It's Climate Change I tell'ya!! IT'S CLIMATE CHANGE!!
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How does heat kill? It confuses your brain. It shuts down your organs. It overworks your heart.
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Seth Borenstein
Published Jun 21, 2024 • Last updated 6 days ago • 4 minute read
As temperatures and humidity soar outside, what’s happening inside the human body can become a life-or-death battle decided by just a few degrees.
The critical danger point outdoors for illness and death from relentless heat is several degrees lower than experts once thought, say researchers who put people in hot boxes to see what happens to them.
With much of the United States, Mexico, India and the Middle East suffering through blistering heat waves, worsened by human-caused climate change, several doctors, physiologists and other experts explained to The Associated Press what happens to the human body in such heat.
Key body temperature
The body’s resting core temperature is typically about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius).
That’s only 7 degrees (4 Celsius) away from catastrophe in the form of heatstroke, said Ollie Jay, a professor of heat and health at the University of Sydney in Australia, where he runs the thermoergonomics laboratory.
Dr. Neil Gandhi, emergency medicine director at Houston Methodist Hospital, said during heat waves anyone who comes in with a fever of 102 or higher and no clear source of infection will be looked at for heat exhaustion or the more severe heatstroke.
“We routinely will see core temperatures greater than 104, 105 degrees during some of the heat episodes,” Gandhi said. Another degree or three and such a patient is at high risk of death, he said.
How heat kills
Heat kills in three main ways, Jay said. The usual first suspect is heatstroke — critical increases in body temperature that cause organs to fail.
When inner body temperature gets too hot, the body redirects blood flow toward the skin to cool down, Jay said. But that diverts blood and oxygen away from the stomach and intestines, and can allow toxins normally confined to the gut area to leak into circulation.
“That sets off a cascade of effects,” Jay said. “Clotting around the body and multiple organ failure and, ultimately, death.”
But the bigger killer in heat is the strain on the heart, especially for people who have cardiovascular disease, Jay said.
It again starts with blood rushing to the skin to help shed core heat. That causes blood pressure to drop. The heart responds by trying to pump more blood to keep you from passing out.
“You’re asking the heart to do a lot more work than it usually has to do,” Jay said. For someone with a heart condition “it’s like running for a bus with dodgy (hamstring). Something’s going to give.”
The third main way is dangerous dehydration. As people sweat, they lose liquids to a point that can severely stress kidneys, Jay said.
Many people may not realize their danger, Houston’s Gandhi said.
Dehydration can progress into shock, causing organs to shut down from lack of blood, oxygen and nutrients, leading to seizures and death, said Dr. Renee Salas, a Harvard University professor of public health and an emergency room physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“Dehydration can be very dangerous and even deadly for everyone if it gets bad enough — but it is especially dangerous for those with medical conditions and on certain medications,” Salas said.
Dehydration also reduces blood flow and magnifies cardiac problems, Jay said.
Attacking the brain
Heat also affects the brain. It can cause a person to have confusion, or trouble thinking, several doctors said.
“One of the first symptoms you’re getting into trouble with the heat is if you get confused,” said University of Washington public health and climate professor Kris Ebi. That’s little help as a symptom because the person suffering from the heat is unlikely to recognize it, she said. And it becomes a bigger problem as people age.
One of the classic definitions of heat stroke is a core body temperature of 104 degrees “coupled with cognitive dysfunction,” said Pennsylvania State University physiology professor W. Larry Kenney.
Humidity matters
Some scientists use a complicated outside temperature measurement called wet bulb globe temperature, which takes into account humidity, solar radiation and wind. In the past, it was thought that a wet-bulb reading of 95 Fahrenheit (35 Celsius) was the point when the body started having trouble, said Kenney, who also runs a hot box lab and has done nearly 600 tests with volunteers.
His tests show the wet-bulb danger point is closer to 87 (30.5 Celsius). That’s a figure that has started to appear in the Middle East, he said.
And that’s just for young healthy people. For older people, the danger point is a wet bulb temperature of 82 (28 degrees Celsius), he said.
“Humid heat waves kill a lot more people than dry heat waves,” Kenney said.
When Kenney tested young and old people in dry heat, young volunteers could function until 125.6 degrees (52 degrees Celsius), while the elderly had to stop at 109.4 (43 degrees Celsius). With high or moderate temperatures, the people could not function at nearly as high a temperature, he said.
“Humidity impacts the ability of sweat to evaporate,” Jay said.
Rushing to make patients cool
Heatstroke is an emergency, and medical workers try to cool a victim down within 30 minutes, Salas said.
The best way: Cold water immersion. Basically, “you drop them in a water bucket,” Salas said.
But those aren’t always around. So emergency rooms pump patients with cool fluids intravenously, spray them with misters, put ice packs in armpits and groins and place them on a chilling mat with cold water running inside it.
Sometimes it doesn’t work.
“We call it the silent killer because it’s not this kind of visually dramatic event,” Jay said. “It’s insidious. It’s hidden.”
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Seth Borenstein
Published Jun 21, 2024 • Last updated 6 days ago • 4 minute read
As temperatures and humidity soar outside, what’s happening inside the human body can become a life-or-death battle decided by just a few degrees.
The critical danger point outdoors for illness and death from relentless heat is several degrees lower than experts once thought, say researchers who put people in hot boxes to see what happens to them.
With much of the United States, Mexico, India and the Middle East suffering through blistering heat waves, worsened by human-caused climate change, several doctors, physiologists and other experts explained to The Associated Press what happens to the human body in such heat.
Key body temperature
The body’s resting core temperature is typically about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius).
That’s only 7 degrees (4 Celsius) away from catastrophe in the form of heatstroke, said Ollie Jay, a professor of heat and health at the University of Sydney in Australia, where he runs the thermoergonomics laboratory.
Dr. Neil Gandhi, emergency medicine director at Houston Methodist Hospital, said during heat waves anyone who comes in with a fever of 102 or higher and no clear source of infection will be looked at for heat exhaustion or the more severe heatstroke.
“We routinely will see core temperatures greater than 104, 105 degrees during some of the heat episodes,” Gandhi said. Another degree or three and such a patient is at high risk of death, he said.
How heat kills
Heat kills in three main ways, Jay said. The usual first suspect is heatstroke — critical increases in body temperature that cause organs to fail.
When inner body temperature gets too hot, the body redirects blood flow toward the skin to cool down, Jay said. But that diverts blood and oxygen away from the stomach and intestines, and can allow toxins normally confined to the gut area to leak into circulation.
“That sets off a cascade of effects,” Jay said. “Clotting around the body and multiple organ failure and, ultimately, death.”
But the bigger killer in heat is the strain on the heart, especially for people who have cardiovascular disease, Jay said.
It again starts with blood rushing to the skin to help shed core heat. That causes blood pressure to drop. The heart responds by trying to pump more blood to keep you from passing out.
“You’re asking the heart to do a lot more work than it usually has to do,” Jay said. For someone with a heart condition “it’s like running for a bus with dodgy (hamstring). Something’s going to give.”
The third main way is dangerous dehydration. As people sweat, they lose liquids to a point that can severely stress kidneys, Jay said.
Many people may not realize their danger, Houston’s Gandhi said.
Dehydration can progress into shock, causing organs to shut down from lack of blood, oxygen and nutrients, leading to seizures and death, said Dr. Renee Salas, a Harvard University professor of public health and an emergency room physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“Dehydration can be very dangerous and even deadly for everyone if it gets bad enough — but it is especially dangerous for those with medical conditions and on certain medications,” Salas said.
Dehydration also reduces blood flow and magnifies cardiac problems, Jay said.
Attacking the brain
Heat also affects the brain. It can cause a person to have confusion, or trouble thinking, several doctors said.
