Bigger Wildfires Making Air Pollution Worse. Latest Victim: Sydney, Australia

In this image from CNN, the famed Sydney Opera House is barely
visible amid clouds of choking wildfire smoke in the city this week.

Today, here in Vermont, we will be treated to northwest breezes that will pump in chilly but very clean and fresh air from central Canada.

We're lucky, especially if you compare us to, say Sydney, Australia in recent days.

Destructive and very, very big wildfires continue to burn in Australia, and that will continue through their summer, as it appears now.

Some of the big fires are near Sydney, and smoke from those fires is choking this iconic Australian city in a thick, dangerous haze.  In some parts of the city, pollution levels were five times higher than the level considered hazardous, says the Sydney Morning Herald.

That newspaper also reported that there were 150 ambulance calls Monday for people with breathing problems, ferry service was shut down due to poor visibility, and outdoor venues such as swimming pools were closed because the city didn't want people exercising in the pollution.

Firefighters were responding to four times the usual number of false alarms because the smoke was so thick it was seeping into buildings and triggering smoke alarms, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. 

It's early in the summer fire season in Australia and already more than 720 homes have been lost. Officials are warning of exponentially greater losses as the fires chew their way into more populated areas later this summer.

And most of that time, this choking, dangerous smog from the fires will linger over some Australian cities, like Sydney.

This is not a problem limited to Australia. It's a world-wide issue

According to Outside, the bigger wildfires are starting to erase the big gains the United States has made since the 1970s.

There are all kinds of laws and improved emission systems for all kind of vehicles, homes, factories, buildings - what have you. Cities that were routinely smoggy in the 1960s and 1970s routinely have clean air.

However, the wildfires, now getting bigger, hotter, more long lasting and numerous in large part due to climate change, are spewing huge amounts of particulates and other pollution into the atmosphere.

During the worst of the wildfires, weather patterns and winds move the smoke and pollutants into big cities and small towns often hundreds of miles distant from the fires, leading to dangerous spikes in bad air quality.

San Francisco was shrouded in serious haze back in October. Other western North American cities, like Salt Lake City, Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, have had very serious smoke attacks from wildfires in recent years.

These outbreaks of thick haze are dangerous for everybody, causing lung damage and cardiovascular injury.  People who already have health issues could be hospitalized, or even die. And it's going to get worse.

Says Outside:

"While the U.S. has done a lot to limite particulate matter from burning fossil fuels, the country is still spewing a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which is speeding climate change. That, in turn make wildfires more severe."

To be Captain Obvious here, more severe wildfires mean a lot more smoke pumping into the atmosphere and often traveling long distances.

Don't think for a minute we Vermonters are immune from this wildfire pollution.  You know those fresh, clean northwest breezes I referred to at the top of this post?

Those northwest breezes are not necessarily so fresh in the summer and early autumn. There's been an uptick in wildfires in the northern forests of Canada and even up in the Arctic.  Some of that smoke blows down into the Green Mountain State.

I'm not sure on the statistics, but my perception is certainly that we've had more smoky, hazy and icky summer and early autumn days due to those fires hundreds or even thousands of miles to our north and west.

Wildfire smoke is not just an immediate danger to Sydney, Australia, It appears it will be an increasing threat to all of us.

Despite North American Cold Blob, Globe Was Second Warmest In October

The western and central United States had one of their coldest Octobers on record this year.

That was a big anomaly: Pretty much all of the rest of the world was unusually warm, enough to make October, 2019, the second warmest on record for Earth as a whole.   Which goes to prove, if it's cold in your backyard, that doesn't mean climate change is canceled.

Accordig to the NOAA's National Centers for Climate Information, the central United States was the only real cold spot in a warm world last month. Says the agency:

"Record warm October temperatures were mainly present across parts of the North and Western Pacific Ocean and northeastern Canada, as well as scattered across parts of the South Atlantic Ocean, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean and South America."

Additionally, Arctic sea ice extent was the lowest on record for October.  Antarctic sea ice extent was also below normal.

Some scientists are tying the unusually cold weather in the central and western United States in October, and the record chill in the eastern two thirds of the United States so far in November to that lack of sea ice.

When the jet stream is wavier than usual - meaning bigger northward bulges toward the north and deeper dips southward, the weather gets more extreme.  A big dip in the jet stream has repeatedly set up over central North America, causing the cold waves in the United States.

Some research suggests that a lack of Arctic sea ice can make the jet stream wavier, and make it stick in more persistent patterns.  This could be one major contributing factor making muh of the United States cold while most of the rest of the world bakes.

I would add that this research still isn't conclusive. Plus, with or without climate change, there is still going to be variability in weather and climate month to month and in different locations.  Climate change does not cancel out other factors that can influence the weather in your back yard, as I've already noted.

On top of all this, the year 2019 so far is the second warmest on record for the Globe.  Highlighting the persistence of weather patterns this year, it looks like parts of the central United States will be an outlier.  The whole year has been generally chilly in that part of the world.

