Extreme Weather Events just Getting Started

This is the next thread in a series of threads featuring chapters of my book, Fever Rising. This chapter deals with extreme weather caused by increasing methane gas...climate change. To read the other threads, check out this link and follow the other links to earlier threads at the beginning of this link to the last chapter Burrr...it's so cold! Where's the Global Warming?

Chapter 26: Extreme Weather Events just Getting Started

The extreme weather events have been picking up steam over the past few years, literally. It was hard for anyone to not take notice to the crazy winter weather patterns that struck the United States over the winter of 2013-14. November arrived and so did Old Man Winter, and it never relented for most of North America. The jet stream dipped far south over the country’s midsection bringing frigid cold temperatures as far south as Atlanta while causing much warmer than normal temperatures in Alaska. The pattern began and never looked back until the middle of March, when temperatures finally shot back up to balmy normal temperatures…right around freezing at 32 degrees.

The weather extremes are becoming the new normal, from super storms such as Sandy, to tropical tornadoes, snow in the desert, hurricane-force winds in the UK, heatwaves shattering records in the southern hemisphere, to freak hail storms that rain down ice boulders. Most parts of the world are experiencing some type of weather pattern that’s out of the ordinary.

I’m going to provide a brief summary of the why’s because I’ve gone into great detail on the causes of extreme weather in relation to the dangerous gas theory throughout this book. Here’s a recap, in brief, step-by-step.

The temperatures are increasing due to rising methane levels trapping the sun’s heat;
The rising temperature is causing the moisture content and storm energy to increase;
More moisture results in much heavier rain, snow and flooding events;
The rising temperature has also caused an escalation of volcanic activity;
Rising volcanic activity in Indonesia is causing the jet stream to fluctuate;
The jet stream is causing dangerously warm weather to increase over Arctic ice;
The jet stream has also pulled frigid Arctic air deep into southern climate zones;
These clashing warm and cold fronts are causing extreme storm events;
The warm air over Arctic ice is causing an alarming amount of land ice to melt;
This land ice melting off Greenland is bringing extreme weather to northern Europe.

Here is an article from January of 2013 that talks about the wild weather that was the year 2012. It was extreme throughout that year, the United States’ hottest year on record, and the severity of events continued to escalate throughout 2013.

Heat, flood or icy cold; extreme weather rages world wide
The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2013
By Sarah Lyall
WORCESTER, England — Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace.

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.”

Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr. Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds.

Over the past two years, the U.K. has been battered by biblical rains producing floods. Three different times there were floods in the U.K. These floods followed the floods of 2007 and 2009. Since the MET Office (Great Britian’s weather service) began keeping records over 100 years ago, they declared 2012 the second wettest year and the single wettest year for England. Four of the five wettest years were in the last decade. This is a very disconcerting trend.

The flooding was so bad in some areas, a pub owner in Mevagissey, Cornwall, closed his business for good after he flooded 11 times in two months.

According to the NY Times article above, “The biggest change, said Charles Powell, a spokesman for the Met Office, is the frequency in Britain of “extreme weather events” — defined as rainfall reaching the top 1 percent of the average amount for that time of year. Fifty years ago, such episodes used to happen every 100 days; now they happen every 70 days, he said.”

Australia experienced two of their wettest years ever, as well. The heat extremes in Australia are epic, with extreme heat waves hammering the nation over the past few years. I previously mentioned how their weather service added two more colors to their temperature gauge. According to the Commonwealth Scientific and industrial Research Organization, every decade since the 1950’s has been hotter than the one before (in Australia).

As most of the United States suffered harsh winters, so has China. The jet stream fluctuation brought frigid Arctic air far south into warmer climate zones. The winter of 2012-13 was one of the worst in recent memory for China. According to the NY Times article, in the western region of Xinjiang, more than 1,000 houses collapsed under a relentless onslaught of snow, while in Inner Mongolia, 180,000 livestock froze to death. The cold has wreaked havoc with crops, sending the price of vegetables soaring.

