The effects of climate change tiptoes behind us, sea level rises an inch every few years, or temperatures might break a daily record. We acclimate and don’t notice that they are signs of serious change occurring. So we ignore the warning from climatologists that we need to quickly change our behavior of fossil fuel consumption if we want any chance of a livable world.
This year feels different from previous heat waves somehow, the planetary heatwave that we have experienced these past months has begun to turn the tide of public opinion from denial and indifference, to acceptance that climate change is a real threat to our safety. Climate change should be the issue in the mid-term elections, but the media will make sure that it will not.
Earth has a greenhouse atmosphere, consisting of gases like carbon dioxide , water vapor, methane, nitrous oxides and ozone which trap the heat that is radiated up from the planet’s surface. These gases act as a thermal blanket for the Earth by absorbing the heat from the sun and warming the earth just enough for our modern agricultural civilization to flourish. But due to human activity, a super greenhouse feedback loop is emerging and heating the Earth at an increasing rate year after year. NASA explains the feedback:
A warming earth is the interplay between temperature, water vapor and heat in the form of infrared radiation. When Earth’s surface gets hotter, more evaporation occurs, which releases water vapor into the atmosphere. “Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. When more of it is in the air, it traps even more heat and radiates it back down to the surface,” says Mark Richardson, a postdoctoral scholar at JPL. “That extra infrared heat evaporates more water vapor, which traps more heat, then, in turn, evaporates even more water vapor, and so on. It becomes a feedback loop.”
Recent heatwaves have killed dozens from PyongYang to Tokyo. In Canada’s recent deadly heatwave, over 70 died as a result of a hot and humid air mass stalled over Quebec. This intense heat desiccates the soil and vegetation creating a tinderbox for wildfires such as those currently burning in California, Siberia and Sweden. In the suburbs of Athens, the deadliest wildfire in more than a decade has claimed at least 74 lives.
Nearly 75 people have died in wildfires in the eastern part of the Attica region around Athens, in Greece's worst fire crisis in more than a decade. Desperate families trying to reach the safety of the sea, just metres away, were trapped by walls of smoke and flame. Others died in buildings or cars.New Scientist reports that it may be the warming Arctic that is to blame for the heatwave in the northern hemisphere. Andy Coghlan writes:
One reason is that the jet stream—a fast-flowing river of air snaking continually round the northern hemisphere at altitudes of around 6 kilometres—has stalled over Europe since May, and could continue to do so, trapping regions of high pressure that are cloudless, windless and extremely hot.snip
She says evidence is mounting that accelerated warming of the Arctic is a major reason why the jet stream keeps getting stalled. The stream is driven by collisions between cold air descending southward from the Arctic and warm air pushing northward from the equator.
The greater the temperature difference between the colliding air streams, the more powerful the jet stream. But the temperature gap—and therefore the power of the jet stream—is being weakened because the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, supplying the stream with increasingly warmer air.
Joe Romm presents a convincing case in Think Progress titled, Heat Waves bother you? Under Trump climate policies, add another 12F.
But if we fail to significantly curb emissions of carbon pollution — the path set forth by President Trump’s climate policies — then these severe and deadly heatwaves will become the normal summer weather over the next few decades.
Typical five-day heat waves in the U.S. will be 12°F warmer by mid-century alone, according to the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), which the White House itself reviewed and approved last November.
Other studies also show the devastating heat-related impacts the nation and the world face from Trump’s policies of abandoning the Paris climate deal, undoing Obama-era climate rules, and boosting carbon pollution.
Romm is referring to one such study published last year in Joint Research Centre.
That study provides evidence that with a 4 degree C (7.2 F) rise in temperature a new super heatwave of 131°F (wetbulb temperature) may regularly impact many parts of the world. The study looked at temperature and “relative humidity in estimating the magnitude and impact of heatwaves”. Because the Earth is considered the enemy by the Trump regime and that the extraction of coal and other fossil fuels is its current policy, we will blow past the 2°C above pre-industrial levels target much sooner than predicted due to this madman’s determination to derail the global war on climate change.
The study analyses changes in the annual probability of high humidity heatwaves since 1979 under different global warming scenarios. If global temperatures increase by up to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the combined effect of heat and humidity (known as apparent temperature or Heat Index) will likely exceed 40°C every year in many parts of Asia, Australia, Northern Africa, and South and North America.
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However, if temperatures rise by 4°C, a severe scenario is on the horizon. Scientists predict that a new super-heatwave will occur, with apparent temperatures peaking at above 55°C – endangering human life. It will affect densely populated areas such as the US' East coast, coastal China, large parts of India and South America.
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The authors highlight that although some urban areas such as Chicago and Shanghai are not considered to be at high risk of heatwaves based on temperature alone, the probability of extreme weather strongly increases when relative humidity is taken into consideration.
According to the study, the effect of relative humidity on the magnitude and peak of heatwaves might be underestimated in current research. The results of the study support the need for urgent mitigation and adaptation measures to address the impacts of heatwaves, and indicate regions where new adaptation measures might be necessary to cope with heat stress.
The projected 4 C super-heatwave with temperatures at 131 F by 2050 will affect “densely populated areas such as the US' East coast, coastal China, large parts of India and South America”.