Weeks after Canada baked in desert-like temperatures and western US records melted in multitudes, five “heat domes” have formed, spawning what the Washington Post described as an “infestation of heatwaves”. The Los Angeles Times opined about a “hell on earth” as wildfires erupted in the US.

But the intense weather hasn’t been confined to heat. Germany and neighbouring parts of Europe last week copped months’ worth of rain in a day.

Zhengzhou, a city of 10 million people in central China’s Henan province, was swamped by a year’s rain over four days to Tuesday, turning roads into raging rivers and drowning at least a dozen subway rail commuters.

Researchers say that assessing the role the warming planet has played in exacerbating these extremes will take time.

Some basic connections are well understood, such as global temperatures have warmed about one degree over the past century and for Australia, the increase is 1.4 degrees.

With the atmosphere capable of holding 7 per cent more moisture per degree of heating, that means there’s more rain available that can be potentially dumped on populations and ecosystems below.

“It’s no longer about climate change, it’s about weather change,” Christian Jakob, an atmospheric scientist at Monash University, said. “The warming of our planet is changing the dynamics of high-impact weather events, and as we have seen just recently, with potentially dramatic consequences.”

Professor Jakob says the focus of climate modelling has largely been to project long-term changes, such as how many degrees the world will heat by the end of the century, based on various scenarios of how much more greenhouse gas emissions we pump into the atmosphere.

However, as these recent weeks have shown, too little is understood about what might happen to the peak of heatwaves, say, or the most torrential of thunderstorms.

“While our overall expectation is that in a warmer world we will see an increase in such events, the details of where, when and how remain elusive,” Professor Jakob said.

Andrew King, a Climate Extremes Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, said while heatwaves and flooding are a feature of every summer, “what we’ve seen this year has been exceptional in many ways”.

“The temperature records in western North America were a long way off the charts,” Dr King said. “The devastating floods in parts of Europe were unusual and these events in general highlight how we need to build much greater resilience to extremes that will become more common as the world continues to warm.”

One large-scale shift that scientists are interested in is the apparent slowing of weather systems that cause a high-pressure, creating a so-called “heat dome” or rain event to linger over a region.

One potential culprit is the warming Arctic, which is heating at three times the global average, and is an important influence on northern hemisphere weather even at lower latitudes, Dr King said. Research is limited so far but the clues are there.

“Warming over the Arctic and a reduced temperature gradient from the equator to the North Pole may mean that the jet stream and associated weather patterns at the surface stay in the same locations for longer,” he said. “This could lead to heat building up over longer periods and more persistent heavy rain events that lead to worsening floods.”

READ MORE:

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/how-the-dynamics-of-a-heating-planet-are-driving-extreme-weather-20210722-p58c1c.html

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SEE ALSO: https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

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By 2100

about one billion people would have been displaced by rising sea level.

30 per cent of countries would be uninhabitable unless all life is “indoors"

Crops would be in “cooling” tents.

25 per cent of animals and plants would have become extinct

45 per cent of the rest of nature would be on the endangered list

5 billion people would be suffering from heat and then cold — and heat again.

Most major cities at sea level would need sea barriers and locks to cater for a six/seven metre sea level rise by 2200. note: if present global warming goes the full hog by 2350, be prepared for a rise of 75 metres above present sea level (by 2500).

Major hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones would “regularly” destroy cities and raise flat lands. 

Food would become scarce thus very expensive

The insurance industry would have collapsed.

Crime would be rampant. Social pandemonium would be hard to control even with the best of armies and police.

——————————

Is this the future?… Under the present pandemic, consider that had this happened in the 1970s:

No internet, no Zoom. No real understanding of dealing with the pandemic. TV, radio and newspapers the only one-way style of communications. No possibility of “reply”, comment and express public opinion but street protests and spruikers on street corners. Depressed people everywhere... Crime...

Am I insane?

From Germany to Canada to China, dramatic pictures of the severe impacts of extreme weather have been dominating the news in recent weeks. Is the climate crisis to blame?

See more:

https://www.dw.com/en/in-pictures-deadly-extreme-weather-shocks-the-world/g-58610512

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A tropical storm could make landfall on Japan’s main island on Tuesday, the weather agency said, as Olympic organizers said they had no plans to reschedule events beyond those already moved.

But because Tropical Storm Nepartak is expected to move west and approach east and northeastern Japan, some Olympic events may be affected by the weather, with the Meteorological Agency warning of heavy rain, winds and high waves.

The eighth storm of the year was moving northwest at about 30 kph in the Pacific as of 3 p.m. Monday. It had an atmospheric pressure of 992 hectopascals at its center and was packing wind gusts of up to 108 kph.