“One of the first symptoms you’re getting into trouble with the heat is if you get confused,” said University of Washington public health and climate professor Kris Ebi. That’s little help as a symptom because the person suffering from the heat is unlikely to recognize it, she said. And it becomes a bigger problem as people age.
One of the classic definitions of heat stroke is a core body temperature of 104 degrees “coupled with cognitive dysfunction,” said Pennsylvania State University physiology professor W. Larry Kenney.
Humidity matters
Some scientists use a complicated outside temperature measurement called wet bulb globe temperature, which takes into account humidity, solar radiation and wind. In the past, it was thought that a wet-bulb reading of 95 Fahrenheit (35 Celsius) was the point when the body started having trouble, said Kenney, who also runs a hot box lab and has done nearly 600 tests with volunteers.
His tests show the wet-bulb danger point is closer to 87 (30.5 Celsius). That’s a figure that has started to appear in the Middle East, he said.
And that’s just for young healthy people. For older people, the danger point is a wet bulb temperature of 82 (28 degrees Celsius), he said.
“Humid heat waves kill a lot more people than dry heat waves,” Kenney said.
When Kenney tested young and old people in dry heat, young volunteers could function until 125.6 degrees (52 degrees Celsius), while the elderly had to stop at 109.4 (43 degrees Celsius). With high or moderate temperatures, the people could not function at nearly as high a temperature, he said.
“Humidity impacts the ability of sweat to evaporate,” Jay said.
Rushing to make patients cool
Heatstroke is an emergency, and medical workers try to cool a victim down within 30 minutes, Salas said.
The best way: Cold water immersion. Basically, “you drop them in a water bucket,” Salas said.
But those aren’t always around. So emergency rooms pump patients with cool fluids intravenously, spray them with misters, put ice packs in armpits and groins and place them on a chilling mat with cold water running inside it.
Sometimes it doesn’t work.
“We call it the silent killer because it’s not this kind of visually dramatic event,” Jay said. “It’s insidious. It’s hidden.”
How does heat kill? It confuses your brain. It shuts down your organs. It overworks your heart.
As temperatures and humidity soar outside, what's happening inside the body can become a life-or-death battle decided by just a few degrees
A big boost for a climate solution: Electricity made from the heat of the Earth
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Jennifer Mcdermott
Published Jun 25, 2024 • 2 minute read
Southern California Edison will purchase electricity from Fervo Energy, Fervo announced on Tuesday, June 25, 2024.
Southern California Edison will purchase electricity from Fervo Energy, Fervo announced on Tuesday, June 25, 2024.
One method of making electricity cleanly to address climate change has been quietly advancing and on Tuesday it hit a milestone.
A California utility is backing the largest new geothermal power development in the U.S. — 400 megawatts of clean electricity from the Earth’s heat — enough for some 400,000 homes.
Southern California Edison will purchase the electricity from Fervo Energy, a Houston-based geothermal company, Fervo announced.
The company is drilling up to 125 wells in southwest Utah.
Clean electricity like this reduces the need for traditional power plants that cause climate change. The boost could go a long way toward bringing down the cost of a new generation of geothermal energy, said Wilson Ricks, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University.
“If these purchases help to get this technology off the ground, it could be massively impactful for global decarbonization,” he said. Decarbonization refers to switching out things that produce carbon dioxide and methane, which cause the climate to change, in favor of machines and methods that don’t.
Today the world still relies mainly on fossil fuels for round-the-clock power. This new deal shows that clean power can meet a growing demand for electricity, said Sarah Jewett, vice president of strategy at Fervo.
“I think that’s why it’s so exciting. This isn’t a niche energy resource going to a niche use,” she said. “And that is something we have not had, you know, readily available” and able to be scaled up.
The first generation of geothermal plants, for example, The Geysers in California, tapped into superheated reservoirs of steam or very hot water close to the Earth’s surface. Such reservoirs are relatively rare.
New geothermal companies are adapting drilling technology and practices taken from the oil and gas industry to create reservoirs from hot rock. That unlocks the potential for geothermal energy in many more places. Engineers have been working to advance the methods for years.
The United States is one of the world leaders in using the Earth’s heat to make electricity, but geothermal still accounts for less than half a percent of the nation’s total large-scale electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Fervo is pioneering horizontal drilling in geothermal reservoirs. It signed the world’s first corporate agreement with Google in 2021 to develop new geothermal power and drilled three wells in Nevada. That project began sending carbon-free electricity onto the Nevada grid in November to power data centers there.
Cape Station, about 200 miles south of Salt Lake City, is expected to start delivering electricity to California as early as 2026.
California Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild said the state is committed to clean, zero-carbon electricity. He said geothermal complements wind and solar farms by providing steady power when it’s not windy or sunny, and that is key to ensuring reliability as the state cuts fossil fuels.
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Jennifer Mcdermott
Published Jun 25, 2024 • 2 minute read
Southern California Edison will purchase electricity from Fervo Energy, Fervo announced on Tuesday, June 25, 2024.
Southern California Edison will purchase electricity from Fervo Energy, Fervo announced on Tuesday, June 25, 2024.
One method of making electricity cleanly to address climate change has been quietly advancing and on Tuesday it hit a milestone.
A California utility is backing the largest new geothermal power development in the U.S. — 400 megawatts of clean electricity from the Earth’s heat — enough for some 400,000 homes.
Southern California Edison will purchase the electricity from Fervo Energy, a Houston-based geothermal company, Fervo announced.
The company is drilling up to 125 wells in southwest Utah.
Clean electricity like this reduces the need for traditional power plants that cause climate change. The boost could go a long way toward bringing down the cost of a new generation of geothermal energy, said Wilson Ricks, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University.
“If these purchases help to get this technology off the ground, it could be massively impactful for global decarbonization,” he said. Decarbonization refers to switching out things that produce carbon dioxide and methane, which cause the climate to change, in favor of machines and methods that don’t.
Today the world still relies mainly on fossil fuels for round-the-clock power. This new deal shows that clean power can meet a growing demand for electricity, said Sarah Jewett, vice president of strategy at Fervo.
“I think that’s why it’s so exciting. This isn’t a niche energy resource going to a niche use,” she said. “And that is something we have not had, you know, readily available” and able to be scaled up.
The first generation of geothermal plants, for example, The Geysers in California, tapped into superheated reservoirs of steam or very hot water close to the Earth’s surface. Such reservoirs are relatively rare.
New geothermal companies are adapting drilling technology and practices taken from the oil and gas industry to create reservoirs from hot rock. That unlocks the potential for geothermal energy in many more places. Engineers have been working to advance the methods for years.
The United States is one of the world leaders in using the Earth’s heat to make electricity, but geothermal still accounts for less than half a percent of the nation’s total large-scale electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Fervo is pioneering horizontal drilling in geothermal reservoirs. It signed the world’s first corporate agreement with Google in 2021 to develop new geothermal power and drilled three wells in Nevada. That project began sending carbon-free electricity onto the Nevada grid in November to power data centers there.
Cape Station, about 200 miles south of Salt Lake City, is expected to start delivering electricity to California as early as 2026.
California Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild said the state is committed to clean, zero-carbon electricity. He said geothermal complements wind and solar farms by providing steady power when it’s not windy or sunny, and that is key to ensuring reliability as the state cuts fossil fuels.
A big boost for a climate solution: Electricity made from the heat of the Earth
Electricity made from the heat of the Earth.
Canada’s 2023 wildfires burned huge chunks of forest, spewing far more heat-trapping gas than planes
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Seth Borenstein
Published Jun 27, 2024 • 3 minute read
Wildfires
WASHINGTON (AP) — Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, setting ablaze an area of forest larger than West Virginia, new research found.
Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe. They figured it put 3.28 billion tons (2.98 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, according to a study update published in Thursday’s Global Change Biology. The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was.
The fire spewed nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year, study authors said. It’s about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647 million cars put in the air in a year, based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data.
