extreme weather

Spring not only brings us daffodils and cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., but also occasionally powerful thunderstorms that can knock out power to thousands of homes and businesses.

I live in one of those northern and western suburbs of DC that tend to lose power fairly frequently.

It used to be that one of the few nice things about losing power was the sound of silence. But those days are gone. Now losing power has a new sound: the whirring of the startup of my neighbors’ backup generators.

We need power not only to keep our food from spoiling and protect us from uncomfortable and even dangerous heat, but also to stay connected. As a nation, we are becoming ever more dependent on electronic devices. We cannot survive without our cell phones and computers, let alone our refrigerators and air conditioners. At the same time, climate change threatens the reliability of the grid through more intense heat waves and potentially more powerful storms.

While it’s easy to say we should work to prevent disruption in electricity, how much should we invest to bolster the resilience of the grid? And who should pay?

As Hurricane Sandy moves out of the region, people in affected areas are beginning to take stock of the damage. Flooding in parts of New Jersey and New York from the storm surge hit record levels. The 13.8-foot surge measured at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan surpassed the all-time record of 11.2 feet set in 1821, flooding the New York subway system and two major commuter tunnels.  Along the Eastern Seaboard, an estimated 7.5 million people lost power. Farther inland, blizzard conditions dropped as much as 2 feet of snow as Sandy crashed into arctic air over the Midwest. While early estimates indicate direct damages from the hurricane may be as much as $20 billion, the total economic losses, including losses in consumer and business spending, could be more than twice that amount.

A number of climate change-related factors may well have intensified the storm's impact: higher ocean temperatures, higher sea levels, and an atmospheric traffic jam that may be related to Arctic melting.  Hurricane Sandy is also a clear reminder of how vulnerable our homes and infrastructure already are to extreme weather — and this risk is growing.

A report released this week by two senior members of Congress notes that the unusual number of extreme weather events in 2012 has cost the country billions of dollars and that the unusual frequency of these events is consistent with what scientists have predicted from climate change.

The staff report, “Going to Extremes: Climate Change and the Increasing Risk of Weather Disasters” is from the offices of Reps. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA), the prime movers behind the last attempt at significant climate legislation. It cites information from a variety of sources, including NOAA, the news media and the private sector to show how rising weather risk costs real money.  

Their report comes a week after Congress headed home for the elections having accomplished very little to address climate change. Nearly half the bills introduced by the current Congress would block or hinder climate action, though none of these have been enacted into law.

Today we’re updating our online map providing an overview of extreme weather events in the United States since 1990.  The map highlights memorable examples of extreme heat, heavy precipitation, drought, and wildfire, four types of events with clear trends connected to climate change.

I recently responded to a question on the National Journal blog, "Does climate change cause extreme weather like the heat waves much of the country has been enduring for the past few weeks?"

With the Senate set to vote today on fixes to the ailing National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), a new C2ES brief explains why the program is chronically in debt to the U.S. Treasury, and how to make it solvent. We urge, among other things, that Congress allow federal underwriters to begin taking into account rising flood risk due to climate change.

The 44-year-old federally-backed NFIP covers 5.6 million American households and more than $1 trillion in assets in flood-prone areas along rivers and coasts. Flooding is not an easy risk to insure, so historically private insurers chose not to. But in assuming that role, the NFIP has at times served to encourage rather than contain risk, and has racked up $18 billion in debt in the process.

The U.S. has just come through the warmest spring on record—indeed, the warmest 12-month stretch since record-keeping began.

With headlines like “Warmest spring heats up economy,” readers weary of bad economic news might be forgiven for thinking that a little global warming is not such a bad thing. But the warming we’ve experienced globally over the past 30 years is more than “a little.” And in the U.S., it’s likely contributing to drought and wildfires in the West and more extreme weather nationwide.  

This past May came in as the second warmest on record globally, trailing only May of 2010. For land area only, it was the warmest on record, at 2.18 degrees F above average. It was also the 36th consecutive May, going back to 1976, with global temperatures above the 20th-century average.  

Back in November the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the executive summary for a “special report” called Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX for shorthand). Today, the IPCC released the full technical report that underlies the executive summary. In addition to documenting the scientific evidence that extreme weather events are on the rise, the report provides a risk-based analysis of how society can best respond to the climate threat. In the words of Chris Field, co-chair of one of the two working groups that produced the report:

“The main message from the report is that we know enough to make good decisions about managing the risks of climate-related disasters. Sometimes we take advantage of this knowledge, but many times we do not.  The challenge for the future has one dimension focused on improving the knowledge base and one on empowering good decisions, even for those situations where there is lots of uncertainty.”