In South America, it was relentless heat. Brazil had to ration electricity because of a heat wave and lack of rain. Rio de Janeiro broke a temperature record reaching to 110 degrees on December 26, 2012, the hottest day since records began in 1915.

Jerusalem experienced intense rain, cold winds, followed by an 8-inch snow storm, right there in the desert and palm trees. These weather patterns persisted all over the Middle East, hammering countries such as Jordan, with torrential rains and hail storms. The floods paralyzed cities and washed away cars and roads.

Smashing waves have also been the headlines from the U.K to Portugal all the way over to the Mediterranean shores of Beirut. Shorelines have been forever altered by the waves, sometimes as high as 60 feet, but averaging 30 feet.

Continued...

Hey Rezlooper, I always love reading your posts, especially The Fever Rising Book Series of late. Keep it up, lots of great info here Arjunanda.

According to the NY Times article above, “Barry Lynn, who runs a forecasting business and is a lecturer at the Hebrew University’s department of earth science, said a striking aspect of the whole thing was the severe and prolonged cold in the upper atmosphere, a big-picture shift that indicated the Atlantic Ocean was no longer having the moderating effect on weather in the Middle East and Europe that it has historically.”

This is because the jet stream reached so high into the Arctic Circle, bringing the normally warm ocean air that mitigates weather in Europe and the Middle East, up over Greenland. Instead of receiving that warm ocean air the Middle East is used to, they are getting much cooler air brought down from the northern regions.

“The intensity of the cold is unusual,” Mr. Lynn said. “It seems the weather is going to become more intense; there’s going to be more extremes.”

Many of you will remember that the spring of 2013 failed to arrive. Following the strange and intense weather patterns throughout the winter months, just when you thought spring would arrive, a little-known phenomenon by the name of the Greenland Block showed up. The block prevented spring from arriving and allowed winter to blast North America and Europe throughout the month of April. This was due to the high and low jet stream pattern which went way up above Greenland, pulling warm ocean temperatures from the Atlantic over the country. The blocking pattern resulted in massive amounts of land ice melt.

Here is another example of the intensity of events. A major dust storm in Australia came into shore from the ocean in January of 2013. The rare occurrence was a frightening scene for onlookers as they observed the wall of dust when it was still miles off shore. Can you imagine seeing a dust storm, which is common over deserts, over the ocean?

A Tsunami of Red Dust
From Reuters, Jan. 11, 2013
By Michael Blaustein
As Australia braced itself for the first hurricane of the year a gigantic wall of dust slammed into the north-eastern part of the country.

Images of the terrifying red storm were caught by tugboats near the town of Onslow, according to the Daily Mail.
On a beautifully clear day the storm could be seen looming on the horizon miles before it reached shore but once it hit visibility was reduced to around 300 feet and 7 foot waves lashed the shoreline.

Dust storms are a common weather occurrence in deserts but are rarely seen in such dramatic circumstances over open ocean.

The following article shows evidence that links extreme weather to global warming. You might want to visit the link and read the entire article for more information, but here is a brief part of the article.

The link between global warming and extreme weather
From jcmooreonline.com...
Statistical Evidence: A recent NOAA report, edited by Petersen, et al., examined 6 extreme weather events that occurred in 2011 and found that there was a link between climate change and the extreme weather event. One of the most interesting reports, found that the 2011 heat wave and drought in Texas were 20 times more likely to happen than they would have been in the 1950′s. How did they arrive at that conclusion? A recent paper by Hansen et al., shows that extreme temperatures are much more likely to occur worldwide than in the 1950′s, and over 10 times as likely to occur as in 1980. As Hansen puts it, the extreme temperatures “which covered much less than 1% of Earth in 1950, now typically covers about 10% of the land area. It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.”

Those two papers are important as they have been able to establish a quantitative link between the probabilities of weather events and global warming. More importantly, the link does not depend on theory or on climate models, and relies only on a straight forward statistical analysis of the data. The method depends on computing the normal distribution of the Earth’s temperature anomalies for each decade and then comparing how the distribution of extreme weather events change with time.

