees it used occasionally as a synonym for “climate change.”

mjevans• 5 years ago

Climate Change sounds cute and cuddly. Global Weather Chaos is a term I prefer since it describes what will be affected and implies that it grows more energetic as well as 'bad' in layperson impressions.

defaultname• 5 years ago

Global warming is still the current terminology. As is climate change. Global -- as in at a global scale -- warming is the mechanism that is leading to climate change, even where that can even mean colder conditions at a local level.

There is nothing outdated about it.

kqr3• 5 years ago

(In layman's terms: not only is the bell-shaped curve shifting over to the right, it's also getting squashed down flatter and wider.)

Maybe you've already accounted for this, but I'm bringing it up anyway: increasing variance doesn't necessarily mean flatter and wider bell curve. There are at least two more options:

- A bell curve with a more pronounced peak, lower shoulders, and more mass under the tails. This would correspond to experiencing even more normal weather, but the extreme weather that does occur is insanely out of whack with normal.

- The peak separating into a low number of different peaks which drift apart. This would correspond to weather flip-flopping in its behaviour based on time or location.

I'm not saying this is what happens, I'm just saying we ought to be mindful of automatically committing the Gaussian fallacy whenever we hear summary statistics!

f6v5• 5 years ago

I’ve engaged in a discussion recently where a guy told me:

- Climate modeling doesn’t make sense since science can’t even predict next-day weather

- More CO2 is good for plants

- He doesn’t care about scientific papers on climate change because he can’t comprehend them. But he thinks they’re wrong anyway.

- There’s a guy on YouTube who says climate change isn’t real

What grinds my gears is that so many people think they can reason about complex systems based on their gut feeling. And their gut tells them: “If it’s getting warmer, why is it snowing in Texas?!”

Aloha• 5 years ago

You also get media exhorting loudly and frequently about the problem which causes people to tune out.

Several weeks ago, a several friends messages me and asked me if I was okay... somewhat taken aback, I replied, that yes, I was indeed fine. One in particular went on to explain that that they saw an article about a heat dome in Texas, and were concerned for my safety. I explained that it was no hotter than normal here, and that everything was just fine. They seemed perplexed by my answer. I'm still perplexed why everyone was so concerned - it's always hot in North Texas in July, at least we're not in a drought this year.

At some point stories like this cause folks to just tune it all out, at the media selling hysteria. Blood sells as they say. We have a lack of media responsibility too here causing some of this. If the news media keeps presenting everything as on fire, you'll want to find information that tells you it's not.

montalbano• 5 years ago

Thinking about an equation like (how much an average individuals life will be affected * number of people who will be affected), the co2 ppm should probably be a front page headline every day. Yet the most popular newspapers in my country (and other countrys' that I check) only have one story once every few months at best.

JMTQp8lwXL• 5 years ago

It's possible folks used that merely as a conversation opener. Sure there was some concern but primarily they wanted to reach out and talk. Concerns for hysteria are valid, but there are more plausible explanations.

slx26• 5 years ago

Some people try to adjust their opinions by getting pieces of information and considering which ones fit and which ones don't within a (more or less) rational frame.

In contrast, everyone has their opinions biased by what they repeatedly hear others say. And if they "like" what they hear, the story, then almost everything is lost.

But it's not just "don't let the facts get in the way of a good story", it's more like there's a lot of people who is incapable to see that some pieces simply don't fit together. They understand what a contradiction is, but it can't reach their eyes when there's a story that already shines more brightly for them.

Not a lot of people believes they "can reason about complex systems based on their gut feeling". That's what you see they are doing, but that's not how they think about it. They simply see a bright light, and call it understanding. You are only pointing at dimmer lights beyond their blindness. First, you need to teach them how to put pieces of information together in a field where they aren't blinded by a nice story already. Then, they have to start applying their newly found rational thinking to other areas where their gut/irrational/random feelings are stronger, until they see that those are very fallible.

