In the Northern Hemisphere in 2017 and 2018 brought several destructive hurricanes to the shores of North America, the Caribbean, and throughout the Pacific rim. Such extreme weather events are predicted to get more common and more severe with increasing climate change.
Several participating classes in the ISCFC were or are in the path of these storms and we hope for the best for them, their families and communities.
We would love to hear from students affected directly and indirectly by extreme weather events, and also any students who have been following the news this summer.
What are your thoughts about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events? Has this hurricane season increased your concern about climate change or not? Do you think that US citizens and residents (and others in the region) will take climate change more seriously now?
Extreme Weather >
Climate Change and Extreme Weather
With the recent hurricanes and tropical storms in the Caribbean and United States, extreme weather has been a topic discussed a lot. An aspect of extreme weather that is less obvious than the storms and hurricanes, but still important, is drought and extreme heat waves. These events go largely unnoticed compared to the media attention that huge storms get. These events of extreme heat and drought have raised mortality and have decreased crop yields. According to "From Heat Waves to Hurricanes: What we Know about Extreme Weather and Climate Change" by The New York Times, the recent heat wave in Europe was 10 times more likely to happen under current conditions of Earth's atmosphere than the Earth in which green house gasses were not emitted into the atmosphere. This illustrates that not only is climate change, but also extreme weather can be attributed to human activity. This article puts an important link between climate change and extreme weather.
Dear Clayton, yes there has been a lot of recent progress on trying to quantify how likely a given extreme weather event is in the changing climate. Here is a much-discussed article from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA where they set out to do just that:
Noah S. Diffenbaugh el al., "Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events," PNAS (2017). http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1618082114