Catastrophes - 287

What ranks as a catastrophe? My mother, who remained mentally sharp through her 80s, started to slip a bit in her 90s. When the beloved family dog died, she was convinced it was catastrophic and the end of the world was near. 

Recently, in a LTE in this newspaper, a gentleman opened his LTE with, "The climate alarmists have been peddling doom and gloom for many years. None of their catastrophic predictions have come true." 

 

Let’s look at predictions made by scientists and the science-literate vs what has happened. Scientists have predicted the earth would warm, and it has. It has warmed a little over 1 degree C or a little less than 2 degrees F since the Industrial Revolution. With this warming, the scientists predicted the weather would, while varying from region to region, experience more high heat events. They predicted longer and deeper droughts in drought-prone areas and more heavy rains with floods in wet areas. In other words, scientists have predicted and continue to expect that weather systems will have a greater possibility of extreme weather. 

 

How have their predictions held up? 

 

While the earth is experiencing new heat records at an unprecedented rate, the two deadliest heat waves were the European Heat Wave of 2003 and the Russian Heat Wave of 2010. Deaths DIRECTLY attributable to heat killed were 70,000 in the EU and 50,000 in Russia, respectively.

 

In a warming world, a heatwave that had a 1 in 10 chance to occur before industrialization now has a 2.8 times chance of occurring, and any new heat wave will, on average, be 1.2C or 1.8F hotter. 

 

If we do not end carbon pollution and allow the earth to heat up by 2C, the likelihood of killer heat waves will increase by 13.9 times.* 

 

I emphasized "DIRECTLY" because every plant and creature on earth has an optimal temperature range to thrive. As we warm the earth, all those living entities will inevitably be challenged to survive. We depend, in turn, on these to survive. If they die, then we will be challenged to survive. 

 

One specific prediction was that a rise in forest temperatures of just 1C or 1.8F would lead to 4 times the chance of forest fires. 

 

Maybe you remember those hazy summer days and the vivid red sunsets of the summer of 2023? Some of us may have struggled to remember what caused the haze and vivid sunsets or recall why. The cause was smoke. The Canadian fire season of 2023 was perhaps, dare I say, predicted. 

 

Here is a quote from a Canadian, David Wallace-Wells, who wrote an article for the New York Times titled, "It is like our Country Exploded: Canada's Year of Fire." 

 

"It was, all told, an ecologically unprecedented event. By the end of September, more than half of the world's countries could fit inside the land burned this year in the Canadian wilderness. Since the 1970s, the average area burned in the country had already doubled; this year, wildfires consumed that average six times over. The modern single-year record had been set in 1989 when almost 19 million acres burned across the country. In 2023, the total has passed 45 million."   

                                                                                  

There have been massive fires on every continent except Antarctica. Hopefully, most of us can still remember the Australian Black Summer fire of 2019-20. While greater acreage was burnt in the Australian bushfire of 1974-75, the Black Summer fire was particularly intense, killing an estimated 1 billion animals and at least 33 people. It occurred after Australia's hottest and driest year on record.

 

This year's European fires were memorable because Greece had massive, deadly forest fires this summer in the Alexandropoulos and Evros regions and on the beautiful island of Rhodes, where 20,000 people, including tourists, were evacuated. 

 

How about predicted extreme rain by climate scientists? Pakistan was hit with record-intense monsoon rains in 2022. Combined with rapidly melting glaciers, a third of the entire country was inundated, 7.9 million people displaced, and 9.4 million acres of crops destroyed. Food shortages still plague Paki kids, with 44% of their kids showing stunted growth.

 

In September, Cyclone Daniel hit the Mediterranean countries of Libia, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, and Israel. In some places, the single-storm rain totals topped the country's average accumulation for the whole year. Daniel did a lot of damage. There were over 4,000 confirmed deaths, with over 10,000 missing, presumed washed out to sea.

 

Hurricanes have not been kind, either. Scientists cannot tell us if hurricanes are more common or less common than preindustrial times. They know for hurricanes to form, they need three things: warm water, a lot of moisture in the atmosphere, and low vertical wind shear. 

 

Human-caused warming by burning fossil fuel has given us plenty of record-setting warm ocean waters; thus, as the October Science News magazine reports, human-caused global warming has caused the oceans to "stockpile heat." While there is insufficient evidence that there are more hurricanes, there is strong evidence they are larger, drop more water, and rapidly intensify more often and faster. Rapid intensification of ocean storms is particularly worrisome for meteorologists trying to keep coastal communities safe by giving advanced warnings. They must decide whether an ocean storm will remain a storm or build into a monster. In the 1980s, records show rapid intensification happened only five times yearly. Now, the average is 15 per year. 

The danger of rapidly intensifying hurricanes is no better example than Hurricane Otis, which recently hit Acapulco. It was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Pacific. The killer storm started as a relatively moderate tropical storm, but when it hit the warm coastal waters, it intensified 115 mph in just 24 hours. There was not enough time for the meteorologist to get the word to the community.

The report says this rapid intensification, due to climate-warmed waters, grew Otis to a Category 5 Hurricane, killing 45 people when winds reached a "catastrophic" 165 miles per hour. 

 

Note that I did not use the word catastrophic, but I only referenced a source that did. I wouldn't dare to utter that word because if I did, it would infer the numerous predictions by the world's finest science organizations, repeated over decades, might just be "accurate."

 

There are also countless examples of less than catastrophic events happening worldwide due to a rapidly warming earth. Living in the middle of a continent, the health of the oceans rarely enters our consciousness. A less-than-catastrophic event occurred in the North Pacific starting in 2013, which intensified through 2015. Known as the Blob, my source referred to the deadly hot ocean water as an "unprecedented anomaly in magnitude and duration" and "…a clear indicator of the changing conditions in the Pacific Ocean due to climate change". Water 4 to 10 degrees warmer than normal spread across the N Pacific for a thousand miles and down 300 feet. The warm waters dramatically impacted the marine environment. Sea birds died off in mass because cold water fish left or died. It was the largest documented die-off of the Common Murre more commonly known as the flying penguin.

 

The marine nurseries of the ocean, the Coral Reefs have been in decline due to numerous factors such as pollution and industrial fishing. But coral bleaching is greatly accelerating their demise.

As the climate crisis persists, marine heat waves lead to more frequent, intense, widespread bleaching events. (bleaching, in this case, means dying). According to the World Economic Forum, the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, a geologic/biologic region so vast astronauts can see it from space, has had 98% of its corals impacted to some degree or another.

 

So, which of the documented events above do you consider catastrophic? I like to stick with "unprecedented anomaly in magnitude and duration, which is a clear indicator of changing conditions due to climate change." 

 

The word catastrophic has too many moral implications. Is the death and destruction of other people and creatures a catastrophe? It must not be to the previous letter writer and must not be a gloom and doom event unless it affects a person directly.

 

And, to I would like to make this clear, if we act to stop global warming there will be less gloom and no doom. 

 

*For an in-depth analysis, search: "Extreme weather impacts of climate change: an attribution perspective," published in IOP Science.