Rainfall of up to 150 millimeters is projected for the Tohoku region and 100 mm for the Kanto-Koshin region, including Tokyo, in the 24 hours through noon Tuesday.

The Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games said that it currently plans to hold Tuesday’s events as scheduled, except for rowing and archery, which have already been rescheduled to avoid possible disruption.

“We’d like to secure the safety of all people related to the event. We will notify as soon as possible if any changes are made,” said Masanori Takaya, an official of the organizing committee.

Read more:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/07/26/national/tropical-storm-tuesday-landfall/

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By Paul Voosen    Jul. 27, 2021 , 4:50 PM

Next month, after a yearlong delay because of the pandemic, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will begin to release its first major assessment of human-caused global warming since 2013. The report, the first part of which will appear on 9 August, will drop on a world that has starkly changed in 8 years, warming by more than 0.3°C to nearly 1.3°C above preindustrial levels. Weather has grown more severe, seas are measurably higher, and mountain glaciers and polar ice have shrunk sharply. And after years of limited action, many countries, pushed by a concerned public and corporations, seem willing to curb their carbon emissions.

But as climate scientists face this alarming reality, the climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist. Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Ahead of each major IPCC report, the world’s climate modeling centers run a set of scenarios for the future, calculating how different global emissions paths will alter the climate. These raw results, compiled in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), then feed directly into the IPCC report. The results live on as other scientists use them to assess the impacts of climate change, insurance companies and financial institutions forecast effects on economies and infrastructure, and economists calculate the true cost of carbon emissions, says Jean-François Lamarque, a lead climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and CMIP’s new director. “This is not an ivory tower type of exercise.”

In the past, most models projected a “climate sensitivity”—the warming expected when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is doubled over preindustrial times—of between 2°C and 4.5°C. Last year, a landmark paper that largely eschewed models and instead used documented factors including ongoing warming trends calculated a likely climate sensitivity of between 2.6°C and 3.9°C. But many of the new models from leading centers showed warming of more than 5°C—uncomfortably outside these bounds.

The models were also out of step with records of past climate. For example, scientists used the new model from NCAR to simulate the coldest point of the most recent ice age, 20,000 years ago. Extensive paleoclimate records suggest Earth cooled nearly 6°C compared with preindustrial times, but the model, fed with low ice age CO2 levels, had temperatures plummeting by nearly twice that much, suggesting it was far too sensitive to the ups and downs of CO2. “That is clearly outside the range of what the geological data indicate,” says Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the work, which appeared in Geophysical Research Letters. “It’s totally out there.”

To find out why, modelers probed the guts of the simulations, focusing on their representation of clouds, long the wild card of climate change. The models can’t simulate clouds directly, so they rely on known physics and observations to estimate cloud properties and behavior. In previous models ice crystals made up more of the low clouds in the midlatitudes of the southern Pacific Ocean and elsewhere than satellite observations seemed to justify. Ice crystals reflect less sunlight than water droplets, so as these clouds heated and the ice melted, they became more reflective and caused cooling. The new models start with more realistic clouds containing more supercooled water, which allows other dynamics driven by warming—the penetration of dry air from above and a subduing of turbulence—to thin the clouds.

But that fix has allowed scientists to spy another bias previously countered by the faulty cooling trend. In both the old and new climate models, the patchy cumulus clouds that form in the tropics thin out in response to warming, allowing in more heat than satellite observations suggest, according to a study by Timothy Myers, a cloud scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Even though one feature of the climate is now more realistic, another that’s persistently biased has been revealed,” Myers says.

By the time modelers exposed that bias, the supercomputing runs were already done and the IPCC report was nearing completion. And many of the hot models otherwise simulate the climate extremely well overall, doing a better job than their predecessors at capturing atmospheric connections between remote ocean basins and the distribution of rainfall. “You want a way you can use those models for what they have without getting stuck with their climate sensitivity,” Schmidt says.

So the IPCC team will probably use reality—the actual warming of the world over the past few decades—to constrain the CMIP projections. Several papers have shown how doing so can reduce the uncertainty of the model projections by half, and lower their most extreme projections. For 2100, in a worst-case scenario, that would reduce a raw 5°C of projected warming over 1986–2005 levels to 4.2°C. It’s good news for the modelers—but also a clear, and dismaying, sign that global warming has gone on long enough to help chart its own path, says Aurélien Ribes, a climate scientist at France’s National Centre for Meteorological Research. “Observations now provide a clear view for what climate change will be.”

The IPCC report is also likely to present the spatial impacts of different amounts of warming—2°C, 3°C, 4°C—rather than saying how quickly those impacts will be felt. That heat-based technique worked well in an interim IPCC report in 2018, on the impacts of 1.5°C of warming, and would preserve good information from the hot models, even if they suggest these thresholds will come too soon.

