https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27072018/summer-2018-heat-wave-wildfires-climate-change-evidence-crops-flooding-deaths-records-broken
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By Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News
Jul 28, 2018
'In many places, people are preparing for the past or present climate. But this summer is the future.'
By Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News
Jul 28, 2018
Earth's global warming fever spiked to deadly new highs across the Northern Hemisphere this summer, and we're feeling the results—extreme heat is now blamed for hundreds of deaths, droughts threaten food supplies, wildfires have raced through neighborhoods in the western United States, Greece and as far north as the Arctic Circle.
At sea, record and near-record warm oceans have sent soggy masses of air surging landward, fueling extreme rainfall and flooding in Japan and the eastern U.S. In Europe, the Baltic Sea is so warm that potentially toxic blue-green algae is spreading across its surface.
There shouldn't be any doubt that some of the deadliest of this summer's disasters—including flooding in Japan and wildfires in Greece—are fueled by weather extremes linked to global warming, said Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia.
"We know very well that global warming is making heat waves longer, hotter and more frequent," she said.
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The challenges created by global warming are becoming evident even in basic infrastructure, much of which was built on the assumption of a cooler climate. In these latest heat waves, railroad tracks have bent in the rising temperatures, airport runways have cracked, and power plants from France to Finland have had to power down because their cooling sources became too warm.
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Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann said this summer's extreme weather fits into a pattern he identified with other researchers in a study published last year. The jet stream's north-south meanders have been unusually stationary, leading to persistent heat waves and droughts in some areas and days of rain and flooding in others, he said. "Our work last year shows that this sort of pattern ... has become more common because of human-caused climate change, and in particular, amplified Arctic warming."
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In Europe, scientists on Friday released a real-time attribution study of the heat wave that has baked parts of northern Europe since June. They found that global warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution made the ongoing heat wave five times more likely in Denmark, and twice as likely in Ireland.
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"Near the Arctic, it's absolutely exceptional and unprecedented. This is a warning," said French heat wave expert Robert Vautard, who worked on the study for World Weather Attribution. The group previously determined that global warming made last summer's "Lucifer" heat wave in southern Europe 10 times more likely.
"In many places, people are preparing for the past or present climate. But this summer is the future," he said.
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Crop damage is being reported in parts Norway through Sweden, Denmark and the Baltics. Depending on conditions during the next month, more widespread crop failures could raise global food prices.
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Isaksen is finalizing some studies that find heat is penetrating between 30 and 50 meters deep into the ground through cracks in the rocky mountains around Norway's fjords. Instead of just a thin skin of permafrost melting, those mountains could fall apart in large chunks when autumn rains start, threatening coastal communities with tsunamis.
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Although climate scientists are reluctant to link any one particular fire to climate change, there is plenty of scientific evidence showing how heat-trapping greenhouse gases contribute to increased fire danger.
"Weather is a product of the climate system. We are drastically altering that system, and all the weather we observe now is the product of that human-altered climate system. One result is an increase in the frequency, size and severity of large fire events," University of California, Merced researcher Leroy Westerling wrote on Twitter.
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Tyndall Centre Director Le Quéré said she faulted some media for failing to connect global warming to the current global heat wave. "This signal is very clear," she said, adding that some of the early stories about the deadly fire in Greece almost seemed to downplay a link to climate change.
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To prepare for the new normal, people must act in the next five to 10 years, said environmental scientist Cara Augustenborg, chairperson of Friends of the Earth Europe.
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"We've had several years now where airport runways have melted on extremely hot days," she continued. "That's something we need to factor in to future construction as it's a problem that won't go away."
Society also needs to think about food security, she said.
"That's what I really lose sleep over," she said. "Our available arable land is declining now as our global population is booming. It doesn't take much in the way of extreme weather to have a major impact on food supplies."
tags: extreme weather, severe weather
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