Weather events. Enough data and computing power is now available to calculate normal distributions of temperature data every 10 years for many decades. Having the normal distribution of the temperature data by decade can be used to find whether the probability of extreme temperatures is increasing or decreasing. The Earth’s temperature was fairly stable from about 1950 to 1980, making it a convenient standard for comparing changes. Rather than using temperatures, the graph uses temperature anomalies, which measure how far a temperature reading was above or below average.

Freak hail storms also made the headlines world wide in 2013. This freak storm struck in New Mexico on July 3, 2013, turning the desert southwest into what appeared to be a winter wonderland.

Massive storm dumps two feet of hail in New Mexico
Komonews.com, July 4, 2013
By Scott Sistek
SANTA ROSA -- A massive thunderstorm turned a summer day into a winter wonderland in Santa Rosa, New Mexico on Wednesday by dropping more than a foot of hail around town. The hail, some of which was golf-ball and paint-ball sized, according to a report from the Guadalupe County Communicator, damaged some roofs and skylights as it fell non-stop for 20 minutes.

"I have lived here all my life and I have never seen this," Guadalupe County Manager George Dodge told The Communicator as he drove around the city surveying the damage. The Communicator reports some of the neon was destroyed at landmark Route 66 diners through the city, and several buildings were flooded when the hail melted after damaging the roof.

According to the article, another storm dropped waist-deep hail in Laredo, Texas in the summer of 2012. That’s two major freak hailstorms in the southwest in the past couple of years. Another large hail storm struck in 2013, this time in India. The storm dumped hail stones the size of boulders.

The extreme weather events extended deep into 2014 with no sign of letting up. As I stated in the beginning of this chapter, extreme weather patterns are the new normal. Tokyo saw its worst snow events in 45 years, and it wasn’t just one event, it was back-to-back snowfalls that broke records. It was just a few inches, but this is a climate that isn’t too familiar with snow. The first of the snowstorms killed 11 people in Tokyo and injured 1,200. This was only a few inches, but like I said, they don’t know how to prepare for these abnormal events.

Continued...

More heavy snow paralyzes Tokyo, commuters
From Japan Daily Press, Feb. 14, 2014
By Maan Pamintuan
The Japan Meteorological Agency said to prepare for as much as 10 centimeters, or 4 inches, of snowfall within the next 24 hours in Tokyo. Just last weekend, a record 24 centimeters of snow fell on the Japanese capital. Broadcasting company NHK reported that the amount of snow over the weekend was worst snowfall to hit the city in 45 years. Train and plane services were paralyzed because of the snow, leaving many commuters stranded. While ANA Holdings Inc. and Japan Airlines Co., had to cancel 138 domestic and international flights, while six lines from the East Japan Railway Co. were stopped from running. On the other hand, bullet trains such as those from Central Japan Railway Co. were only delayed for up to 50 minutes, as wells as lines from West Japan Railway Co.

On the same day the story was released about snow storms paralyzing Tokyo, news headlines came out about the pounding storms in the UK bringing flooding, hurricane-force winds and massive waves.

Atlantic storm bring more flood misery to drenched UK
CNN, Feb. 14, 2014
By Laura Smith-Spark
Nearly 6,000 homes have been inundated along the Thames Valley and elsewhere following England's wettest January in 2½ centuries.

Some communities in low-lying areas of Somerset, in southwest England, have been under water since December.
And there's no letup in sight just yet.

The Environment Agency has warned of more flooding along the Thames over the weekend as the river reaches its highest level in 60 years.

A powerful Atlantic storm that is blowing in on Friday will add to people's woes.

It comes only two days after a storm blasted western Wales and northwest England, as well as parts of Ireland, with gale-force winds.

Some 450,000 properties were affected by power outages as a result of Wednesday's storm.