Forests “remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere and that gets stored in their branches, their trunks, their leaves and kind of in the ground as well. So when they burn all the carbon that’s stored within them gets released back into the atmosphere,” said study lead author James MacCarthy, a research associate with WRI’s Global Forest Watch.
When and if trees grow back much of that can be recovered, MacCarthy said, adding “it definitely does have an impact on the global scale in terms of the amount of emissions that were produced in 2023.”
MacCarthy and colleagues calculated that the forest burned totaled 29,951 square miles (77,574 square kilometers), which is six times more than the average from 2001 to 2022. The wildfires in Canada made up 27% of global tree cover loss last year, usually it’s closer to 6%, MacCarthy’s figures show.
These are far more than regular forest fires, but researchers focused only on tree cover loss, which is a bigger effect, said study co-author Alexandra Tyukavina, a geography professor at the University of Maryland.
“The loss of that much forest is a very big deal, and very worrisome,” said Syracuse University geography and environment professor Jacob Bendix, who wasn’t part of the study. “Although the forest will eventually grow back and sequester carbon in doing so, that is a process that will take decades at a minimum, so that there is a quite substantial lag between addition of atmospheric carbon due to wildfire and the eventual removal of at least some of it by the regrowing forest. So, over the course of those decades, the net impact of the fires is a contribution to climate warming.”
It’s more than just adding to heat-trapping gases and losing forests, there were health consequences as well, Tyukavina said.
“Because of these catastrophic fires, air quality in populated areas and cities was affected last year,” she said, mentioning New York City’s smog-choked summer. More than 200 communities with about 232,000 residents had to be evacuated, according to another not-yet-published or peer-reviewed study by Canadian forest and fire experts.
One of the authors of the Canadian study, fire expert Mike Flannigan at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, puts the acreage burned at twice what MacCarthy and Tyukavina do.
“The 2023 fire season in Canada was (an) exceptional year in any time period,” Flannigan, who wasn’t part of the WRI study, said in an email. “I expect more fire in our future, but years like 2023 will be rare.”
Flannigan, Bendix, Tyukavina and MacCarthy all said climate change played a role in Canada’s big burn. A warmer world means more fire season, more lightning-caused fires and especially drier wood and brush to catch fire “associated with increased temperature,” Flannigan wrote. The average May to October temperature in Canada last year was almost 4 degrees (2.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, his study found. Some parts of Canada were 14 to 18 degrees (8 to 10 degrees Celsius) hotter than average in May and June, MaCarthy said.
There’s short-term variability within trends, so it’s hard to blame one specific year and area burned on climate change and geographic factors play a role, still “there is no doubt that climate change is the principal driver of the global increases in wildfire,” Bendix said in an email.
With the world warming from climate change, Tyukavina said, “the catastrophic years are probably going to be happening more often and we are going to see those spikier years more often.”
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Seth Borenstein
Published Jun 27, 2024 • 3 minute read
Wildfires
WASHINGTON (AP) — Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, setting ablaze an area of forest larger than West Virginia, new research found.
Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe. They figured it put 3.28 billion tons (2.98 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, according to a study update published in Thursday’s Global Change Biology. The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was.
The fire spewed nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year, study authors said. It’s about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647 million cars put in the air in a year, based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data.
Forests “remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere and that gets stored in their branches, their trunks, their leaves and kind of in the ground as well. So when they burn all the carbon that’s stored within them gets released back into the atmosphere,” said study lead author James MacCarthy, a research associate with WRI’s Global Forest Watch.
When and if trees grow back much of that can be recovered, MacCarthy said, adding “it definitely does have an impact on the global scale in terms of the amount of emissions that were produced in 2023.”
MacCarthy and colleagues calculated that the forest burned totaled 29,951 square miles (77,574 square kilometers), which is six times more than the average from 2001 to 2022. The wildfires in Canada made up 27% of global tree cover loss last year, usually it’s closer to 6%, MacCarthy’s figures show.
These are far more than regular forest fires, but researchers focused only on tree cover loss, which is a bigger effect, said study co-author Alexandra Tyukavina, a geography professor at the University of Maryland.
“The loss of that much forest is a very big deal, and very worrisome,” said Syracuse University geography and environment professor Jacob Bendix, who wasn’t part of the study. “Although the forest will eventually grow back and sequester carbon in doing so, that is a process that will take decades at a minimum, so that there is a quite substantial lag between addition of atmospheric carbon due to wildfire and the eventual removal of at least some of it by the regrowing forest. So, over the course of those decades, the net impact of the fires is a contribution to climate warming.”
It’s more than just adding to heat-trapping gases and losing forests, there were health consequences as well, Tyukavina said.
“Because of these catastrophic fires, air quality in populated areas and cities was affected last year,” she said, mentioning New York City’s smog-choked summer. More than 200 communities with about 232,000 residents had to be evacuated, according to another not-yet-published or peer-reviewed study by Canadian forest and fire experts.
One of the authors of the Canadian study, fire expert Mike Flannigan at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, puts the acreage burned at twice what MacCarthy and Tyukavina do.
“The 2023 fire season in Canada was (an) exceptional year in any time period,” Flannigan, who wasn’t part of the WRI study, said in an email. “I expect more fire in our future, but years like 2023 will be rare.”
Flannigan, Bendix, Tyukavina and MacCarthy all said climate change played a role in Canada’s big burn. A warmer world means more fire season, more lightning-caused fires and especially drier wood and brush to catch fire “associated with increased temperature,” Flannigan wrote. The average May to October temperature in Canada last year was almost 4 degrees (2.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, his study found. Some parts of Canada were 14 to 18 degrees (8 to 10 degrees Celsius) hotter than average in May and June, MaCarthy said.
There’s short-term variability within trends, so it’s hard to blame one specific year and area burned on climate change and geographic factors play a role, still “there is no doubt that climate change is the principal driver of the global increases in wildfire,” Bendix said in an email.
With the world warming from climate change, Tyukavina said, “the catastrophic years are probably going to be happening more often and we are going to see those spikier years more often.”
Canada’s 2023 wildfires burned huge chunks of forest, spewing far more heat-trapping gas than planes
Spewing far more heat-trapping gas than planes.
When heat waves strike, Environment Canada can link it to climate change — fast
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Jordan Omstead
Published Jun 28, 2024 • 4 minute read
The heat wave over Eastern Canada last week brought stifling conditions. It put pressure on the electricity grid. It broke temperature records.
The heat wave over Eastern Canada last week brought stifling conditions. It put pressure on the electricity grid. It broke temperature records.
TORONTO — The heat wave that gripped Eastern Canada last week brought stifling conditions, put pressure on the electricity grid and broke several temperature records as residents sweltered.
While the unusually high temperatures have now relented, fundamental questions remain: just how much more likely was that heat wave because of climate change? And how much worse did it get because of it?
Within a few days, researchers at Environment and Climate Change Canada are expected to have the results.
The data would mark the public debut of Canada’s new rapid extreme weather event attribution pilot program. Environment Canada will be able to say, within about a week of the end of a heat wave, whether and to what extent climate change made it more likely or intense.
Environment and Climate Change Canada is believed to be one of the first government offices in the world to publicly roll out such a tool and automatically apply it to heat waves across large parts of the country.
“I think it’s an important milestone,” said Nathan Gillett, a research scientist with Environment Canada and Climate Change Canada, who helped steer the pilot project since its approval in 2022 under the federal government’s national adaptation strategy.
Climate scientists have long detailed how planet-warming emissions are making weather extremes — from heat waves to heavy rainfall — more likely and severe across Canada. Temperatures that would have been virtually impossible without burning fossil fuels are becoming the new extreme, scientists say, while extremes are becoming the new unusual.
Studies of those specific heat waves or floods can, however, take months to make it into a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
By then, decisionmakers may have debated how to rebuild or where to relocate after a devastating flood, for example, without a clear indication of climate change’s role. Public attention and the news cycle has shifted elsewhere.
