When we see records being broken and unprecedented events such as this, the onus is on those who deny any connection to climate change to prove their case. Global warming has fundamentally altered the background conditions that give rise to all weather. In the strictest sense, all weather is now connected to climate change. Kevin Trenberth
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(Reuters) - The old adage, "it's not the heat, it's the humidity," will come into play more often and in more places because of climate change, with life-altering results in southern U.S. cities from Miami to Atlanta to Washington and even northern ones such as New York, Chicago and Seattle.
"As temperatures rise, toward the end of the century, less than an hour of activity outdoors in the shade could cause a moderately fit individual to suffer heat stroke," said climatologist Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, lead scientific author of the report. "That's something that doesn't exist anywhere in the world today."
That result emerges from the heat-and-humidity analysis in "Risky Business," the report on the economic consequences of climate change released on Tuesday. The analysis goes beyond other studies, which have focused on rising temperatures, to incorporate growing medical understanding of the physiological effects of heat and humidity, as well as research on how and where humidity levels will likely rise as the climate changes.
The body's capacity to cool down in hot weather depends on the evaporation of sweat. That keeps skin temperature below 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius). Above that, core temperature rises past 98.6 F. But if humidity is also high, sweat cannot evaporate, and core temperature can increase until the person collapses from heat stroke.
"If it's humid you can't sweat, and if you can't sweat you can't maintain core body temperature in the heat, and you die," said Dr Al Sommer, dean emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and author of a chapter on health effects in the new report.
The highest heat-plus-humidity reading in the United States was in 1995 in Appleton, Wisconsin, when the outside temperature was 101 F. While the Upper Midwest is not known for tropical conditions, climate research shows that it will experience more warming than lower latitudes as well as more humidity.
As a result, the deadliest heat-and-humidity combinations are expected to center around that region, with threads reaching to the Eastern Seaboard and islands of dangerous conditions along the northwest Pacific coast.
If climate change continues on its current trajectory, the report concluded, Midwesterners could see deadly heat-and-humidity pairings (which meteorologists call "wet-bulb temperature") two days every year by later this century. [This is pie in the sky -- we are already having this kind of weather in southern Illinois.]
"It will be functionally impossible to be outside, including for things like constructionwork and farming, as well as recreation," said climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University.
Even without killer humidity, heat waves are expected to take a larger and larger toll.
The Southeast is expected to be hit with an additional 17-52 extremely hot days per year by mid-century and an additional 48-130 days by 2100. That could prove deadly for thousands: "Risky Business" projects an additional 15-21 deaths per 100,000 people every year from the heat, or 11,000-36,000 additional deaths at current population levels.
(Reuters) - When at least 80 tornadoes rampaged across the United States, from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, last Friday, it was more than is typically observed during the entire month of March, tracking firm AccuWeather.com reported on Monday.
According to some climate scientists, such earlier-than-normal outbreaks of tornadoes, which typically peak in the spring, will become the norm as the planet warms.
"As spring moves up a week or two, tornado season will start in February instead of waiting for April," said climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Whether climate change will also affect the frequency or severity of tornadoes, however, remains very much an open question, and one that has received surprisingly little study.
"There are only a handful of papers, even to this day," said atmospheric scientist Robert Trapp of Purdue University, who led a pioneering 2007 study of tornadoes and climate change.
"Some of us think we should be paying more attention to it," said atmospheric physicist Anthony Del Genio of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of NASA.
The scientific challenge is this: the two conditions necessary to spawn a twister are expected to be affected in opposite ways. A warmer climate will likely boost the intensity of thunderstorms but could dampen wind shear, the increase of wind speed at higher altitudes, researchers say.
Tomorrow's thunderstorms will pack a bigger wallop, but may strike less frequently than they have historically, explained Del Genio.
"As we go to a warmer atmosphere, storms -- which transfer energy from one region to another -- somehow figure out how to do that more efficiently," he said. As a result, thunderstorms transfer more energy per outbreak, and so have to make such transfers less often.
In a 2011 paper, Del Genio calculated that, "especially in the central and eastern United States, we can expect a few more days per month with conditions favorable to severe thunderstorm occurrence" by the latter part of this century if the global climate grows warmer.