No one has so much time though, so we shall continue giving them flak and trying to become great preachers on HN instead.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

Counter example: I had an argument with someone in Bay Area that boiled down to the fact that my existence is adding CO2 to the atmosphere, which is absolutely true, and that I should feel guilty.

f6v5• 5 years ago

I’m not going to go vegan myself. But things like making your home well-insulated to save on cooling/heating is a great idea. For some people it’d mean to skip on vacation or two. But it's probably worth it.

chess_buster2• 5 years ago

As an implied American, maybe you should? I mean look at North America's footprint compared to anyone else...

hereforphone• 5 years ago

Can you comprehend those papers (and by implication have you read them?) If so congratulations - you have a strong academic background in a science related to climate. Most people do not.

craftinator3• 5 years ago

That is the insidious nature of being uneducated or ignorant in a heavy science subject. I'm fairly well educated, and had a meteorological related job for many years, and I still have a hard time parsing many of these papers. So my options are:

A. Spend huge amounts of time learning the heavy math involved

B. Find someone else who seems educated enough, and trust their ELI5

C. Make my own conclusions based on an imperfect understanding of the science

D. Make my own conclusions based on experience and whatever knowledge I have at the moment

Now I do understand enough about atmospheric dynamics to know, at a high level, that human induced climate change is occuring, why it's happening, and some fuzzy understanding of some of the effects we will see. But I don't think a generic USA highschool level education will be able to inform people enough to have the same understanding, which is why we are in this boat. It seems mostly the people who really understand the what/when/why/how of the situation are STEM field graduates.

readflaggedcomm• 5 years ago

Plants like CO2.

f6v5• 5 years ago

Life on earth is definitely not in danger, it’s seen worse.

mellavora• 5 years ago

Up to a point. But ..

"when plants take in an excess of CO2, their chemical makeup changes in a way that that’s harmful to the humans and animals that depend on them for nutrition: higher concentrations of CO2, increases the synthesis of carbohydrates like sugars and starches, and decrease the concentrations of proteins and nutrients like zinc, iron, and B-vitamins. “

https://globalhealth.washington.edu/news/2019/04/23/high-co2...

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfcfa

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.00924...

anodari• 5 years ago

I wasn't in this conversation but I'm sure he also said that the planet is millions of years old and the climate always has its ups and downs.

d110af5ccf8• 5 years ago

Which is completely true! Antarctica was even covered by rainforest at one point! It's just the rate of change that's the issue (by many many orders of magnitude).

(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2148-5)

Avalaxy• 5 years ago

I always refer those people to this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1732/. It visualizes things very powerfully. Yet, I never get a response anymore after sending this to them.

mod50ack• 5 years ago

The planet will be fine. It's a rock. It's the inhabitants who will have a problem.

anticodon• 5 years ago

One way to look at the world events is to follow the money. Green energy hysteria makes some people and corporations extremely wealthy (pumping money from people/government into pockets of "green" corporations) and also is a new colonial tax for the developing countries. Two birds with one stone.

existony• 5 years ago

More research across disciplines is needed

Lack of research is not the bottleneck here. Having worked with a Canadian environmental non-profit on ecological impact assessment (how are natural events interconnected, how effective are our environmental efforts), the problem of natural disaster prevention is moreso a problem of political and economic will than actual science/modelling/data.

For example, there are obvious things you can do to reduce flash flooding and wildfire risk and damage, but government/taxpayers/corporations are often unwilling to take these measures since they:

- are expensive, though eventually more than make up their worth in disasters averted and scale of disaster reduced

- are not immediate fixes, since they usually involve restoring ecological health i.e. forests, rivers, ecosystems

- are not guaranteed to prevent disasters - only reduce their occurrence and severity

- generally involve reducing the "development" (sprawl) of cities and the "productivity" (unsustainable practices) of big farms

I hope this summer increases environmental disaster prevention budgets everywhere. May the Ministry of the Future wet bulb event never happen.

jillesvangurp2• 5 years ago

What's lacking is a sense of urgency. People are calling for action but not agreeing on what action. There are several camps arguing about whether there is a problem, whether we should do something, what we should do, when we should do it, or what would happen if we do/don't do it. But not a lot is getting done even while we are facing weather extremes that some still insist are perfectly normal.