The modelers hope to do better next time around. Lamarque says they may test new simulations against recent paleoclimates, not just historical warming, while building them. He also suggests that the development process could benefit from more time, with updates every decade or so rather than the current report interval of every 7 years. And it could be helpful to divide the modeling process in two, with one track focused on scientific experimentation—when a large range of climate sensitivities is helpful—and the other on providing a best estimate to policymakers. “It’s not easy to reconcile these two approaches under a single entity,” Lamarque says.

A cadre of researchers dedicated to the task of translating the models into useful projections could also help, says Angeline Pendergrass, a climate scientist at Cornell University who helped develop one technique for weighting the model results by their accuracy and independence. “It’s an actual job to go between the basic science and the tools I’m messing around with,” she says.

For now, policymakers and other researchers need to avoid putting too much stock in the unconstrained extreme warming the latest models predict, says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and one of the leaders of CMIP’s climate projections. Getting that message out will be a challenge. “These issues don’t translate very well in practice,” she says. “It’s going to be hard for people looking to make some projection of a water basin in the West to make sense of it.”

Already scientific papers are appearing using CMIP’s unconstrained worst-case scenarios for 2100, adding fire to what are already well-justified fears. But that practice needs to change, Schmidt says. “You end up with numbers for even the near-term that are insanely scary—and wrong.”

Read more:

Science (magazine)

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Some people still push an agenda of wait and see to do anything about "climate change" until the arse of the earth is on fire... They are not full denialists per se, but they are like mitigating factors retardants... Below is an article from a CONservative media outlet (RealClear) that is doing exactly this: wait for the next season of bushfires and forest fires to say: "IT'S NOT HOT ENOUGH YET to declare global warming"... (read from top). As mentioned, one heat bubble is bad enough, but four or five AT THE SAME TIME in the northern hemisphere is one in a million without climate change. We're likely to get the same again in 2023 (according to Gus, 2021 is up-there with the warmests, while 2022 could be a notch down, with 2023 being another "record" year)... Anyway, we need to know what the skeptics argue wrongly about — SNEAKILY. They also go for the old furphy of climate scientists not being able to distinguish between "weather and climate" (a difference we have tackled many times on this site). Here we go in bullshit territory: 

The Pacific Northwest was hit with a record-shattering heat wave in June, with temperatures over 35 degrees higher than normal in some places. On June 28, Portland, Ore., reached 116 degrees. Late last week the region suffered another blast of hot weather, with a high in Portland of 103 degrees. The New York Times didn’t hesitate to pronounce the region’s bouts of extreme weather proof that the climate wasn’t just changing, but catastrophically so.

To make that claim, the Times relied on a “consortium of climate experts” that calls itself World Weather Attribution, a group organized not just to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, but to do so quickly. Within days of the June heat wave, the researchers released an analysis, declaring that the torrid spell “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

World Weather Attribution and its alarming report were trumpeted by Time magazine, touted by the NOAA website  Climate.gov , and featured by CBS News, CNBC, Scientific American, CNN, the Washington Post, USAToday, and the New York Times, among others.

The group’s claim that global warming was to blame was perhaps less significant than the speed with which that conclusion was provided to the media. Previous efforts to tie extreme weather events to climate change hadn’t had the impact scientists had hoped for, according to Time, because it “wasn’t producing results fast enough to get attention from people outside the climate science world.”

“Being able to confidently say that a given weather disaster was caused by climate change while said event still has the world’s attention,” Time explained, approvingly, “can be an enormously useful tool to convince leaders, lawmakers and others that climate change is a threat that must be addressed.” In other words, the value of rapid attribution is primarily political, not scientific.

Inconveniently for World Weather Attribution, an atmospheric scientist with extensive knowledge of the Pacific Northwest climate was actively running weather models that accurately predicted the heatwave. Cliff Mass rejected the notion that global warming was to blame for the scorching temperatures. He calculated that global warming might have been responsible for two degrees of the near 40-degree anomaly. With or without climate change, Mass wrote, the region “still would have experienced the most severe heat wave of the past century.”

Mass has no shortage of credentials relevant to the issue: A professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, he is author of the book “The Weather of the Pacific Northwest.”

Mass took on the World Weather Attribution group directly: “Unfortunately, there are serious flaws in their approach.” According to Mass, the heatwave was the result of “natural variability.” The models being used by the international group lacked the “resolution to correctly simulate critical intense, local precipitation features,” and “they generally use unrealistic greenhouse gas emissions.”