Indeed, the world has been experiencing more violent storms since 1970, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in its most recent assessment.
EXTENDING TORNADOES' PATH
Purdue's Trapp and colleagues got a similar result in their 2007 study, which they confirmed in research published in 2009 and 2011. "The number of days when conditions exist to form tornadoes is expected to increase" as the world warms, he said.
In addition, they found, regions near the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts not normally associated with tornadoes will experience tornado-making weather more frequently. They projected a doubling in the number of days with such conditions in Atlanta and New York City, for instance.
More powerful thunderstorms would be expected to produce more tornadoes, but wind shear could prove a mitigating factor.
Because climate change is not uniform, Del Genio wrote in the 2011 paper, "in the lower troposphere, the temperature difference between low and high latitudes decreases as the planet warms, creating less wind shear."
Other scientists are not so sure, and they see a surge in tornadoes last year as ominous. April 2011 was the most active tornado month on record, with 753, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), compared to the previous record of 267 in April 1974.
"I have no doubt that there will be many times when wind shear is plenty strong to create a tornado," said Trenberth.
That is what Trapp's team concluded in their 2007 study. "Over most of the United States," they wrote, the increase in the power of thunderstorms will "more than compensate for the relative decreases in shear."
As a result, "the environment would still be considered favorable for severe convection" of the kind that creates tornadoes.
From March to May the projected increase in severe storms is "largest over a 'tornado-alley'-like region extending northward from Texas," Trapp found. From June through August, the eastern half of the country is projected to experience such an increase.
If there are more days in the future when wind shear is too weak to produce a tornado from a thunderstorm, said Trenberth, then "the frequency of tornadoes may decrease but the average intensity might increase. You could have a doozy of an outbreak, and then they could go away for a while."
On average, about 800 tornados are reported annually in the United States. About 70% are "weak," finds NOAA, with winds less than 110 mph. Just under 29% are "strong," with winds between 110 and 205 mph. Only 2% of all tornadoes are what NOAA characterizes as "violent," with winds in excess of 205 mph, but they account for 70% of all twister deaths.
In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future
Joplin, Missouri, after the tornado that hit on May 22, 2011. Valentina Abinanti / Polaris
Joplin, Mo., was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.
Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland.
And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.
From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.
Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state’s trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain. These aren’t scenes from another deadly-weather thriller like The Day After Tomorrow. They’re all changes that California officials believe they need to brace for within the next decade or two. And they aren’t alone. Across the U.S., it’s just beginning to dawn on civic leaders that they’ll need to help their communities brave coming dangers brought by climate change, from disappearing islands in Chesapeake Bay to dust bowls in the Plains and horrific hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet only 14 states are even planning, let alone implementing, climate-change adaptation plans, says Terri Cruce, a climate consultant in California. The other 36 apparently are hoping for a miracle.
The game of catch-up will have to happen quickly because so much time was lost to inaction. “The Bush administration was a disaster, but the Obama administration has accomplished next to nothing either, in part because a significant part of the Democratic Party is inclined to balk on this issue as well,” says economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “We [are] past the tipping point.” The idea of adapting to climate change was once a taboo subject. Scientists and activists feared that focusing on coping would diminish efforts to reduce carbon emissions. On the opposite side of the divide, climate-change deniers argued that since global warming is a “hoax,” there was no need to figure out how to adapt. “Climate-change adaptation was a nonstarter,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. “If you wanted to talk about that, you would have had to talk about climate change itself, which the Bush administration didn’t want to do.” In fact, President Bush killed what author Mark Hertsgaard in his 2011 book, Hot, calls “a key adaptation tool,” the National Climate Assessment, an analysis of the vulnerabilities in regions of the U.S. and ideas for coping with them. The legacy of that: state efforts are spotty and local action is practically nonexistent. “There are no true adaptation experts in the federal government, let alone states or cities,” says Arroyo. “They’ve just been commandeered from other departments.”