Rapid studies, popularized over the past decade by trailblazing international research groups, look to inject climate science into the discussion when it’s most relevant.
Take, for example, the bridges destroyed during the 2021 British Columbia floods, Gillett said.
“If you’re rebuilding those bridges, it’s useful to know whether the event was made more likely by human-induced climate change, and also to know how that likelihood might change in the future,” said Gillett, who co-authored a study that indicated that B.C. event was made 45 per cent more likely due to human-caused warming.
Attribution studies typically follow the same general premise. Researchers run climate models under two different scenarios. One scenario is modeled on a pre-industrial climate before humans started burning fossil fuels, and a second is based on a simulation of our climate as it is now.
Scientists then compare those results to a defined extreme weather event, such as the Eastern Canada heat wave, to figure out how it may have been influenced by human-caused climate change.
Gillett said the pilot program will eventually be applied to other weather extremes, such as precipitation and cold temperatures, and there is work ongoing to extend it to wildfire activity.
While many national meteorological agencies do attribution studies, Canada’s commitment to a rapid study program on this scale is a standout example, said Sarah Kew, a climate researcher with Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and World Weather Attribution.
“This is a great step forward for attribution,” she said.
World Weather Attribution, which is made up of a team of international researchers, has been at the vanguard of rapid attribution science, collaborating with local scientists, including Environment Canada’s Gillett, on dozens of studies over the past decade that have helped standardize research practices.
Days after a heat wave relented over Mexico earlier this month, World Weather Attribution released a report suggesting it was made 35 times more likely and about 1.4 degrees hotter due to climate change.
Attribution studies also parse what might be natural climate variation, rather than just human-caused climate change. A World Weather Attribution study of drought across southern Africa earlier this year found El Nino, a natural climate cycle, was the key driver, not climate change.
“The climate is changing faster and faster. And we’re seeing more and more extremes, every year. It’s really crazy the amount of extreme events that are happening. So, the questions are coming thick and fast,” said Kew.
“It’s important that there are scientific answers at hand. Not biased answers, but answers that have been developed with a good, solid methodology.”
More broadly, attribution science has also bolstered efforts to hold big emitters, such as oil companies, responsible for the casualties and costs of specific climate-fuelled weather extremes.
Rapid attribution tools are best used as a call to action, said Rachel White, an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of British Columbia, who uses climate models to study extreme weather events.
“All it’s doing is telling how bad the problem is; we still have to stop making the problem worse,” she said.
“We need to be reducing our greenhouse gas emissions really quickly, and doing that in a way that … is fast, fair and forever.”
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Jordan Omstead
Published Jun 28, 2024 • 4 minute read
The heat wave over Eastern Canada last week brought stifling conditions. It put pressure on the electricity grid. It broke temperature records.
The heat wave over Eastern Canada last week brought stifling conditions. It put pressure on the electricity grid. It broke temperature records.
TORONTO — The heat wave that gripped Eastern Canada last week brought stifling conditions, put pressure on the electricity grid and broke several temperature records as residents sweltered.
While the unusually high temperatures have now relented, fundamental questions remain: just how much more likely was that heat wave because of climate change? And how much worse did it get because of it?
Within a few days, researchers at Environment and Climate Change Canada are expected to have the results.
The data would mark the public debut of Canada’s new rapid extreme weather event attribution pilot program. Environment Canada will be able to say, within about a week of the end of a heat wave, whether and to what extent climate change made it more likely or intense.
Environment and Climate Change Canada is believed to be one of the first government offices in the world to publicly roll out such a tool and automatically apply it to heat waves across large parts of the country.
“I think it’s an important milestone,” said Nathan Gillett, a research scientist with Environment Canada and Climate Change Canada, who helped steer the pilot project since its approval in 2022 under the federal government’s national adaptation strategy.
Climate scientists have long detailed how planet-warming emissions are making weather extremes — from heat waves to heavy rainfall — more likely and severe across Canada. Temperatures that would have been virtually impossible without burning fossil fuels are becoming the new extreme, scientists say, while extremes are becoming the new unusual.
Studies of those specific heat waves or floods can, however, take months to make it into a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
By then, decisionmakers may have debated how to rebuild or where to relocate after a devastating flood, for example, without a clear indication of climate change’s role. Public attention and the news cycle has shifted elsewhere.
Rapid studies, popularized over the past decade by trailblazing international research groups, look to inject climate science into the discussion when it’s most relevant.
Take, for example, the bridges destroyed during the 2021 British Columbia floods, Gillett said.
“If you’re rebuilding those bridges, it’s useful to know whether the event was made more likely by human-induced climate change, and also to know how that likelihood might change in the future,” said Gillett, who co-authored a study that indicated that B.C. event was made 45 per cent more likely due to human-caused warming.
Attribution studies typically follow the same general premise. Researchers run climate models under two different scenarios. One scenario is modeled on a pre-industrial climate before humans started burning fossil fuels, and a second is based on a simulation of our climate as it is now.
Scientists then compare those results to a defined extreme weather event, such as the Eastern Canada heat wave, to figure out how it may have been influenced by human-caused climate change.
Gillett said the pilot program will eventually be applied to other weather extremes, such as precipitation and cold temperatures, and there is work ongoing to extend it to wildfire activity.
While many national meteorological agencies do attribution studies, Canada’s commitment to a rapid study program on this scale is a standout example, said Sarah Kew, a climate researcher with Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and World Weather Attribution.
“This is a great step forward for attribution,” she said.
World Weather Attribution, which is made up of a team of international researchers, has been at the vanguard of rapid attribution science, collaborating with local scientists, including Environment Canada’s Gillett, on dozens of studies over the past decade that have helped standardize research practices.
Days after a heat wave relented over Mexico earlier this month, World Weather Attribution released a report suggesting it was made 35 times more likely and about 1.4 degrees hotter due to climate change.
Attribution studies also parse what might be natural climate variation, rather than just human-caused climate change. A World Weather Attribution study of drought across southern Africa earlier this year found El Nino, a natural climate cycle, was the key driver, not climate change.
“The climate is changing faster and faster. And we’re seeing more and more extremes, every year. It’s really crazy the amount of extreme events that are happening. So, the questions are coming thick and fast,” said Kew.
“It’s important that there are scientific answers at hand. Not biased answers, but answers that have been developed with a good, solid methodology.”
More broadly, attribution science has also bolstered efforts to hold big emitters, such as oil companies, responsible for the casualties and costs of specific climate-fuelled weather extremes.
Rapid attribution tools are best used as a call to action, said Rachel White, an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of British Columbia, who uses climate models to study extreme weather events.
“All it’s doing is telling how bad the problem is; we still have to stop making the problem worse,” she said.
“We need to be reducing our greenhouse gas emissions really quickly, and doing that in a way that … is fast, fair and forever.”
When heat waves strike, Environment Canada can link it to climate change — fast
Within a few days, researchers at Environment and Climate Change Canada are expected to have the results.
How hot water that fuelled Hurricane Beryl foretells scary storm season
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Seth Borenstein
Published Jul 01, 2024 • 4 minute read
Hurricane Beryl’s explosive growth into an unprecedented early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water the Atlantic and Caribbean are in right now and the kind of season they can expect, experts said.
Beryl smashed various storm records even before its major hurricane level winds approached land. The powerful storm is acting more like monsters that form in the peak of hurricane season thanks mostly to water temperatures as hot or hotter than the region normally gets in September, five hurricane experts told The Associated Press.
Beryl set the record for earliest Category 4 storm with winds of at least 209 km/h — the first Category 4 in June. It also was the earliest storm to rapidly intensify with wind speeds jumping 102 km/h in 24 hours, going from an unnamed depression to a Category 4 in 48 hours.
