It should be no surprise that Hurricane Beryl broke virtually every early-season hurricane record in June. It was the fastest intensifying June hurricane; earliest Category 5 storm in history; and the strongest July Atlantic hurricane as well, with winds of 165 mph. As ocean and air temperatures spike around the globe, hurricanes and extreme weather fueled by warming seas are growing more intense than any time in modern history.
After reporting on climate change and its geophysical fallout for more than a decade, I spent the last three years documenting warming oceans and the resulting uptick in severe storms. I grew up on the Gulf of Maine—now the fastest-warming large body of water on the planet—and conducted much of my research from the deck of a boat my father built. The correlation between heat and storm is simple: air masses and weather systems draw energy from heat in the oceans as they pass over, leading to fiercer tropical cyclones. Since the average global sea surface temperature has increased by 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit, storms are growing more powerful than we have ever seen. This is the dawn of the Superstorm Era—and it will only continue to rise, unless we take action to stop it.
More Category 4 and 5 hurricanes hit the U.S. mainland from 2017 to 2021 than from 1963 to 2016. Hurricanes today also last longer than they once did and move slower, multiplying damage by many times. Rapid intensification used to spin up once a century, but studies show that in the future, it could occur more frequently—especially in waters bordering the East Coast—putting cities like New Orleans, Houston, Tampa, and Charleston at higher risk. By 2100, the number of major hurricanes, including a new breed of “ultra-intense” Category 5 storms with winds of at least 190 miles per hour, is expected to increase by 20%.
As with most anthropogenic catastrophes, the effects of climate change are compounding. Storm surge now rides on an elevated sea level, flooding coastlines with walls of water more than 25 feet high (Hurricane Katrina, 2005). Because the atmosphere holds around 8% more water for every 2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, storms today carry vastly more precipitation—dumping up to 40 inches of rain in a day (Hurricane Harvey, 2017). One example of how the compounding forces of climate change are overwhelming coastlines, according to climate scientist Kerry Emanuel: If Superstorm Sandy had occurred in 1912 instead of 2012, it may not have flooded Lower Manhattan.
Over the past 50 years, tropical cyclones have taken nearly 800,000 lives worldwide and inflicted $1.5 trillion in damages. Some of these people were teenagers. Some were babies. Some lived on a flood plain and others in an apartment building 20 miles inland. At risk on the U.S. mainland are 44 million coastal residents between Texas and Maine, a dozen major seaside cities, thousands of coastal towns, half the nation’s oil-refining business, and major infrastructure like highways, airports, trains, and much of the shipping industry—already backed up with supply-chain issues as it transports 90 percent of all foreign trade. In the last four decades alone, hurricanes cost the United States more than $1.3 trillion and nearly 7,000 lives. By the end of the century, they will likely set the U.S. back $200 billion annually.
Read More: How Hurricane Beryl Is Shattering Storm Records
Plotting the cost of weather disasters since 1980 follows a trajectory eerily similar to that of CO2 content in the atmosphere. 2022 was the third-hottest US summer in more than a century, in a year that saw 15 weather disasters cost more than a billion dollars each. 2023 shattered that record, going down as the hottest summer in modern history, and as of August 8, 2024, NOAA has reported 19 confirmed billion-dollar disaster events in the U.S. Adding an estimated .07 watts of heat to every square meter of land and water on the planet influences pretty much everything in the ocean and sky, including thunderstorms, blizzards, squalls, nor’easters, tornadoes, heat waves, and droughts.
You have likely seen some of this freak weather: extraordinary amounts of moisture falling from the sky; random squalls with hurricane-force winds; the weakened and wandering jet stream delivering 70-degree days to the Lower 48 in January, deep freezes in Texas, and springtime polar vortexes in New England. You have likely watched television coverage of tropical storms rolling over Death Valley for the first time, drought draining the last aquifers and reservoirs of the U.S. West, and linked thunderstorm systems annihilating the Great Plains.
Just look at weather around the world in 2022: historic rainstorms flooded the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro; record-low rainfall in Iraq resulted in a massive dust storm that shut down most of the country; heat waves in India and Pakistan brought temperatures topping 120 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, followed by exceptionally rainy monsoon seasons. The next year saw more billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S. than ever before, as record heat, rainfall, and a historic 1,197 tornadoes tore across the country. A parade of atmospheric rivers—made wetter and more intense by climate change—dumped more than 30 trillion gallons of water on the state of California, on the heels of a years-long megadrought and some of the worst wildfires in the state’s history.
Fast forward to 2024, which saw Earth’s average temperature exceed 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial baseline for the first time in history as heatwaves in Southeast Asia killed dozens and shut down schools, parts of Brazil received more than half of their annual rainfall in just ten days, wildfire season started historically early in Canada as drought conditions persisted, and Cyclone Remal forced over 800,000 people in Bangladesh and over 110,000 people in India to evacuate.
Hiro Murakami, a project scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., worries that regions with little to no experience with extreme weather are being drawn into storm country. A 2021 study by Yale University researchers showed that warmer waters will soon draw hurricanes north, inundating cities like Washington, DC, New York, and Boston. A possible westward migration of the North Atlantic tropical cyclone generation zone could also result in an uptick of landfalls along the U.S. East Coast later this century. A recent study by Brooklyn’s First Street Foundation also shows how hurricanes will penetrate farther inland in decades to come, affecting U.S. states as far west as New Mexico, Kansas, and Wisconsin.
Millions throughout the U.S. remain unprotected. Flood insurance is optional in most of the U.S.; some FEMA loans are contingent on good credit; corrupt contractors flock to disasters because consumer protection laws do not rein them in; and state governments often lack the funds and staffing to manage recovery. “This kind of unprecedented location may be much more high risk,” Murakami told me. “They have no dikes, no defenses.”
There is a silver lining, though, Murakami says. If we stopped burning fossil fuels today, additional warming would begin to flatten almost immediately, as would the escalation of tropical-cyclone intensity. “Carbon emissions are largely proportional to hurricane changes,” he explains. “If we can successfully constrain emissions in the middle of the 21st century, and CO2 emissions decrease afterward, hurricane activity will also go back to present-day. Cyclone activity largely follows the path of CO2 levels.”
This, then, begs the question: What would it be like to wake up in a world where the amplification of storms, extreme weather, and resulting damage stopped? Or began to contract? What would we do if we were not headed for climate disaster? What would we talk about?
Worldwide disaster is by no means a forgone conclusion. It is not predestined in any way—not in hurricane country, typhoon country, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines, the U.S. East Coast, or the windswept island nations of the Pacific Basin. As we can see in the data, the science, and now in our own backyards, it is merely the result of inaction.
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Publish date : 2024-09-10 00:00:00
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