Left: A wildfire rages in Strawn, Texas, on April 19; Right: Rescuers pass a partially submerged building in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on May 11, 2011. Tom Pennington / Getty Images (left); Sean Gardner /Reuters-Landov
The rookies will struggle to comprehend the complex impacts of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels has raised atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide by 40 percent above what they were before the Industrial Revolution. The added heat in the atmosphere retains more moisture, ratchets up the energy in the system, and incites more violent and extreme weather. Scientists disagree about whether climate change will bring more intense or frequent tornadoes, but there is wide consensus that the 2 °F of global warming of the last century is behind the rise in sea levels, more intense hurricanes, more heat waves, and more droughts and deluges. Even if the world went carbon-neutral tomorrow, we’d be in for more: because of the CO2 that has already been emitted, we’re on track for another 5 degrees of warming. Batten down the hatches. “You can no longer say that the climate of the future is going to be like the climate of today, let alone yesterday,” says Judi Greenwald, vice president of innovative solutions at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “In all of the plausible climate scenarios, we are going to have to change the way we do things in ways we can’t even predict.”
Changing temperatures will have a profound effect on the plants and animals among us. Crops that flourished in the old climate regime will have to adapt to the new one, as some pests are already doing. Tropical diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever are reaching temperate regions, and ragweed and poison ivy thrive in the hothouse world. Yet most of us are naive about what climate-change adaptation will entail. At the benign extreme, “adapting” sounds as easy as home gardeners adjusting to their new climate zones—those colorful bands on the back of the package of zinnia seeds. It sounds as pleasant as cities planting more trees, as Chicago, New York, Boston, and scores of others are doing (with species native to the warmer climes: Chicago is subbing heat-loving sweet gum and swamp oak for the traditional white oak). And it sounds as architecturally interesting as changing roofs: New York, which is looking at an average temperature increase of up to 3 °F by 2020, is planning to paint 3 million square feet of roofs white, to reflect sunlight and thus reduce urban heat-island effects.
But those steps don’t even hint at how disruptive and expensive climate-change adaptation will be. “Ten years ago, when we thought climate change would be slow and linear, you could get away with thinking that ‘adaptation’ meant putting in permeable pavement” so that storm water would be absorbed rather than cause floods, says Bill McKibben, author of the 2010 book Eaarth. “Now it’s clear that’s not going to be at all sufficient, as we see already with disruptions in our ability to grow food, an increase in storms, and the accelerated melting of Greenland that could raise sea levels six feet. Adaptation is going to have to be a lot more than changing which trees cities plant.”
As tomorrow’s climate wreaks havoc on agriculture—this spring’s deluges have already kept farmers from getting tractors into fields to plant corn—McKibben foresees tens of thousands more Americans having to work on farms, since human hands can do what machines cannot, like planting seeds in flooded fields. Until now, maximizing yield has been the agricultural imperative, but in the future, stability and resilience will be more important. In much of the Northeast, farmers will be unable to grow popular varieties of apples, blueberries, and cranberries, for instance; in Vermont, maple sugaring will likely go the way of ox-drawn plows.
States and cities will have to make huge investments in infrastructure to handle the encroaching sea and raging rivers. Keene, N.H., for instance, has been a pioneer in climate-change adaptation, says Missy Stults, climate director of ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA. The city recently enlarged culverts along its highways so storm runoff would be less likely to wash out roads. In the San Francisco Bay area, planners are considering increasing the height of the seawall on the city’s waterfront and the levees at the San Francisco and Oakland airports. In Ventura, Calif., construction crews moved Surfer’s Point 65 feet inland, the state’s first experiment in “managed retreat.” Because warmer air provides less lift, airport runways the world over will have to be lengthened in order for planes to take off.
In Norfolk, Va., where the combination of global sea-level rise and local-land subsidence has brought water levels 13.5 inches higher since 1930, the city has fought a battle to stay ahead of the tide by elevating one often-flooded roadway by 18 inches. But the neighborhood may have to be abandoned—and residents may not be much happier in neighboring parts of Maryland. An expected sea-level rise there of twice the global average means that 371 miles of highway are at risk of looking more like canals, while 2,500 historic and archeological sites could become real-life versions of Atlantis. Thousands of septic systems—5,200 in a single county near Chesapeake Bay—are in flood zones, says Zoe Johnson, who directs the climate-change adaptation program at the Department of Natural Resources.