Beryl is on an unusually southern path, especially for a major hurricane, said University at Albany atmospheric scientist Kristen Corbosiero.
It made landfall Monday on the island of Carriacou with winds of up to 240 km/h, just shy of a top Category 5 storm, and is expected to plow through the islands of the southeast Caribbean.
“Beryl is unprecedentedly strange,” said Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters, a former government hurricane meteorologist who flew into storms. “It is so far outside the climatology that you look at it and you say, ‘How did this happen in June?”‘
Get used to it. Forecasters predicted months ago it was going to be a nasty year and now they are comparing it to record busy 1933 and deadly 2005 — the year of Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Dennis.
“This is the type of storm that we expect this year, these outlier things that happen when and where they shouldn’t,” University of Miami tropical weather researcher Brian McNoldy said. “Not only for things to form and intensify and reach higher intensities, but increase the likelihood of rapid intensification. All of that is just coming together right now, and this won’t be the last time.”
Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach called Beryl “a harbinger potentially of more interesting stuff coming down the pike. Not that Beryl isn’t interesting in and of itself, but even more potential threats and more — and not just a one off — maybe several of these kinds of storms coming down later.”
The water temperature around Beryl is about 1-2 C above normal at 29 C, which “is great if you are a hurricane,” Klotzbach said.
Warm water acts as fuel for the thunderstorms and clouds that form hurricanes. The warmer the water and thus the air at the bottom of the storm, the better the chance it will rise higher in the atmosphere and create deeper thunderstorms, said the University at Albany’s Corbosiero.
Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean “are above what the average September (peak season) temperature should be looking at the last 30-year average,” Masters said.
It’s not just hot water at the surface that matters. The ocean heat content — which measures deeper water that storms need to keep powering up — is way beyond record levels for this time of year and at what the September peak should be, McNoldy said.
“So when you get all that heat energy you can expect some fireworks,” Masters said.
This year, there’s also a significant difference between water temperature and upper air temperature throughout the tropics.
The greater that difference is, the more likely it becomes that storms will form and get bigger, said MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel. “The Atlantic relative to the rest of the tropics is as warm as I’ve seen,” he said.
Atlantic waters have been unusually hot since March 2023 and record warm since April 2023. Klotzbach said a high-pressure system that normally sets up cooling trade winds collapsed then and hasn’t returned.
Corbosiero said scientists are debating what exactly climate change does to hurricanes, but have come to an agreement that it makes them more prone to rapidly intensifying, as Beryl did, and increase the strongest storms, like Beryl.
Emanuel said the slowdown of Atlantic ocean currents, likely caused by climate change, may also be a factor in the warm water.
A brewing La Nina, which is a slight cooling of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, also may be a factor. Experts say La Nina tends to depress high-altitude crosswinds that decapitate hurricanes.
La Nina also usually means more hurricanes in the Atlantic and fewer in the Pacific. The Eastern Pacific had zero storms in May and June, something that’s only happened twice before, Klotzbach said.
Globally, this may be a below-average year for tropical cyclones, except in the Atlantic.
On Sunday night, Beryl went through eyewall replacement, which usually weakens a storm as it forms a new centre, Corbosiero said. But now the storm has regained its strength.
“This is sort of our worst scenario,” she said. “We’re starting early, some very severe storms. .. Unfortunately, it seems like it’s playing out the way we anticipated.”
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Seth Borenstein
Published Jul 01, 2024 • 4 minute read
Hurricane Beryl’s explosive growth into an unprecedented early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water the Atlantic and Caribbean are in right now and the kind of season they can expect, experts said.
Beryl smashed various storm records even before its major hurricane level winds approached land. The powerful storm is acting more like monsters that form in the peak of hurricane season thanks mostly to water temperatures as hot or hotter than the region normally gets in September, five hurricane experts told The Associated Press.
Beryl set the record for earliest Category 4 storm with winds of at least 209 km/h — the first Category 4 in June. It also was the earliest storm to rapidly intensify with wind speeds jumping 102 km/h in 24 hours, going from an unnamed depression to a Category 4 in 48 hours.
Beryl is on an unusually southern path, especially for a major hurricane, said University at Albany atmospheric scientist Kristen Corbosiero.
It made landfall Monday on the island of Carriacou with winds of up to 240 km/h, just shy of a top Category 5 storm, and is expected to plow through the islands of the southeast Caribbean.
“Beryl is unprecedentedly strange,” said Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters, a former government hurricane meteorologist who flew into storms. “It is so far outside the climatology that you look at it and you say, ‘How did this happen in June?”‘
Get used to it. Forecasters predicted months ago it was going to be a nasty year and now they are comparing it to record busy 1933 and deadly 2005 — the year of Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Dennis.
“This is the type of storm that we expect this year, these outlier things that happen when and where they shouldn’t,” University of Miami tropical weather researcher Brian McNoldy said. “Not only for things to form and intensify and reach higher intensities, but increase the likelihood of rapid intensification. All of that is just coming together right now, and this won’t be the last time.”
Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach called Beryl “a harbinger potentially of more interesting stuff coming down the pike. Not that Beryl isn’t interesting in and of itself, but even more potential threats and more — and not just a one off — maybe several of these kinds of storms coming down later.”
The water temperature around Beryl is about 1-2 C above normal at 29 C, which “is great if you are a hurricane,” Klotzbach said.
Warm water acts as fuel for the thunderstorms and clouds that form hurricanes. The warmer the water and thus the air at the bottom of the storm, the better the chance it will rise higher in the atmosphere and create deeper thunderstorms, said the University at Albany’s Corbosiero.
Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean “are above what the average September (peak season) temperature should be looking at the last 30-year average,” Masters said.
It’s not just hot water at the surface that matters. The ocean heat content — which measures deeper water that storms need to keep powering up — is way beyond record levels for this time of year and at what the September peak should be, McNoldy said.
“So when you get all that heat energy you can expect some fireworks,” Masters said.
This year, there’s also a significant difference between water temperature and upper air temperature throughout the tropics.
The greater that difference is, the more likely it becomes that storms will form and get bigger, said MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel. “The Atlantic relative to the rest of the tropics is as warm as I’ve seen,” he said.
Atlantic waters have been unusually hot since March 2023 and record warm since April 2023. Klotzbach said a high-pressure system that normally sets up cooling trade winds collapsed then and hasn’t returned.
Corbosiero said scientists are debating what exactly climate change does to hurricanes, but have come to an agreement that it makes them more prone to rapidly intensifying, as Beryl did, and increase the strongest storms, like Beryl.
Emanuel said the slowdown of Atlantic ocean currents, likely caused by climate change, may also be a factor in the warm water.
A brewing La Nina, which is a slight cooling of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, also may be a factor. Experts say La Nina tends to depress high-altitude crosswinds that decapitate hurricanes.
La Nina also usually means more hurricanes in the Atlantic and fewer in the Pacific. The Eastern Pacific had zero storms in May and June, something that’s only happened twice before, Klotzbach said.
Globally, this may be a below-average year for tropical cyclones, except in the Atlantic.
On Sunday night, Beryl went through eyewall replacement, which usually weakens a storm as it forms a new centre, Corbosiero said. But now the storm has regained its strength.
“This is sort of our worst scenario,” she said. “We’re starting early, some very severe storms. .. Unfortunately, it seems like it’s playing out the way we anticipated.”
How hot water that fuelled Hurricane Beryl foretells scary storm season
Hurricane Beryl's explosive growth into an early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water the Atlantic and Caribbean are in right now.
Rain in Moose Jaw starts as hot water in the Atlantic or Pacific. Water as rain tends to cool shit off so its safe to say if it doesnt rain in Moose Jaw its hot and the Pacific and Atlantic dont have the heat energy to carry water vapour to the mid continent to create rain.
Then we have " its too cold to snow" but I digress...
