Lots Of Weather Extremes With Relatively Modest Global Warming:What's Up With That?

Lytton, British Columbia, Canada burns in June, 2021 the 
day after setting Canada's all-time hottest temperature 
of 121 degrees in a climate change-fueled heat wave

 The world has warmed about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1880s. That really doesn't seem like much. 

But as we increasingly see, this seemingly modest change has led to a huge increase in weather extremes. 

How much more extreme are things now? And how bad will they get in a couple decades as climate change continues? There's no easy answers to this. The question is muddied by how one defines an extreme, the perception of the person experiencing it, and how much media confuses us all about there subject. 

In our wired, social media soaked world, extreme weather is in our face 24/7. Take this example here in Vermont. 

Stories of the extreme flooding in the Great 1927 flood in Vermont seem to pale in comparison to the roughly equally intense floods in Vermont from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. That's despite the fact the death toll in 1927, with 84 deaths, was much worse than what happened with Irene, with 7 deaths. 

By 2011, social media like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter was already popular, so the Irene disaster gave us stunningly vivid visuals.  

Even against this backdrop, there's certainly growing evidence that weather extremes are growing more frequent and more, well, extreme as we plod further and further along into climate change. 

Scientists to this day cannot get over the incredibly heat wave in southwestern Canada and the northwester United States in June, 2021, That heat wave killed more than 1,000 people. It also brought on Canada's all time hottest temperature of 121 degrees in Lytton, British Columbia. The day after that record was established, Lytton burned down in a ferocious wildfire, as Jeff Masters and Bob Henson tell us in a Yale Climate Connections article this month.

 The World Weather Attribution initiative said the June 2021 heat wave would have been "virtually impossible without human-caused climate change."

We've always had extreme weather events, with Vermont's 1927 flood being just one example. All-time heat and cold records from 1934 and 1936 still exist in the Great Plains. 

The trouble is, even taking into account past extremes and media constantly blasting us with images of intense storms, even those that are pretty normal, extremes have gotten greater.

Here's how Masters and Henson put it: 

"All weather is now occurring in an atmosphere fundamentally altered by global warming. Heat is energy. More heat in the atmosphere means that there is more energy to power extreme weather events. Moreover, the extra heat energy from human-caused global warming has fundamentally disrupted atmospheric circulation patterns. 

The combination of more heat energy and a disrupted atmospheric circulation has made extreme weather events more common and more intense, a phenomenon climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe calls 'global weirding.' The resulting weather disasters are severely stressing a society construction for the old, somewhat calmer climate of the 20th century."

 Deciding which weather event is more extreme than other, similar past calamities does seem subjective. But scientists are getting better at objectively comparing and contrasting. 

A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor. That added water vapor adds to the potential for especially torrential rainfall. 

Not long ago, Stefan Rahmstorf, the head of Earth System Analysis at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, tweeted a chart of record breaking daily rainfall events around the world. The chart shows that from between about 1950 to 1990, the number of these events held pretty steady. Since 1990, the record breaking rainfall incidents climbed sharply. 

Additional research showed to the period 1951 to 1980, 24 -hour precipitation records increased by 30 percent globally by 2016.  

Overall, the science of attributing specific weather events to climate change is still fairly new, but is making strides.  In January, NOAA explained pretty well how it works:

"Now in its 11th year, Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective presents new peer-reviewed analyses of extreme weather and climate across the world during 2021 and 2022. It features research from NOAA and other leading international climate scientists on extreme weather occurring across the globe, including the U.S. UK. South Korea and China. 

Research teams use both historical observations and model simulations to determine whether - and by how much - climate change may have influenced extreme weather events."

NOAA and other researchers are finding that more and more extreme heat waves are all-time record highs due to climate change.  

Specific examples include a hot October in 2021 that under conditions from 1990 to 2020, it had a one in 6,250 chance of happening. But within 60 years, such a hot month would be a 'new normal"

An intense heat wave last spring in East Asia was made up to 20 times more likely due to the climate change the world has experienced so far.

I'm sure we'll find more and more of these attribution studies that link weird weather events to climate change. However, it is safe to assume that even mildly strange weather has some links to climate change.