Already, 13 islands in the bay are submerged, 400,000 acres on the eastern shore are on the way to joining them, and 580 acres of shoreline are lost every year as intense storms erode beaches and wetlands. Homeowners can no longer automatically get a permit to “harden” their beaches by erecting bulkheads and sea walls; they must instead plant vegetation, which may not do the trick. “It’s inevitable that some of our low-lying communities will need to be relocated or abandoned,” says Johnson.
Maryland is not the only place that will have to decide which communities it can afford to protect and which will have to be sacrificed. Environmental scientist Thomas Wilbanks of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who chaired a 2011 panel of the National Research Council on adapting to climate change, says: “We’ll identify places with iconic value and protect them whatever the cost, even if that means Miami and New Orleans become islands” as surrounding communities are sacrificed. Given that Manhattan is already an island, architects asked to imagine its future have gone a step further: designing Venice-like canals for the southern tip.
In Alaska, six indigenous villages on the coast, including Newtok and Shishmaref, are likely to get swamped as seas rise and storm surges intensify, says Gary Kofinas of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. They also sit on permafrost, which isn’t “perma” anymore. As the ground melts beneath the villages, the state is figuring out how and where to relocate them. Around the world, nearly 1 billion people live in low-lying river deltas, from Guangzhou to New Orleans, that will be reclaimed by the sea, forcing tens of millions of people to migrate. It threatens to be a trail of human misery that will make the exodus after Hurricane Katrina look like a weekend getaway.
The U.S. could take some advice from other countries like the Netherlands, which has more than a little experience keeping the ocean at bay. The Dutch seem to understand just how radically different life will be. As part of a 200-year plan, the country has launched a €1.5 billion project to broaden river channels so they aren’t overwhelmed as a result of the higher flows, says Pier Vellinga, professor of climate change at Wageningen University. Rotterdam raised by two feet a storm gate at the port that holds back the (rising) North Sea, and elevated the ground the new 1,700-acre port sits on by a foot and a half to keep it from being submerged, all at a cost of some €50 million. The country is also adding millions of cubic yards of sand to dunes that hold back the North Sea. All told, it will soon be spending some €4 billion a year to cope with what’s coming down the pike. Britain, too, is taking adaptation seriously, planning to raise the height of the floodgates protecting central London from the Thames by 12 inches.
So what lies behind America’s resistance to action? Economist Sachs points to the lobbying power of industries that resist acknowledgment of climate change’s impact. “The country is two decades behind in taking action because both parties are in thrall to Big Oil and Big Coal,” says Sachs. “The airwaves are filled with corporate-financed climate misinformation.” But the vanguard of action isn’t waiting any longer. This week, representatives from an estimated 100 cities are meeting in Bonn, Germany, for the 2nd World Congress on Cities and Adaptation to Climate Change. The theme is “Resilient Cities.” As Joplin, Mo., learned in the most tragic way possible, against some impacts of climate change, man’s puny efforts are futile. But time is getting short, and the stakes are high. Says Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University: “Not to adapt is to consign millions of people to death and disruption.”
In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future.
Photo: Valentina Abinanti/Polaris. Joplin, Missouri, after the tornado that hit on May 22, 2011.
Joplin, Mo., was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.
Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.
From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.
Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state’s trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain. These aren’t scenes from another deadly-weather thriller like The Day After Tomorrow. They’re all changes that California officials believe they need to brace for within the next decade or two. And they aren’t alone. Across the U.S., it’s just beginning to dawn on civic leaders that they’ll need to help their communities brave coming dangers brought by climate change, from disappearing islands in Chesapeake Bay to dust bowls in the Plains and horrific hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet only 14 states are even planning, let alone implementing, climate-change adaptation plans, says Terri Cruce, a climate consultant in California. The other 36 apparently are hoping for a miracle.