WWA issued a “rebuttal” calling Mass’ criticisms “misleading and incorrect.” But the gauntlet thrown down by Mass did seem to affect WWA’s confidence in its claims. The group, which had originally declared the heatwave would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,” altered its tone. In subsequent public statements, it emphasized that it had merely been making “best estimates” and had presented them “with the appropriate caveats and uncertainties.” Scientists with the attribution group did not respond to questions about Mass’s criticisms posed by RealClearInvestigations.

But what of the group’s basic mission, the attribution of individual weather events to climate change? Hasn’t it been a fundamental rule of discussing extreme temperatures in a given place not to conflate weather with climate? Weather, it is regularly pointed out, refers to conditions during a short time in a limited area; climate is said to describe longer-term atmospheric patterns over large areas.

When Donald Trump joked, on a cold day, that he could go for some global warming, he was chastised for confusing weather with climate. The director of Yale University's project on climate change communication, Anthony Leiserowitz, denounced Trump’s comment as "scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false."

"There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is," Leiserowitz added. "What's going on in one small corner of the world at a given moment does not reflect what's going on with the planet."

Until recently, at least, climate scientists long warned against using individual weather events to ponder the existence or otherwise of global warming. Typically, that argument is used to respond to those who might argue a spate of extreme cold is reason to doubt the planet is warming. Using individual weather events to say anything about the climate is “dangerous nonsense,” the New Scientist warned a decade ago.

Perhaps, but it happens all the time now that climate advocates have found it to be an effective tool. In 2019, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found that three-fourths of those polled said their views about climate change had been shaped by extreme weather events. Leah Sprain, in the book “Ethics and Practice in Science Communication,” says that even though it may be legitimate to make the broad claim that climate change “may result in future extreme weather,” when one tries “arguing weather patterns were caused by climate change, things get dicey.” Which creates a tension: “For some communicators, the ultimate goal – mobilizing political action – warrants rhetorical use of extreme weather events.” But that makes scientists nervous, Sprain writes, because “misrepresenting science will undermine the credibility of arguments for climate change.”

Which is exactly what happened with the World Weather Attribution group, according to Mass: “Many of the climate attribution studies are resulting in headlines that are deceptive and result in people coming to incorrect conclusions about the relative roles of global warming and natural variability in current extreme weather,” he wrote at his blog. “Scary headlines and apocalyptic attribution studies needlessly provoke fear."

Covering the back-and-forth between the World Weather Attribution and Mass, the Seattle Times labeled the local atmosphere academic “a controversial figure.” The newspaper noted that “Mass has sometimes gotten into very public disputes with other scientists.” He has also been critical of the news media — “including the Seattle Times,” wrote the Seattle Times — for what he says is alarmist coverage of the climate. The Seattle Times did not respond to questions from RCI.

The newspaper was not wrong that Mass has disagreed with his fellow climate scientists. He didn’t hesitate to take on any and all comers at the Real Climate blog. But he doesn’t think that should make him controversial. “Science is all about conflict,” Mass has said. “Somebody has an idea; and then someone else criticizes it.”

Mass also counts as “controversial” because he spoke out last summer against the rioting and looting taking place nightly in Seattle. A recurring segment he had on Tacoma public radio was canceled after Mass – on his own blog, not on the radio —  likened the shattering of glass in Seattle to the shattered glass of Kristallnacht, the Nazi anti-Semitic pogrom.

The blogging professor laments that atmospheric sciences have been “poisoned” by politics. “It’s damaged climate science,” he told RCI.

And not just politics – Mass also says that the accepted tenets of global warming have become a sort of religion. Consider the language used, he says, such as the question of whether one “believes” in anthropogenic climate change. “You don’t believe in gravity,” he says. The religious metaphor also explains why colleagues get so bent out of shape with him, Mass says: “There’s nothing worse than an apostate priest.”

That goes even for those who are merely mild apostates. Mass doesn’t dispute warming, he merely questions how big a problem it is. “We need to worry about climate change,” he has said. “But hype and exaggeration of its impacts only undermine the potential for effective action.”

Read more:

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/08/17/

BRILLIANT "MODERATE" BULLSHIT...

RealClearPolitics (RCP) is an American political news website and polling data aggregator formed in 2000 by former options trader John McIntyre and former advertising agency account executive Tom Bevan.[2][3][4][5] The site features selected political news stories and op-eds from various news publications in addition to commentary from its own contributors.[6][3] The site is prominent during election seasons for its aggregation of polling data.[7][8][9]

Since the end of 2017, RealClearPolitics has had a rightward, pro-Trump turn in its content.[10] According to a 2020 Knight Foundation study, RealClearPolitics is generally read by a moderate audience, leaning slightly toward the right.[11]

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealClearPolitics

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