Florence and Mangkhut Deliver 1-2 Punch
Simultaneous hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut noted in New Zealand media.
Are we getting the message yet? Super cyclones simultaneously hit the United States and China over the weekend. Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut respectively ravaged the Southeastern U.S. and China, with strong winds and severe flooding. The double whammy was perfectly aligned on opposite sides of the northern hemisphere, at the summer peak of the annual heat cycle.
The timing was notable or ironic as world leaders were meeting in California that very day to address the urgency of climate action. (California was acting somewhat as a government in exile, while the White House and Congress continued to avoid action on climate, and even to work to dismantle efforts to slow the warming.)
Whether one sees this double-barreled event just as an unusual coincidence, the hand of an almighty deity, or just “Mother Nature” it is hard not to notice when we get hit with such synchronization and well placed ‘punches.’
Is there cause and effect? For many years scientists have been very reluctant to make the correlation of long-term global warming, or climate change, and any particular weather event. That is now changing with more severe weather effects and more sophisticated monitoring. Several good scientific journals are now publishing analyses by recognized experts making a correlation.
We are trapping more heat in the atmosphere with greater amounts of carbon dioxide, an invisible “greenhouse gas” that was proven to be a heat barrier two hundred years ago. Atmospheric and ocean measurements confirm that the world is warmer, breaking records almost annually. The latest data from NASA is that we have now broken the previous record in 2016, shown on this graphic.
As we put more heat into the huge ocean-atmospheric system, the currents will change, with the weather becoming more erratic, and even harder to predict.
Sometimes when we are getting jostled around and a bit disoriented like the unfortunate people in the storms hitting North Carolina, South Carolina, Hong Kong, Guangdong province, and the Philippines, we are understandably scared and confused. Yet, even then, if someone hit us simultaneously on both sides of the head, we probably would take notice.
And if this all seems familiar, it is. Last year about this same time I was writing about the 1-2-3 punch of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in rapid succession.
We should note that the weather is always variable. And climate has changed naturally, from the repeating ice age cycles of the last several million years to the minor aberrations such as the medieval warm period and the “little ice age.” But objective scientists now see clearly that we are in a new era quite unlike anything in the last eleven thousand years (the Holocene) and even unprecedented in the last ten million years. And the change in the last century correlates well with the human effects on the atmosphere. Like medicine and astronomy, the technology and tools developed in the earth sciences in the last half-century have led to a new understanding.
Of course, the immediate task in the U.S. and in Asia is to recover from Florence and Mangkhut, whose remnants are still causing damage as I write this. Flooding will continue to worsen for days as record rainfall meets saturated soils, becoming deadly runoff.
While “flooding” may seem to be a good description of the problem, we need to grasp that the “Five Forms of Flooding” all have different drivers, but can combine for worse effect. The five forms of flooding are: storms, rain, runoff, extreme tides, and sea level rise. (See “Riley Reinforces 5 forms of Flooding“)
If we could see clearly through the stormy weather, the desire not to give up places we love, the reluctance to give up cheap fossil fuel, and the politics, we would see the urgency to do two things:
- Reduce the warming ASAP, by reducing the level of carbon dioxide, largely caused by burning fossil fuels.
- Design, build, and in some cases, relocate to get out of the rising flood waters, both the short-term storm and tide events, and the inexorable rising sea level baseline.
Nature is doing her job to get our attention with wildfires, deadly heat, record rain, drought, storms, melting glaciers, and rising sea level. The question is, when will we get the message…