The game of catch-up will have to happen quickly because so much time was lost to inaction. “The Bush administration was a disaster, but the Obama administration has accomplished next to nothing either, in part because a significant part of the Democratic Party is inclined to balk on this issue as well,” says economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “We [are] past the tipping point.” The idea of adapting to climate change was once a taboo subject. Scientists and activists feared that focusing on coping would diminish efforts to reduce carbon emissions. On the opposite side of the divide, climate-change deniers argued that since global warming is a “hoax,” there was no need to figure out how to adapt. “Climate-change adaptation was a nonstarter,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. “If you wanted to talk about that, you would have had to talk about climate change itself, which the Bush administration didn’t want to do.” In fact, President Bush killed what author Mark Hertsgaard in his 2011 book, Hot, calls “a key adaptation tool,” the National Climate Assessment, an analysis of the vulnerabilities in regions of the U.S. and ideas for coping with them. The legacy of that: state efforts are spotty and local action is practically nonexistent. “There are no true adaptation experts in the federal government, let alone states or cities,” says Arroyo. “They’ve just been commandeered from other departments.”
Photos: Tom Pennington / Getty Images (left); Sean Gardner /Reuters-Landov. Left: A wildfire rages in Strawn, Texas, on April 19.; Right: Rescuers pass a partially submerged building in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on May 11, 2011.
The rookies will struggle to comprehend the complex impacts of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels has raised atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide by 40% above what they were before the Industrial Revolution. The added heat in the atmosphere retains more moisture, ratchets up the energy in the system, and incites more violent and extreme weather. Scientists disagree about whether climate change will bring more intense or frequent tornadoes, but there is wide consensus that the 2 °F of global warming of the last century is behind the rise in sea levels, more intense hurricanes, more heat waves, and more droughts and deluges. Even if the world went carbon-neutral tomorrow, we’d be in for more: because of the CO2 that has already been emitted, we’re on track for another 5 degrees of warming. Batten down the hatches. “You can no longer say that the climate of the future is going to be like the climate of today, let alone yesterday,” says Judi Greenwald, vice president of innovative solutions at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “In all of the plausible climate scenarios, we are going to have to change the way we do things in ways we can’t even predict.”
Changing temperatures will have a profound effect on the plants and animals among us. Crops that flourished in the old climate regime will have to adapt to the new one, as some pests are already doing. Tropical diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever are reaching temperate regions, and ragweed and poison ivy thrive in the hothouse world. Yet most of us are naive about what climate-change adaptation will entail. At the benign extreme, “adapting” sounds as easy as home gardeners adjusting to their new climate zones—those colorful bands on the back of the package of zinnia seeds. It sounds as pleasant as cities planting more trees, as Chicago, New York, Boston and scores of others are doing (with species native to the warmer climes: Chicago is subbing heat-loving sweet gum and swamp oak for the traditional white oak). And it sounds as architecturally interesting as changing roofs: New York, which is looking at an average temperature increase of up to 3 °F by 2020, is planning to paint 3 million square feet of roofs white, to reflect sunlight and thus reduce urban heat-island effects.
But those steps don’t even hint at how disruptive and expensive climate-change adaptation will be. “Ten years ago, when we thought climate change would be slow and linear, you could get away with thinking that ‘adaptation’ meant putting in permeable pavement” so that storm water would be absorbed rather than cause floods, says Bill McKibben, author of the 2010 book Eaarth. “Now it’s clear that’s not going to be at all sufficient, as we see already with disruptions in our ability to grow food, an increase in storms, and the accelerated melting of Greenland that could raise sea levels six feet. Adaptation is going to have to be a lot more than changing which trees cities plant.”
As tomorrow’s climate wreaks havoc on agriculture—this spring’s deluges have already kept farmers from getting tractors into fields to plant corn—McKibben foresees tens of thousands more Americans having to work on farms, since human hands can do what machines cannot, like planting seeds in flooded fields. Until now, maximizing yield has been the agricultural imperative, but in the future, stability and resilience will be more important. In much of the Northeast, farmers will be unable to grow popular varieties of apples, blueberries, and cranberries, for instance; in Vermont, maple sugaring will likely go the way of ox-drawn plows.