There were 18 severe flood warnings, meaning a danger to life, in place Friday, most of them in southeast England. Warnings of high winds are also in place for parts of southern England.

a reply to: Rezlooper

The weather, along with everything else, is coming together as predicted.

originally posted by: arjunanda
Hey Rezlooper, I always love reading your posts, especially The Fever Rising Book Series of late. Keep it up, lots of great info here

Arjunanda.

Thanks for that and for reading along.

Personal observations from where I live (Southern Ontario Canada) About 5 years ago we had to quit leaving our Patio Umbrella open all the time. Even with a cement stand and locked down it kept getting loose and flying all over the place.

Our storm fronts always came from the South West and you had lots of warning when one was on its way. Not now the storms now arrive from any direction and they are vicious. Extremely high winds wreck havoc on our property almost monthly now.

We had a very nice pond with a lot of rockery and it was beautiful I will say without shame, well two years ago we filled it in because of the wind and the mess and the longer than usual winters we are getting here. Three years ago I traded in our old faithful Toro Snowblower for a larger model because of all the snow obviously:-) We could not have timed the pond fill in and the new snowblower any better if we tried.

I always notice the weather as I like to spend my days gardening and let me tell you that the wind is just going nuts here, Iv'e watched stuff blow down the street (patio furniture etc] one way only to come back down the street 5 minutes later going the other way. Then it gets blown up against the house across the street going another way so on and so on........sigh

Any ways I as always enjoyed this chapter of your book and I am looking forward to the next one.
As always REZ
Regards, Iwinder

S&F as always.

P

a reply to: pheonix358

Thanks Pheonix

a reply to: Iwinder

I too have experienced stronger weather here in my neck of the woods as well (northern Wis). We've had major storms in our town over the years, but in my lifetime it seemed they averaged one every ten years where trees get knocked down and there's some damage to buildings, but in the last few years we've average one a year. Last year, I brought my 4 yo to pre-k school in the morning and I had not paid attention to weather reports that morning and a massive storm came in, I had never seen the sky that color...anyways, we had to lock down in the basement of the school with other parents and kids while golf ball size hail struck and some extremely intense lightning hit. I watched out a window. My wife and other two kids were at home a few blocks away, and she said she had never been so scared. Two trees fell just outside our house and the corner light pole was damaged to. She said she was watching out the window until the small trees in our yard were bent over sideways, then she took shelter.

Also, after all the snow we had and then relentless rain and storms through the summer, the ground was so saturated that the rain from this massive storm had no where to go and we ended up with half our town in a flood that did a lot of damage to homes. The last time we had a flood in this town was in 1942. It was a pretty intense summer for weather here, just waiting to see what this summer shall bring.

Thanks again, iwinder, for the contribution.

a reply to: Rezlooper

I didn't mention it in my post above but right at this moment we have a very well cared for Maple tree that suffered sever damage in the late fall with our first blizzard. We love our trees and have them professionally pruned about every two to three years.
That did us no good and now we are awaiting the arborologist to come have a look at it. He also cabled our front maple years ago and if that was not done back then I highly doubt we would still have that tree.

Four years ago our antenna for tv (40 feet high) got smacked by an ice storm with high winds, it was leaning so bad that I feared for my life trying to at least get it straight or close to it. I ended up with some help and we placed our heavy picnic table against the base and then laid on about 4 layers of leftover bricks on it.

Called the company here in town that does repairs and installations of the above and the lady just laughed and said take a number. It took them almost a month to get to us, under normal circumstances it would have been the next day.

Glad to hear yourself and your family made it through that bad storm, It must have been stressful to yourself and the wife both wondering how the other is doing and the children too.

Regards, Iwinder

To go against the grain here, I can say that Florida was always just as hot, humid & miserable as it'd ever been straight through us moving, complete with the oscillating drier years & the wetter "Do we REALLY need more humidity?" wetter years.

Dunno about MI (lower) but from what I understand, it's pretty much unchanged here also.