Pre-emptively doing things sidesteps that whole debate. Redneck republican alternate reality types like cheap solar too even if they don't believe in global warming. So lets not bother them with facts that they can't seem to grasp and just present them with solutions that are obviously good.

Things to do:

- Shut down coal everywhere with extreme prejudice. It's expensive; we no longer need it. A couple of countries are dragging their heels here (Germany, US, China) for no good reason other than that they are protecting vested interests. It's dying anyway; we might as well get it over with. And we'll drive electricity prices down long term.

- While we debate taxing carbon, maybe at least stop subsidizing it. Financially it amounts to about the same thing and it will be a long time before taxes catch up to those subsidies otherwise. Not subsidizing oil should be a lot less controversial than subsidizing and taxing it at the same time is (which is the reality in a lot of places). Yes, that will cause a few oil businesses to die. That's a good thing. Needs to happen.

- Commit to an EV only strategy and don't let manufacturers weasel themselves out of this by e.g. counting hybrids as part of the solution or waiting forever on a hydrogen strategy that they is perpetually not happening either. Zero tolerance on any form of ICE on our roads. Get it done. It's going to happen anyway. So, lets just make it happen faster.

- Double down on infrastructure expenses for clean energy. More renewables. More battery. More green hydrogen. More cables to transport electricity. Those are all good investments that will serve us a long time. Create incentives to do this. Remove obstacles. Create some jobs in the process. All good stuff.

- Stop wasting time on stopgap measures like carbon capture that are a net loss of perfectly good clean energy repurposed towards putting more co2 in our atmosphere (but slightly less than without it). It's not a solution; it's not part of a solution; it merely prolongs bad things we need to stop doing. The people insisting this is a solution seem to be employed by subsidized oil companies.

- Stop turning good soil into desert for the production of bio-fuels (e.g. corn). Biofuels are not worth destroying our soil and forests. If we stop burning oil; we don't need bio fuels either. Biofuels without government subsidies are not a viable thing anyway. So, shutting down those would speed this up.

- By all means keep on subsidizing nuclear and fusion. But stop pretending these are anything but very long term solutions. For the foreseeable future they are a combination of too expensive, late, and not happening on a relevant scale on a timeline that matters. Freeing up some oil and gas subsidies would create that budget. At least it will go somewhere constructive instead of destructive. And maybe something genuinely cheaper and better than solr/wind will result from it in a few decades.

m4x2• 5 years ago

Why do you consider carbon capture a stop gap solution? We still have thousands of tons more CO2 in the atmosphere than is safe, and it needs to be removed. Ceasing further emissions is also important, but not enough on its own.

pseudo0• 5 years ago

The lack of any attempt to quantify this trend in the article is rather frustrating. The closest I can find with a quick bit of Googling is a modest downward trend of insurance claims from extreme weather events as a percentage of global GDP [0], [1]. This seems rather counterintuitive, but I guess we've been getting richer slightly faster than the weather has gotten worse? That and the data ends in 2019.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/10/31/surprisi...

[1] - (paywalled paper) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/17477891.2018...

d110af5ccf8• 5 years ago

Given current events on the US west coast (where I live) I've been quite curious about seeing the global trends quantified as well. I'm most curious to know about changes in variance over time, but collecting (let alone analyzing) a global dataset that goes back far enough would be a bit of a task.

_y5hn3• 5 years ago

This has been available for decades already:

https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/

kqr3• 5 years ago

Another possible explanation for the downward trend in insurance is that insurance companies understand the worsening climate better than consumers. (They raise the premium to protect their bottom line in a world of more extremes, and consumers don't think they will need that level of hedge because they extrapolate badly.)

chippytea• 5 years ago

This article seems to rely heavily on single points of data. For example weather in the UK or wildfires in the sub-Arctic. This is no better than saying "If it is getting warmer why did it snow in Texas" and not a good way to construct an argument against climate change sceptics.