States and cities will have to make huge investments in infrastructure to handle the encroaching sea and raging rivers. Keene, N.H., for instance, has been a pioneer in climate-change adaptation, says Missy Stults, climate director of Local Governments for Sustainability. The city recently enlarged culverts along its highways so storm runoff would be less likely to wash out roads. In the San Francisco Bay area, planners are considering increasing the height of the seawall on the city’s waterfront and the levees at the San Francisco and Oakland airports. In Ventura, Calif., construction crews moved Surfer’s Point 65 feet inland, the state’s first experiment in “managed retreat.” Because warmer air provides less lift, airport runways the world over will have to be lengthened in order for planes to take off.
In Norfolk, Va., where the combination of global sea-level rise and local-land subsidence has brought water levels 13.5 inches higher since 1930, the city has fought a battle to stay ahead of the tide by elevating one often-flooded roadway by 18 inches. But the neighborhood may have to be abandoned—and residents may not be much happier in neighboring parts of Maryland. An expected sea-level rise there of twice the global average means that 371 miles of highway are at risk of looking more like canals, while 2,500 historic and archeological sites could become real-life versions of Atlantis. Thousands of septic systems—5,200 in a single county near Chesapeake Bay—are in flood zones, says Zoe Johnson, who directs the climate-change adaptation program at the Department of Natural Resources.
Already, 13 islands in the bay are submerged, 400,000 acres on the eastern shore are on the way to joining them, and 580 acres of shoreline are lost every year as intense storms erode beaches and wetlands. Homeowners can no longer automatically get a permit to “harden” their beaches by erecting bulkheads and sea walls; they must instead plant vegetation, which may not do the trick. “It’s inevitable that some of our low-lying communities will need to be relocated or abandoned,” says Johnson.
Maryland is not the only place that will have to decide which communities it can afford to protect and which will have to be sacrificed. Environmental scientist Thomas Wilbanks of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who chaired a 2011 panel of the National Research Council on adapting to climate change, says: “We’ll identify places with iconic value and protect them whatever the cost, even if that means Miami and New Orleans become islands” as surrounding communities are sacrificed. Given that Manhattan is already an island, architects asked to imagine its future have gone a step further: designing Venice-like canals for the southern tip.
In Alaska, six indigenous villages on the coast, including Newtok and Shishmaref, are likely to get swamped as seas rise and storm surges intensify, says Gary Kofinas of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. They also sit on permafrost, which isn’t “perma” anymore. As the ground melts beneath the villages, the state is figuring out how and where to relocate them. Around the world, nearly 1 billion people live in low-lying river deltas, from Guangzhou to New Orleans, that will be reclaimed by the sea, forcing tens of millions of people to migrate. It threatens to be a trail of human misery that will make the exodus after Hurricane Katrina look like a weekend getaway.
The U.S. could take some advice from other countries like the Netherlands, which has more than a little experience keeping the ocean at bay. The Dutch seem to understand just how radically different life will be. As part of a 200-year plan, the country has launched a €1.5 billion project to broaden river channels so they aren’t overwhelmed as a result of the higher flows, says Pier Vellinga, professor of climate change at Wageningen University. Rotterdam raised by two feet a storm gate at the port that holds back the (rising) North Sea, and elevated the ground the new 1,700-acre port sits on by a foot and a half to keep it from being submerged, all at a cost of some €50 million. The country is also adding millions of cubic yards of sand to dunes that hold back the North Sea. All told, it will soon be spending some €4 billion a year to cope with what’s coming down the pike. Britain, too, is taking adaptation seriously, planning to raise the height of the floodgates protecting central London from the Thames by 12 inches.
So what lies behind America’s resistance to action? Economist Sachs points to the lobbying power of industries that resist acknowledgment of climate change’s impact. “The country is two decades behind in taking action because both parties are in thrall to Big Oil and Big Coal,” says Sachs. “The airwaves are filled with corporate-financed climate misinformation.” But the vanguard of action isn’t waiting any longer. This week, representatives from an estimated 100 cities are meeting in Bonn, Germany, for the 2nd World Congress on Cities and Adaptation to Climate Change. The theme is “Resilient Cities.” As Joplin, Mo., learned in the most tragic way possible, against some impacts of climate change, man’s puny efforts are futile. But time is getting short, and the stakes are high. Says Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University: “Not to adapt is to consign millions of people to death and disruption.”
