FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Take a Disaster Tour of Climate Change Right Now

A record-breaking nationwide heat wave, juggernaut wildfires in the Southwest, and an Arctic ice cap that's melting faster than ever—last week offered up a visceral portrait of the face of climate change. It was hard to look away as more and more...
Do your best Brian Williams impression: “American. Heatwave.” Image: USDAgov

A record-breaking nationwide heat wave, juggernaut wildfires in the Southwest, and an Arctic ice cap that’s melting faster than ever—last week offered up a visceral portrait of the ass-ugly face of climate change. It was hard to look away as more and more details—charts, photos, videos—whipped through my RSS and Twitter feeds.

So let’s take a little digital disaster tour. This, friends and lovers, is what climate change looks like:

Advertisement

Heat Waves

That’s a map of U.S. surface temps at 4 pm last Friday, the 29th. As you can see, the heatwave stretched from California to Massachusetts, ushering record temperatures across the country. The heat wave was largely responsible for the misery in the east—record heat gave way to violent storms, so you sweltered as you sat for hours without power if you live in D.C., Viriginia, and beyond. It was enough to get the meteorologists talking global warming. Here’s NBC:

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the period of January to May was the warmest on record for Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Nebraska. And here’s Dr. Jeff Masters, tallying up some of the record temps (via Climate Progress)

109° Columbia, SC (old record 107° on two previous occasions)
109° Cairo, IL (old record 106° on 8/9/1930)
108° Paducah, KY (ties same on 7/17/1942
106° Chattanooga, TN (ties same on 7/28/1952)
105° Raleigh, NC (ties same on 8/21/2007 and 8/18/1988)
105° Greenville, SC (old record 104° 8/10/2007 although 106° was recorded by the Signal Service in July 1887)
104° Charlotte, NC (ties same on 8/9 and 10/2007 and 9/6/1954)

As Colorado State Climatologist Nolan Doesken told the Coloradoan, 2012, with its driest-on-record spring, is extraordinary. "You sit there and say, well if this is the warmest and driest for that time period, what can we blame that on?" he said. At the start of the decade, he points out, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change predicted that global warming would produce early snowmelt and drier conditions across the Southwest, tying that to more frequent and larger wildfires across the region.

Advertisement

"Extremes happen independent of climate change, but they would happen more often if the word of the climate scientists is held up, and the data we're seeing so far with 2002 and 2012 not far apart says, well, you gotta at least perk up and pay attention," Doesken said.

Wildfires

The record fire season in Colorado has relented some, but wildfires are still raging throughout the Southwest. The unusually hot and dry weather fed those fires, and we should be pretty comfortable counting climate change as a distal cause of the carnage. Warming created the conditions so amenable to monster forest fires; as our friendly neighborhood NBC meteorologist noted above, we wouldn’t be seeing action on this scale without it.

Here, you can see the wildfires from space, courtesy of NASA:

And closer up, from a helicopter:

And these blazes are sweeping through the rest of the region, too. Here’s a USGS before and after shot of the Gladiator fire in Arizana:

Folks are returning to their homes now, or what’s left of them—but this won’t be an irregular occurrence for long.

Melting Arctic

And then there’s the Arctic. It’s melting at a record rate, as we speak.

What you’re looking at hear is the decline in Greenland’s reflectivity—as its snow melts, it deflects less sunlight, and absorbs more, further speeding warming. As you can see, it’s melting more, and absorbing a hell of a lot more than in years past. Or, as Climate Central puts it: “new findings show that the reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet, particularly the high-elevation areas where snow typically accumulates year-round, have reached a record low since records began in 2000. This indicates that the ice sheet is absorbing more energy than normal, potentially leading to another record melt year — just two years after the 2010 record melt season.”

Melt leads to calving, as you can see taking place just a couple weeks ago on the Hubbard glacier that stretches between Canada and Alaska:

Thus concludes our tour for now, but fear not—next week will bring more gruesome weather.