Why Beryl is an early sign of a particularly dangerous hurricane season
Author of the article:Washington Post
Washington Post
Scott Dance
Published Jul 03, 2024 • 5 minute read
When Hurricane Beryl strengthened into the Atlantic Ocean’s earliest Category 5 storm on record, it did so some two months ahead of the heart of hurricane season.
More storms typically form and intensify by August and September because that’s when Atlantic waters are warmest, loaded with storm-fueling energy from a summer of sunshine. But Beryl strengthened in Caribbean waters that were as hot as they normally are in mid-September, just as the calendar turned to July.
Its record-shattering intensification, occurring earlier in the year than any storm before it, is an early sign of the historically stormy year scientists have been warning about. Off-the-charts warmth that has dominated Atlantic waters for more than a year was a key factor in early seasonal forecasts – and was integral to Beryl’s extraordinary development.
In the United States, officials closely watching the forecast said the storm stirred a sense of urgency. And in the Caribbean, the storm prompted immediate calls for action on climate change. Human burning of fossil fuels has warmed the planet about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 150 years, and along with a recent episode of the planet-warming El Niño climate pattern, has pushed the world’s oceans to dramatic and sustained warmth since early 2023.
Beryl is “clear and overwhelming evidence of the fact that we are constantly facing an existential threat to our way of life,” said Dickon Mitchell, the prime minister of Grenada. He called on other nations to “move past the talking” and help island dwellers weather the “ever-present threat that they have created.”
Not all storms will become behemoths like Beryl over the next few months, meteorologists said, stressing that short-lived meteorological conditions can dampen storm activity, or instigate it. But the hurricane has underscored the ways the stage is set for other storms to undergo similarly explosive development.
Another warning of what may come: Many of the records Beryl is breaking were set in 2005, a year of unprecedented hurricane frequency and of devastating storms such as Hurricane Katrina.
“All signs are hinting that this season is going to rival 2005,” said Ben Kirtman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami.
Conditions are ‘far more conducive than normal’ for hurricanes
Beryl is an extraordinary storm for not only how early it intensified, but also where. In previous years, early storm activity in the area where this one developed has been a reliable indicator of a busy hurricane season, said Philip Klotzbach, who studies hurricanes at Colorado State University.
When it strengthened into a Category 4 storm, Beryl was in the middle of the tropical Atlantic. At this time of year in that part of the ocean – an area at the center of what is known as the main development region for hurricanes – cyclones rarely organize or strengthen much until they move farther west or north. That’s because relatively cool waters, an abundance of Saharan dust or dry air all tend to limit early-season storm activity anywhere east of the longitude of places such as the Bahamas, Cuba and Jamaica, Klotzbach said.
But none of those factors stopped Beryl. It shows that “environmental conditions are far more conducive than normal” for hurricanes, Klotzbach said.
Beryl strengthened into Category 4 a week earlier than any storm of that strength ever observed, breaking a record set by Hurricane Dennis in the hyperactive 2005 storm season. It also became the fastest-strengthening storm on record before the month of September.
This kind of early-season activity in the area is a strong predictor of a large tally of tropical storms by late fall, he said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in May predicted 17 to 25 tropical storms would form in the Atlantic basin this year – approaching the record 27 named storms that developed in 2005.
Beryl continues churning through the Caribbean Sea, and its long-term track is uncertain. Still, the hurricane prompted coastal U.S. residents to prepare.
In Pinellas County, Fla., Emergency Management Director Cathie Perkins said dire hurricane season forecasts have prompted hundreds of people to attend community expos on hurricane risks in recent weeks. Now, Beryl is a reminder of how quickly a storm can intensify from a tropical storm to a major hurricane, and of how important it is to prepare, she said.
“With these rapid intensification storms, it cuts your time frame down,” Perkins said. “Knowing that the waters were warm this year already, these are the things that we worry about.”
Why more storms could be intense and damaging
How many of those storms dramatically intensify will depend on conditions that naturally vary, including ocean temperatures and wind shear, or differences in wind speed and direction at varying heights. But a baseline of unusual warmth will only encourage stronger storms, scientists said.
NOAA predicted eight to 13 storms likely to become hurricanes, including four to seven “major” hurricanes of at least Category 3, with maximum sustained winds of between 111 to 129 mph.
“Will all the storms be intense? Possibly not,” said Marjahn Finlayson, a climate scientist from the Bahamas. “But will we see more major hurricanes this year compared to other years? That is very likely.”
For example, meteorologists are watching another tropical system in the central Atlantic that could follow a similar path as Beryl. But after Beryl churned through that part of the tropics, much of the energy that allowed it to strengthen has since dissipated, Kirtman said.
It’s too early to say if perhaps some short-lived conditions contributed to Beryl’s intensity that may be less present with other storms, he added. But the larger picture in the tropics remains conducive to cyclone formation, and it will probably become more so, he said.
Along with normal summer warming, a La Niña climate pattern is likely to develop by late summer or early fall. La Niña is known for encouraging Atlantic hurricanes because it tends to reduce wind shear.
“My sense is that we’re going to see more stronger storms this year,” Kirtman said. “This is just the beginning.”
On top of that, those storms could also wreak more damage than normal as a consequence of another disaster linked to global warming: coral death. As temperatures surged higher than ever observed last summer, corals across the world’s third-largest reef in Florida struggled to survive a heat wave so intense, scientists had to expand their scale for coral bleaching.
Coral reefs act as barriers for storm surge, providing protection on land from a windblown rise in water levels. If large swaths of reefs are now dead, that barrier may be weakened, Finlayson said.
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Washington Post
Washington Post
Scott Dance
Published Jul 03, 2024 • 5 minute read
When Hurricane Beryl strengthened into the Atlantic Ocean’s earliest Category 5 storm on record, it did so some two months ahead of the heart of hurricane season.
More storms typically form and intensify by August and September because that’s when Atlantic waters are warmest, loaded with storm-fueling energy from a summer of sunshine. But Beryl strengthened in Caribbean waters that were as hot as they normally are in mid-September, just as the calendar turned to July.
Its record-shattering intensification, occurring earlier in the year than any storm before it, is an early sign of the historically stormy year scientists have been warning about. Off-the-charts warmth that has dominated Atlantic waters for more than a year was a key factor in early seasonal forecasts – and was integral to Beryl’s extraordinary development.
In the United States, officials closely watching the forecast said the storm stirred a sense of urgency. And in the Caribbean, the storm prompted immediate calls for action on climate change. Human burning of fossil fuels has warmed the planet about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 150 years, and along with a recent episode of the planet-warming El Niño climate pattern, has pushed the world’s oceans to dramatic and sustained warmth since early 2023.
Beryl is “clear and overwhelming evidence of the fact that we are constantly facing an existential threat to our way of life,” said Dickon Mitchell, the prime minister of Grenada. He called on other nations to “move past the talking” and help island dwellers weather the “ever-present threat that they have created.”
Not all storms will become behemoths like Beryl over the next few months, meteorologists said, stressing that short-lived meteorological conditions can dampen storm activity, or instigate it. But the hurricane has underscored the ways the stage is set for other storms to undergo similarly explosive development.
Another warning of what may come: Many of the records Beryl is breaking were set in 2005, a year of unprecedented hurricane frequency and of devastating storms such as Hurricane Katrina.
“All signs are hinting that this season is going to rival 2005,” said Ben Kirtman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami.
Conditions are ‘far more conducive than normal’ for hurricanes
Beryl is an extraordinary storm for not only how early it intensified, but also where. In previous years, early storm activity in the area where this one developed has been a reliable indicator of a busy hurricane season, said Philip Klotzbach, who studies hurricanes at Colorado State University.
When it strengthened into a Category 4 storm, Beryl was in the middle of the tropical Atlantic. At this time of year in that part of the ocean – an area at the center of what is known as the main development region for hurricanes – cyclones rarely organize or strengthen much until they move farther west or north. That’s because relatively cool waters, an abundance of Saharan dust or dry air all tend to limit early-season storm activity anywhere east of the longitude of places such as the Bahamas, Cuba and Jamaica, Klotzbach said.