To those who are convinced that the science of global warming is sound, as well as to those on the fence, the refusal of climate scientists to attribute any single episode of extreme weather to greenhouse-induced climate change has been either exasperating … or suspicious.
You mean you guys can’t definitely say human-caused climate change is why 135 daily rainfall records were broken along the East Coast during September’s deluges (Wilmington, N.C.: 19.7 inches over three days)? You can’t say climate change is why 2010 is eclipsing 1998 as the hottest year on record, or why in August an ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off from a Greenland glacier? How about why 2000–09 was the warmest decade on record, that 153 of the 1,218 U.S. weather stations recorded their hottest summer since 1895, why Moscow suffered a once-in-five-centuries heat wave this summer, or why one fifth of Pakistan flooded?
In short, no. No matter how bizarre the weather, the mantra of climatologists has been that one cannot attribute any single event to changing climate. All science can do is conclude that extreme events are getting more likely as humankind pumps more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Finally, climate scientists see a way to stop being so wishy-washy and start assigning blame, through a technique called “fractional risk attribution.” This technique uses mathematical models of how the atmosphere would work if we had not goosed carbon dioxide to 389 ppm (from 278 ppm before the Industrial Revolution), plus data about ancient (“paleo”) climates and historical (more recent) weather. The idea is to calculate how many times an extreme event should have occurred absent human interference, explains climate scientist Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the probability of the same extreme event in today’s greenhouse-forced atmosphere. Result: putting numbers on extreme weather.
In their biggest success, climate scientists led by Peter Stott of the British Met Office analyzed the 2003 European heat wave, when the mercury rose higher than at any time since the introduction of weather instruments (1851) and probably since at least 1500. After plugging in historical and paleo data, and working out climate patterns in a hypothetical world without a human-caused greenhouse effect, they conclude that our meddling was 75% to blame for the heat wave. Put another way, we more than doubled the chance that it would happen, and it’s twice as likely to be human-caused than natural. That’s one beat shy of “Yes, we did it,” but better than “There’s no way to tell.”
Scientists are now applying the technique to other extreme weather, especially deluges and droughts. They have reason to be optimistic. One of the signal successes of climate science has been identifying the “fingerprints” of the culprits behind rising temperatures, fierce storms, and other signs that a 10,000-year-old climate regime has been knocked for a loop. Fingerprinting has shown that the rise in global temps follows the pattern you’d expect from the greenhouse effect and not an increase in the sun’s output, for instance. A hotter sun would heat the upper atmosphere more than the lower, but in fact the upper layers have cooled while the lower have warmed, Santer explains. Fingerprinting has also nailed the greenhouse effect for warming the oceans. Natural forces such as El Niño warm some seas and cool others, but every major ocean is hotter than in the 1950s. Similar analyses have been done for today’s extreme rainfall patterns (drought followed by deluge, not precipitation spread out evenly) and the retreat of arctic sea ice. “Natural causes alone can’t explain any of these,” Santer says. “You need a large human contribution.”
Video muted: click volume for soundSum Total: Being Green Isn't NewThe United States has the second largest carbon footprint, after China, and more environmental facts
The word “interesting” covers a lot of sins, which is why it’s the perfect word for the world’s current response to climate change. That response is no response -- as shown by the low expectations for the international climate meeting this week in Cancún, by China’s voracious appetite for coal, and by the Senate’s failure to pass a climate bill. It’s interesting that people refuse to make changes today to stave off disasters years hence. It’s interesting that memories—of killer storms and heat waves—are so short, with people apparently viewing them as one-offs rather than harbingers of what we’ll suffer regularly in a greenhouse world. It’s interesting that we saw Muscovites and Pakistanis dying, and blithely thought, too bad, but hey, it isn’t me. All of which means that the climate we are creating will be … interesting.
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