El Niño exacerbates global warming: Record heat, flooding, wildfires

If you feel like record-breaking severe weather events are happening at an alarming pace, you’re not alone. Scientists say it’s not your imagination.

“It seems that the number of simultaneous weather extremes we’re seeing right now in the Northern Hemisphere exceeds anything at least in my memory,” Michael MannProfessor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNBC.

worldwide, June was the hottest June in 174-year records The federal agency said Thursday that it is maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This was the 47th consecutive month, and the 532nd month in a row, that average temperatures have been above average in the 20th century.

The amount of sea ice measured in June was the lowest global sea ice on record in June, mainly due to record low sea ice levels in the Antarctic. Also according to NOAA.

There were nine tropical cyclones in June, defined as storms with winds greater than 74 miles per hour. Accumulated global hurricane energy, a measure of the collective duration and strength of tropical storms, was The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said its average value is nearly twice as high for the period 1991-2020 in June..

As of Friday morning, 93 million people in the United States are under severe heat warnings and heat warnings, according to the National Weather Service’s Weather Forecasting Center. Bulletin issued on Friday morning. “A severe heat wave is set to sweep through much of the West Coast, Great Basin and Southwest,” the National Weather Service said.

On June 27, Canada surpassed the record set in 1989 for total area burned in a single season when it reached 7.6 million hectares, or 18.8 million acres. Since then, the total has increased to 9.3 million hectares, or 23 million acres, driven by record high temperatures, which have turned vegetation into fueling wildfires.

Wildfires in Canada have blanketed these records in parts of the United States, causing some of the worst quality in the world at various points.

every year 2022, There was a separate $18 billion Weather and climate disaster events according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including tornado outbreaks, high winds, hailstorms, tropical cyclones, floods, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires. To date, there will be $12 billion in climate and weather disasters in 2023, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“This year will almost certainly break records for the number of extreme weather events,” Paul Ulrichprofessor of regional and global climate modeling at the University of California, Davis, told CNBC.

Scientists said global warming is making extreme weather events more intense.

“Our research shows that the observed trend toward more persistent summertime extreme weather events — heat waves, floods — is being driven by human-caused warming,” Mann told CNBC.

Ulrich agrees. “Increases in the frequency and intensity of heat waves, floods and wildfires can be directly attributed to climate change,” Ulrich told CNBC.

“By emitting greenhouse gases, we’ve trapped more heat near the surface, which leads to a warmer temperature, more moisture in the air, and a drier surface,” Ulrich said. “Scientists are quite confident that the increased frequency and intensity of extreme events is a direct result of human modification of the climate system.”

Also in June, the weather pattern called El Niño arrives.

El Niño is like adding lighter fuel to an already burning fire. “Under recently emerging El Niño conditions, temperatures are being pushed higher around the world, exacerbating temperature increases from greenhouse gas emissions,” Ulrich said.

The combination of human-induced climate change and El Niño “is driving some of these extreme events,” Mann said.

El Niño, which means “little boy” in Spanish, occurs when the normal trade winds that blow west along the equator weaken and push warmer waters eastward toward the west coast of the Americas. In the United States, moderate to strong El Niño in fall and winter is associated with wetter-than-average conditions from southern California to the Gulf Coast, and drier-than-average conditions in the Pacific Northwest and Ohio Valley.

When global warming and El Niño hit at the same time, “it can be difficult to separate what is just a weather event or if it’s part of a longer trend,” she says. Timothy Cantyprofessor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Maryland, told CNBC.

What is clear, however, is that climate change increases the likelihood of a severe weather event.

“Higher temperatures from climate change are indisputable, and with every degree increase, we multiply the changes we get for an extreme heat wave. And in wetter parts of the world, including the northeastern United States, we expect more rain and more It’s very stormy,” Ulrich told CNBC. “To avoid more extreme changes, we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and work to clean up our polluted atmosphere.”

As long as global greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, the trend of extreme weather is expected to continue to become more and more frequent, says Mann.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels will help moderate extreme weather trends.

“The good news is that the latest research shows that the surface warming that leads to more extreme weather events quickly stabilizes when carbon emissions stop,” Mann told CNBC. “So we can prevent all of this from getting worse and worse by removing carbon from the atmosphere.” our economy quickly.

Kante says everyone’s contributions to reducing their climate impact help.

“People have basically asked me, ‘What can I do as a VIP? And it was decided to do nothing and instead blame everyone. Honestly, it was the communities made up of individuals that got us to this point,” Kante said.

Individuals can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by making small changes such as turning off lights when they are not in a room, turning off the heat or air conditioning when they are not home, avoiding food waste and using public transportation.

Voting is also important, Kante said. Government leaders have been able to make successful progress on international environmental crises in the past, Kante said, pointing to the Montreal Protocol. “There is a roadmap for working together to fix environmental problems in ways that benefit everyone,” Kante said.

“Tackling the ozone hole requires governments, scientists, and companies to work together, and the Montreal Protocol and its amendments have been a huge success not only for ozone but for the climate,” Kante said, noting that the same ozone-depleting chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons, are also very bad greenhouse gases. “The ozone hole is slowly recovering and because of the measures taken in the 1980s, we’ve avoided the planet’s worst warming, and we still have conditioners and hair sprays that seemed to be the big panic at the time.”

If individuals and organizations do not commit aggressively to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this severe weather battery is a harbinger of the future.

“If we fail to act, what we see now is just a melting tip,” Mann told CNBC.