But none of those factors stopped Beryl. It shows that “environmental conditions are far more conducive than normal” for hurricanes, Klotzbach said.
Beryl strengthened into Category 4 a week earlier than any storm of that strength ever observed, breaking a record set by Hurricane Dennis in the hyperactive 2005 storm season. It also became the fastest-strengthening storm on record before the month of September.
This kind of early-season activity in the area is a strong predictor of a large tally of tropical storms by late fall, he said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in May predicted 17 to 25 tropical storms would form in the Atlantic basin this year – approaching the record 27 named storms that developed in 2005.
Beryl continues churning through the Caribbean Sea, and its long-term track is uncertain. Still, the hurricane prompted coastal U.S. residents to prepare.
In Pinellas County, Fla., Emergency Management Director Cathie Perkins said dire hurricane season forecasts have prompted hundreds of people to attend community expos on hurricane risks in recent weeks. Now, Beryl is a reminder of how quickly a storm can intensify from a tropical storm to a major hurricane, and of how important it is to prepare, she said.
“With these rapid intensification storms, it cuts your time frame down,” Perkins said. “Knowing that the waters were warm this year already, these are the things that we worry about.”
Why more storms could be intense and damaging
How many of those storms dramatically intensify will depend on conditions that naturally vary, including ocean temperatures and wind shear, or differences in wind speed and direction at varying heights. But a baseline of unusual warmth will only encourage stronger storms, scientists said.
NOAA predicted eight to 13 storms likely to become hurricanes, including four to seven “major” hurricanes of at least Category 3, with maximum sustained winds of between 111 to 129 mph.
“Will all the storms be intense? Possibly not,” said Marjahn Finlayson, a climate scientist from the Bahamas. “But will we see more major hurricanes this year compared to other years? That is very likely.”
For example, meteorologists are watching another tropical system in the central Atlantic that could follow a similar path as Beryl. But after Beryl churned through that part of the tropics, much of the energy that allowed it to strengthen has since dissipated, Kirtman said.
It’s too early to say if perhaps some short-lived conditions contributed to Beryl’s intensity that may be less present with other storms, he added. But the larger picture in the tropics remains conducive to cyclone formation, and it will probably become more so, he said.
Along with normal summer warming, a La Niña climate pattern is likely to develop by late summer or early fall. La Niña is known for encouraging Atlantic hurricanes because it tends to reduce wind shear.
“My sense is that we’re going to see more stronger storms this year,” Kirtman said. “This is just the beginning.”
On top of that, those storms could also wreak more damage than normal as a consequence of another disaster linked to global warming: coral death. As temperatures surged higher than ever observed last summer, corals across the world’s third-largest reef in Florida struggled to survive a heat wave so intense, scientists had to expand their scale for coral bleaching.
Coral reefs act as barriers for storm surge, providing protection on land from a windblown rise in water levels. If large swaths of reefs are now dead, that barrier may be weakened, Finlayson said.
Why Beryl is an early sign of a particularly dangerous hurricane season
More storms typically form and intensify by August and September because that's when Atlantic waters are warmest.
Beryl set to strengthen on approach to Texas due to hot ocean temperatures
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Seth Borenstein
Published Jul 06, 2024 • 4 minute read
With its unprecedented tear through the ultrawarm waters of the southeast Caribbean, Beryl turned meteorologists’ worst fears of a souped-up hurricane season into grim reality.
Now it’s Texas’s turn.
Beryl hit Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as a Category 2 hurricane on Friday, then weakened to a tropical storm. It’s expected to reach southern Texas by Sunday night or Monday morning, regaining hurricane status as it crosses over the toasty Gulf of Mexico.
National Hurricane Center senior specialist Jack Beven said Beryl is likely to make landfall somewhere between Brownsville and a bit north of Corpus Christi Monday. The hurricane centre forecasts it will hit as a strong Category 1 storm, but wrote “this could be conservative if Beryl stays over water longer” than expected.
The waters in the Gulf of Mexico are warm enough for the early-season storm to rapidly intensify, as it has several times before.
“We should not be surprised if this is rapidly intensifying before landfall and it could become a major hurricane,” said Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters, a former government hurricane meteorologist who flew into storms. “Category 2 may be more likely but we should not dismiss a Category 3 possibility.”
Beven said the official forecast has Beryl gaining 17 to 23 mph in wind speed in 24 hours, but noted the storm intensified more rapidly than forecasters expected earlier in the Caribbean.
“People in southern Texas now need to really keep an eye on the progress of Beryl,” Beven said.
Masters and University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy said hurricane centre forecasters have been very accurate in predicting Beryl’s track so far.
Already three times in its one-week life, Beryl has gained 35 mph in wind speed in 24 hours or less, the official weather service definition of rapid intensification.
The storm zipped from 35 mph to 75 mph on June 28. It went went from 80 mph to 115 mph in the overnight hours of June 29 into June 30 and on July 1 it went from 120 mph to 155 mph in just 15 hours, according to hurricane center records.
Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach, using a different tracking system, said he counted eight different periods when Beryl rapidly intensified — something that has only happened in the Atlantic in July two other times.
MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel doesn’t give Beryl “much of a chance″ for another 35 mph wind speed jump in the Gulf of Mexico, but said it’s a tricky thing to forecast.
Beryl’s explosive growth into an unprecedented early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water the Atlantic and Caribbean are in right now and the figurative hot water the Atlantic hurricane belt can expect for the rest of the storm season, experts said.
The storm smashed various records even before its major hurricane-level winds approached the island of Carriacou in Grenada on Monday.
Beryl set the record for the earliest Category 4 with winds of at least 130 mph (209 kilometers per hour) — the first-ever category 4 in June. It also was the earliest storm to rapidly intensify with wind speeds jumping 63 mph (102 kph) in 24 hours, going from an unnamed depression to a Category 4 in 48 hours.
Colorado State University’s Klotzbach called Beryl a harbinger.
Forecasters predicted months ago it was going to be a nasty year and now they are comparing it to record busy 1933 and deadly 2005 _ the year of Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Dennis.
“This is the type of storm that we expect this year, these outlier things that happen when and where they shouldn’t,” University of Miami’s McNoldy said. “Not only for things to form and intensify and reach higher intensities, but increase the likelihood of rapid intensification.”
Warm water acts as fuel for the thunderstorms and clouds that form hurricanes. The warmer the water and thus the air at the bottom of the storm, the better the chance it will rise higher in the atmosphere and create deeper thunderstorms, said the University at Albany’s Kristen Corbosiero.
“So when you get all that heat energy you can expect some fireworks,” Masters said.
Atlantic waters have been record warm since April 2023. Klotzbach said a high pressure system that normally sets up cooling trade winds collapsed then and hasn’t returned.
Corbosiero said scientists are debating what exactly climate change does to hurricanes, but have come to an agreement that it makes them more prone to rapidly intensifying, as Beryl did, and increase the strongest storms, like Beryl.
Emanuel said the slowdown of Atlantic ocean currents, likely caused by climate change, may also be a factor in the warm water.
A brewing La Nina, which is a slight cooling of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, also may be a factor. Experts say La Nina tends to depress high altitude crosswinds that decapitate hurricanes.
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Seth Borenstein
Published Jul 06, 2024 • 4 minute read
With its unprecedented tear through the ultrawarm waters of the southeast Caribbean, Beryl turned meteorologists’ worst fears of a souped-up hurricane season into grim reality.
Now it’s Texas’s turn.
Beryl hit Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as a Category 2 hurricane on Friday, then weakened to a tropical storm. It’s expected to reach southern Texas by Sunday night or Monday morning, regaining hurricane status as it crosses over the toasty Gulf of Mexico.
