Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

When one of the world’s leading hurricane experts reverses his long-held position based on detailed analysis, it’s worth pointing out. I’m talking about M.I.T.’s Kerry Emanuel, author of perhaps the best book ever written on hurricanes–Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes. He said in May:

And so the rise of hurricane into the 1950s, its subsequent fall around 1990 or so, and then its more recent rise we now believe is mostly owing to changes in the radiation reaching the earth that have been caused by solar variability, volcanic activity, sulfate aerosol pollution and greenhouse warming….

So I no longer believe that there is any evidence for natural cycles of Atlantic hurricanes, even though a year ago I did.

And since greenhouse warming will just keep rising unless we take action soon, global warming will soon overwhelm completely all the other factors. Emanuel told Plenty magazine in February (subs. req’d), “I don’t see any reason why the power of hurricanes wouldn’t continue to increase over the next 100 to 200 years.” In June, Emanuel published the underlying analysis in Eos (subs. req’d), showing precisely why the dominant force driving ocean sea surface temperatures is human-caused global warming, not “natural cycles.”

The May quote was part of a terrific teleconference put on by Clear the Air, which also included a number of other leading experts. I recommend the transcript and audiotape of the event to anyone wishing to become more knowledgeable on this important subject.

No, Tiger hasn’t suddenly become Leonardo DiCaprio or Orlando Bloom or Olympic gold medalist Picabo Street, for that matter. He hasn’t taken up the global warming cause, at least not yet. But there are lessons to be learned from his two consecutive major wins.

As the photo from the British Open shows, the greens at Royal Liverpool were off color. “This is the brown British Open,” as the Associated Press put it:

A heat wave in Britain – the temperature reached 91 degrees Wednesday – has caused the rough to die, leaving wispy strands of native grasses and fairways that are a mixture of yellow and brown. Yellow is the color of the grass, brown is where the grass has died.

Heat waves and droughts are becoming longer and stronger thanks to human-caused climate change. Tiger, however, is the greatest golfer of his generation–probably of any generation–and a briliant all-weather strategist. Washington Post sports writer Michael Wilbon explains:

(more…)

While the recent extreme heat wave generated intense coverage for a while, the media has largely missed the big climate story of the summer–the nationwide drought. The U.S. Drought Monitor paints a sobering picture, with the browns and reds showing the severest areas of drought:

Here is how Rich Tinker of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center describes the alarming situation:

Overview: Abnormal dryness and all drought intensities remained unusually expansive for the nation as a whole, leading to a variety of impacts. More than 5.9 million acres have been scorched by wildfires so far this year, which is 70 percent more than the average for the same period during the previous 10 years, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center…. Fully half of the nation’s pastures and rangelands were in poor or very poor condition, a proportion exceeded only once since weekly growing season records were first gathered in May 1995.

(more…)

Okay, so it isn’t breaking news, or at least it shouldn’t be. A 2004 study in Nature examined the role of greenhouse gas emissions in the deadly 2003 heat wave that killed 35,000 Europeans. It concluded that human influence more than doubled the risk of such a heat wave. On our current emissions path, more than half of European summers will be hotter than 2003 within the next four decades. By the end of the century, “2003 would be classed as an anomalously cold summer relative to the new climate.”

But most U.S. coverage of our recent heat wave ignores the subject. I was interviewed by ABC Evening News last week because of my work on urban heat islands, whereby dark roofs and asphalt pavement and the loss of shade trees have made cities much hotter than they would otherwise be. Although I discussed how global warming is making this kind of deadly heat wave more likely and more intense—and combining with the heat island effect to make cities increasingly inhospitable in the summer—they omitted all of these comments. They wanted only a story on heat islands.

Fortunately, a few articles have begun to appear on the subject, even if they don’t make the front page like the scenes of people sweltering. The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin wrote one of the best articles on the subject, “More Frequent Heat Waves Linked to Global Warming,” for a page 3 story last week.

(more…)