For example here in Eastern Europe I have been very happy with the weather. There were some heat waves like usual but also quite a lot of rain. Normally grass and plants are scorched to death but this year everything is green and growning.

_y5hn3• 5 years ago

Everything will be green and growing, until you get mega-droughts. There may be land that may see a net benefit, but overall, there will be more instability and chaos globally. This will affect everybody at some point in time. Just because it doesn't affect you now, shouldn't be taken as a form of signal.

aivisol• 5 years ago

Eastern European here as well. This year is definitely not your average warmer-than-usually year. Both the winter was extremely cold here where I live (down to -30C) and also there was prolonged heatwave spanning from mid June to end of July with temperatures well in +30s and no rain for more than a month. It will have negative impact on agriculture for sure, especially crops. On the other hand, watching on the news the recent floods in Germany and Belgium I recall seeing similar events in those countries in the pre-global warming times (when most of us knew nothing about it). Then they told us that the reason for the floods is excessive drainage and elimination of swamps and wetlands. They are supposed to act as sponges taking and absorbing excess precipitation and then releasing it when the rains are over. That made a good point because where I live we have plenty of swamps around us and never see such floods apart from seasonal spring thaw induced ones (which are more or less predictable and controllable). So maybe we should not put all our bets into getting all carbon out of atmosphere (which is no simple task) but also see if local ecosystems can be fixed to achieve some quicker wins.

kqr3• 5 years ago

I agree. Single examples of extreme weather will happen. They will be unlikely under the null hypothesis and slightly more likely under a hypothesis of global warming, but single examples are not definitive proof of any kind.

In other words, there may well be lots of good evidence that death by lightning is decreasing (there is) but "look, this year only three people died compared to 11 last year!" is definitely not sufficient on its own.

Again, death by horse kick in the Prussian army is probably a relatively constant cause, but seeing that "3 people died that way last year and this year!" is not proof.

However, maybe they are the sort of narrative that helps less statistically sophisticated people understand. You and I can get our understanding from the relatively solid science and probabilistic reasoning. Many people can't, and the only way to teach them is by example, even if that method is technically flawed.

interactivecode• 5 years ago

I learned a couple years ago that in most climate models clouds aren't included or aren't accurately modeled because they are too complex. https://www.carbonbrief.org/cooling-effect-of-clouds-underes...

Clouds impact weather and climate a lot. like really a lot

aeroman• 5 years ago

This isn't the case - I am not aware of any CMIP6 model (the latest generation used in the current IPCC report) that doesn't include clouds.

Clouds are definitely complicated, as they are smaller than a typical model gridbox. This means that there are lots of uncertainties about how to include them in climate models. Their response to a changing climate is one of the leading uncertainties in our understanding of past and future climate.

As you say, it would be difficult to simulate the climate if you didn't include clouds, and so models absolutely include them.

_y5hn3• 5 years ago

With warming, cloud cover go down, even with much more water-vapor in the air. So is more like a net contributor to warming rather than a breaker.

lmilcin• 5 years ago

I don't know.

It kinda seems to me that most who were conscious of global warming new it is not just linear temperature shift.

Some of our weather patterns are precisely tuned. So are various other phenomena like oceanic currents.

Zababa3• 5 years ago

The more I see article about this and read about climate change, the more I seem to become sympathetic to climate change deniers, alternative theories and things like that. I wonder if I'm the only one? My theory is that since I can't do much about this, my brain tries to change my understanding of the world so it fits better with how I feel. At least I'm conscious of it. If I'm not the only one affected by this, maybe constantly pushing news like this is making the problem worse?

ragazzina• 5 years ago

I wonder if I'm the only one? My theory is that since I can't do much about this, my brain tries to change my understanding of the world so it fits better with how I feel.

Normalcy bias?

Zababa3• 5 years ago

Probably something like that. Maybe something like learned helplessness too, as I've heard countless times that it's too late, that an individual can't do anything.

Summer 2021 has changed our understanding of extreme weather

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