Usually and traditionally,  when global temperatures are near record highs, there's an El Nino pattern going on, which is a warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean off South America.  El Ninos tend to make the world a little hotter than it otherwise would be. But there's no El Nino going on now, which makes the October heat pretty impressive.

November, as we well know, has been brutally cold around here in Vermont. Still, I bet on a global basis, the current month will be another very warm one.

Hot April, But Not Here, Mid-Atlantic Flooding

April was hot across most of the world, but look at that cold
spot over North America

A few tidbits today in the world of weather and climate news:

HOT APRIL, EXCEPT FOR US

For many of us in the United States from Montana to New England south to the central Plains to the Mid-Atlantic States, we want to forget April.

It was uncharacteristically cold and snowy, and some places in the northern Plains had their coldest April on record.

Our fortunes have gloriously reversed, and much of the nation is having an unusually warm May.

That April cold we had in the United States and southern Canada was an exception: The world as a whole had its third hottest April on record. Pretty much the only cold spot was here.

Only 2016 and 2017 had warmer April, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.  Also, April marked the 400th consecutive month of warmer than normal temperatures on Earth.

If you were born after December, 1984, you've never experienced a month when the world as a whole was cooler than average.

It's interesting that April was the third warmest, as things perhaps should have cooled off a bit more by now after the El Nino of 2016 and early 2017, El Ninos tend to make the Earth a bit warmer, regardless of global warming trends.

MID-ATLANTIC FLOODING

While the weather has been nice enough here up north in Vermont, it has been anything but as you head south. The rain has been persistent for a week in the Mid-Atlantic States and it's still coming down. Much of Maryland and Virginia have had at least three inches of rain in the past few days, and up to five inches more might fall in the next two or three days in some areas.

The Potomac River is expected to hit flood stage in and near Washington DC and upstream from there. At last report, some of the worst flooding is going on through a swath of east-central Virginia, and in southeastern Maryland.

Is Warming Arctic Making Our Winters More Miserable

Boston during the winter of 2015. Will a warming
Arctic paradoxically give us more winters
like the one pictured?

Another study is telling us that the warming Arctic might not be doing us in the Northeast if we hate cold winters, and hate paying big heating bills.

As the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang reported this week, we're going to have to talk about the polar vortex again, that weather system that became such an internet sensation a couple winters back.  

The polar vortex is always up in the Arctic in the winter. It's a tightly wound circulation of frigid air that is perfectly normal, not the monster it was made out to be in the winter of 2013-14.

But a warming Arctic might be screwing around with that polar vortex.

Says the Washington Post:

"Occasionally (the polar vortex) fragments and pieces of it plunge into eastern North America, carrying bitter cold air. The winters of 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 witnessed several such polar vortex disintegrations and resulted in record setting cold snaps."

The polar vortex has showed a weakening trend over the past three decades, says the study in Nature Climate Change, making it easier to fragment and sent cold air into parts of Europe, Asia and North America, especially in the late winter and early spring.

Other studies have shown this overall polar vortex weakening, but the latest study takes things a little further. It's complicated, but an oversimplified version of it is this:

There's more open water in the Arctic in the autumn and early winter in recent years. That means more evaporation, and more water vapor in the air that falls as snow in Siberia and other high latitude locations.

The snow cover up there is thus, counterintuitively, more widespread than usual, which helps sets off weather pattern changes that make the polar vortex more likely to fall apart.

Additional complicated weather patterns favor fragments of the polar vortex to unload on eastern North America in late winter and early spring, mostly March, so we would be more prone to terrible cold snaps during that time of year, which prolongs winter.

Or at least give us weather whiplash. There have also been notable heat waves in recent years during March when the polar vortex isn't unloading on us. Remember the 80s in mid-March, 2012. And 70 degrees plus in early March last year?

The hints of spring might be prone to getting clobbered by these cold waves. Which screws ups and freezes early budding plants and fruit trees, causing crop losses, and less importantly, aggravated gardeners. It's a situation we saw last year, I know.

Of course, this doesn't always happen. A strong El Nino last year kept the Arctic air pretty much bottled up over the far north, and many of us in the Northeast enjoyed (or cursed) the warmest winter on record.

Even then, a brief very sharp cold wave around Valentine's Day brought some daily record low temperatures, and there was a temporary chill down in the second half of March and early April before the warmth returned. Which created the above mentioned havoc with frozen flowers on fruit trees.

As Scientific American notes, this is just another piece of evidence that global warming can cause more extremes in weather. Occasionally, those extremes are bitter cold, despite the overall warming trend.

This new study the Washington Post cites is not the final word, as there is controversy among scientists as to what Arctic thawing means, exactly how it affects the polar vortex, and howwe might feel the effects down here where we live.

We just know that things are getting screwed up with climate change, and we're only beginning to understand the picky details of how this will play out.

By the way, as I write this on a mild early November morning, there is much above snow cover in Eurasia, including Siberia, and much below normal Arctic sea ice, the Weather Channel notes. 

Many forecasters are saying this will lead to a bitter winter this year. Starting as soon as just before Thanksgiving, according to some predictions.

Bundle up and stow cash for those high winter heating bills!