National Hurricane Center senior specialist Jack Beven said Beryl is likely to make landfall somewhere between Brownsville and a bit north of Corpus Christi Monday. The hurricane centre forecasts it will hit as a strong Category 1 storm, but wrote “this could be conservative if Beryl stays over water longer” than expected.
The waters in the Gulf of Mexico are warm enough for the early-season storm to rapidly intensify, as it has several times before.
“We should not be surprised if this is rapidly intensifying before landfall and it could become a major hurricane,” said Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters, a former government hurricane meteorologist who flew into storms. “Category 2 may be more likely but we should not dismiss a Category 3 possibility.”
Beven said the official forecast has Beryl gaining 17 to 23 mph in wind speed in 24 hours, but noted the storm intensified more rapidly than forecasters expected earlier in the Caribbean.
“People in southern Texas now need to really keep an eye on the progress of Beryl,” Beven said.
Masters and University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy said hurricane centre forecasters have been very accurate in predicting Beryl’s track so far.
Already three times in its one-week life, Beryl has gained 35 mph in wind speed in 24 hours or less, the official weather service definition of rapid intensification.
The storm zipped from 35 mph to 75 mph on June 28. It went went from 80 mph to 115 mph in the overnight hours of June 29 into June 30 and on July 1 it went from 120 mph to 155 mph in just 15 hours, according to hurricane center records.
Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach, using a different tracking system, said he counted eight different periods when Beryl rapidly intensified — something that has only happened in the Atlantic in July two other times.
MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel doesn’t give Beryl “much of a chance″ for another 35 mph wind speed jump in the Gulf of Mexico, but said it’s a tricky thing to forecast.
Beryl’s explosive growth into an unprecedented early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water the Atlantic and Caribbean are in right now and the figurative hot water the Atlantic hurricane belt can expect for the rest of the storm season, experts said.
The storm smashed various records even before its major hurricane-level winds approached the island of Carriacou in Grenada on Monday.
Beryl set the record for the earliest Category 4 with winds of at least 130 mph (209 kilometers per hour) — the first-ever category 4 in June. It also was the earliest storm to rapidly intensify with wind speeds jumping 63 mph (102 kph) in 24 hours, going from an unnamed depression to a Category 4 in 48 hours.
Colorado State University’s Klotzbach called Beryl a harbinger.
Forecasters predicted months ago it was going to be a nasty year and now they are comparing it to record busy 1933 and deadly 2005 _ the year of Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Dennis.
“This is the type of storm that we expect this year, these outlier things that happen when and where they shouldn’t,” University of Miami’s McNoldy said. “Not only for things to form and intensify and reach higher intensities, but increase the likelihood of rapid intensification.”
Warm water acts as fuel for the thunderstorms and clouds that form hurricanes. The warmer the water and thus the air at the bottom of the storm, the better the chance it will rise higher in the atmosphere and create deeper thunderstorms, said the University at Albany’s Kristen Corbosiero.
“So when you get all that heat energy you can expect some fireworks,” Masters said.
Atlantic waters have been record warm since April 2023. Klotzbach said a high pressure system that normally sets up cooling trade winds collapsed then and hasn’t returned.
Corbosiero said scientists are debating what exactly climate change does to hurricanes, but have come to an agreement that it makes them more prone to rapidly intensifying, as Beryl did, and increase the strongest storms, like Beryl.
Emanuel said the slowdown of Atlantic ocean currents, likely caused by climate change, may also be a factor in the warm water.
A brewing La Nina, which is a slight cooling of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, also may be a factor. Experts say La Nina tends to depress high altitude crosswinds that decapitate hurricanes.
Beryl set to strengthen on approach to Texas due to hot ocean temperatures
With its tear through the waters of the Caribbean, Beryl turned meteorologists' worst fears of souped-up hurricane season into grim reality
Canada’s ambassador for climate change has charged $254,000 in travel expenses in less than two years on the job.
Catherine Stewart billed for stays at luxury hotels ranging up to $623 a night, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, citing access to information records because climate change.
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault appointed Stewart to the role on Aug. 2, 2022, saying she had done “exemplary work” as assistant deputy environment minister.
According to Blacklock’s, from day one Stewart went on international trips including to Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Bali, Beijing, Bern, Brasilia, Brussels, Cairo, Copenhagen, Delhi, Florence, Geneva and Helsinki.
She also visited Istanbul, Kinshasa, Leipzig, Lisbon, London, Milan, Mumbai, Munich, New York City, Paris, Rome, Sao Paulo, Sharm El-Sheikh, Vienna, Washington and Zurich.
Expenses included business class airfare, and she travelled by air even when train service was available because…climate change?
Last year she flew from Ottawa to Toronto to attend a climate conference “to promote Canada’s clean growth.” The trip cost $10,096 including airfare and $323 a night at the Sheraton Centre Hotel.
Stewart also routinely flew from Ottawa to New York City rather than take the train, and the records show she frequently stayed at luxury hotels…climate change, etc…
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Her charges included the Hotel Mercure in Rome at $390 per night, Hotel Maria Theresia in Vienna at $454 per night, and Amsterdam’s Manor Hotel at $551 per night.
In 2023, Stewart stayed at London’s Club Quarters Hotel at Trafalgar Square for $412 a night during a trip for “carbon pricing outreach.”
“In-person outreach was required to have candid conversations,” wrote the department, adding travel was required to “showcase Canada’s leadership.”
A 2023 visit to Berlin was also deemed essential. “Ambassador Stewart engaged in outreach to advance the Prime Minister’s global carbon pricing challenge,” wrote the department.
Catherine Stewart billed for stays at luxury hotels ranging up to $623 a night, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, citing access to information records because climate change.
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault appointed Stewart to the role on Aug. 2, 2022, saying she had done “exemplary work” as assistant deputy environment minister.
According to Blacklock’s, from day one Stewart went on international trips including to Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Bali, Beijing, Bern, Brasilia, Brussels, Cairo, Copenhagen, Delhi, Florence, Geneva and Helsinki.
She also visited Istanbul, Kinshasa, Leipzig, Lisbon, London, Milan, Mumbai, Munich, New York City, Paris, Rome, Sao Paulo, Sharm El-Sheikh, Vienna, Washington and Zurich.
Expenses included business class airfare, and she travelled by air even when train service was available because…climate change?
Last year she flew from Ottawa to Toronto to attend a climate conference “to promote Canada’s clean growth.” The trip cost $10,096 including airfare and $323 a night at the Sheraton Centre Hotel.
Stewart also routinely flew from Ottawa to New York City rather than take the train, and the records show she frequently stayed at luxury hotels…climate change, etc…
Canada’s ambassador for climate change racks up travel expenses — Toronto Sun
Last year she flew from Ottawa to Toronto to attend a climate conference
In 2023, Stewart stayed at London’s Club Quarters Hotel at Trafalgar Square for $412 a night during a trip for “carbon pricing outreach.”
“In-person outreach was required to have candid conversations,” wrote the department, adding travel was required to “showcase Canada’s leadership.”
A 2023 visit to Berlin was also deemed essential. “Ambassador Stewart engaged in outreach to advance the Prime Minister’s global carbon pricing challenge,” wrote the department.
You realize your government official act like Bob and Doug McKenzie left in charge of the shop and raiding the petty-cash box to buy beer, right?
Your whole damn government is a kleptocracy. Makes ours look like paragons of thrift and responsibility.
'Course, that's easier now that our officials are allowed to accept "gratuities."
Your whole damn government is a kleptocracy. Makes ours look like paragons of thrift and responsibility.
'Course, that's easier now that our officials are allowed to accept "gratuities."
Our gratuities come from the taxpayer. It’s not like they’re going to get voted in again, etc… not anytime soon anyway…
Oh! Well, then, might as well snag some office supplies and a bag of cash or two on the way out the door!