Hot Arctic, Bad Hurricanes, Carbon And Coronavirus: All Bad Climate Change News

A few reports, studies and breaking news this week have all been bad news in the climate change department. Let's get into them:   

Recent temperature depiction of the Arctic.  The more orange, the
further temperatures are above normal.  Notice Siberia and the
area around the North Pole have the deepest orange.

ARCTIC HEAT

The (sort of) breaking news is a weird Arctic heat wave that has spread from Siberia and is reaching the North Pole and parts of Greenland. 

As noted in Gizmodo, temperatures at the North Pole will probably get a bit above freezing in the next few days.  For most of us, temperatures in the low to mid 30s most certainly does not constitute a heat wave. 

But such temperatures are odd for the North Pole, especially this early in the season.  Plus, it gets the Arctic off to an early start to the melt season. 

Same is true in Greenland.  The warmth has gotten the melt season going two weeks earlier than normal.  True, not a huge amount of ice has melted in this heat wave, compared to some mid-summer epic melts in recent years, especially last summer, which saw record melts in Greenland. 

As Gizmodo points out, though, this year's early melt exposes older dirtier snow sooner in the year than nornal. This old snow and ice can then absorb more warm sunshine during the rest of the summer than newer, whiter, fresher snow and ice would. This would bring up the risk of major melt events later in the summer. 

We should care more about Greenland's melt than Arctic Ocean melt.  If ice floating on the sea melts, it won't raise global sea levels. But ice melting off the above sea level glaciers in Greeland flow into oceans, raising their levels globally. 

Meanwhile, Siberia is once again on fire after its warmest winter and spring on record. Fires have already crept north of the Arctic Circle. Gizmodo reports there are even some "zombie fires" which smoldered in buried peat all winter and then sparked back up again amid the current record warmth in high latitude Siberia.  

TURBOCHARGED HURRICANES

Climate change appears to be making hurricanes and typhoons and such more intense, according to new research from NOAA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. 

As The Weather Channel reports:

"The researchers discovered that the probability of a tropical cycle having Category 3 or higher wind speeds (at least 111 mph) increased by aboug 15 percent between the first and last halves of the analyzed satellite data. This corresponds to about an 8 percent increase per decade over the period of the study. The proportion of all tropical cyclones exceeding major hurricane intensity showed a similar increase of about 6 percent per decade."

The largest increase in bad hurricanes was in the Atlantic Ocean, but other influences might have helped increase the odds of such storms, too. 

CARBON/CORONAVIRUS

Daily global emissions of carbon dioxide fell by 17 percent from the same period in 2018 as nations locked down their economies to battle the coronavirus pandemic. Most of that decrease was due to less travel and less industrial output. 

I suppose that's good news for people who are not fans of climate change, but obviously we would have all been better off without the pandemic.

Also, this cut in carbon emissions won't really dent the pace of climate change. Economies are already opening back up, and emissions will rise correspondingly.  Even a sustained 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions lasting years wouldn't really solve the problem. 

Said Richard Betts, head of Climate Impacts Research at the Met Office Hadley Centre in England said, "It's like we're filling a bath and have turned down the tap slightly, but not turned it off - the water is still rising, just not as fast. To stop the bath overflowing, we need to turn the tap off."

So yes, the world is rightly consumed with battling the pandemic, but we still need to deal pretty intensely with climate change at the same time. 

Another Monster Nor'Easter As Warm Oceans Fuel Storms Big Time

Big nor'easter off the coast this morning.
It's yet another in a parade of very intense
storms this winter.

Boy, that nor'easter lurking off the Carolina coast this morning looks like a monster. And it totally is.

It's a classic "bomb" meaning it intensified super fast, and it's now an enormous, intense storm packing hurricane force winds and flinging around lots of precipitation and lightning. 

A normal nor'easter in this position this one is this morning would be too far offshore to have an enormous impact on the coast. Maybe some wind, light snow, nasty ocean waves.

But this one is so huge, so intense, that is is having a big effect. Blizzard warnings are still up for much of Cape Cod and the Islands. Up to 18 inches of snow propelled by gusts over 60 mph are still expected there today.

Elsewhere in southeastern New England, a good six to 12 inches of snow will fall.  Blizzard alerts are up in parts of the Maritime Provinces in Canada, too.

Coastal flood alerts are up from South Carolina to New England.

This storm is yet another "over performer" and we've seen a number of them this year. By over performer, I mean the storms have been stronger and more intense than many initial forecasts, and they've been nastier than what you'd normally expect.

Think about it. That late January blizzard really clobbered the Mid-Atlantic states with up to 42 inches of snow and coastal storm surges that broke records in Delaware and southern New Jersey.

Just last Friday, a nor'easter intensified a lot more than some forecasters anticipated. Up to a foot of heavy, wet snow collapsed many trees and power lines.

Over in Great Britain, a series of winter storms since early December have brought catastrophic floods, very damaging winds and coastal surges. Another intense storm is hitting England today.

Is this series of storms just coincidences? I doubt it.

A lot of what's fueling these storms is unusually warm ocean waters, especially off the U.S. East Coast. (There is a cold patch up in the North Atlantic, but it's unclear how that's affecting storms.)

The warm water is conducive to extra evaporation, which means more moisture available to a storm. The contrast between the usual Arctic air masses that descend down from Canada into that warm ocean water increases, making nor'easters stronger as well,  says the Washington Post. 

All this tends to make storms more intense, both in terms of the amount of precipitation they drop, and in terms of how strong they get, and how windy they get.

The warm ocean water off the East Coast this winter is due in large part - but not solely - due to climate change scientists are saying, as noted in the Washington Post article.


There's already been an observed increase in the intensity of winter storms along and off the East Coast.

Says the Washingotn Post:

"Overall, notes the U.S. National Climate Assessment, the northern hemisphere has seen a trend toward more frequent and intense winter storms since 1950. So hs the United States.

According to a 2013 consensus report published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,  'the number of severe regional snowstorms that occurred since 1960 was more than twice the number that occurred during the preceding 60 years' in the United States."



I think as long as water temperatures in the western Atlantic stay warmer than normal this winter and early spring, the risk will remain for more strong storms.


Since ocean temperatures are generally on the long term increase due to global warming, I think we might need to get used to more intense nor'easters in the United States and Canada, and bigger blows in the UK and Europe as well.