Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
A couple of big newspapers have picked up on this news. Here’s the scary story from the Rocky Mountain News:
Severe weather events such as the flooding in the Midwest likely will happen four times more often by the end of the century, a panel of climate scientists said today.
Such severe events happen maybe once in 20 years in the United States, said senior scientists with the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. In another 90 years, they’ll happen once every five years.
Water vapor accumulating in the air will increase the number of severe downpours, while warmer sea surface temperatures will ramp up the severity of hurricanes.
Meanwhile, Colorado and the southwestern United States likely will see more frequent droughts.
“When it rains, it will rain harder, but when it’s not raining the temperatures will be warmer, and more water will evaporate,” Tom Karl, director of the National Climate Data Center, said from Asheville, N.C., via teleconference. “Droughts can become more intense and will last longer.”
The Government Climate Panel’s report of climate change’s influence on extreme weather was cobbled together by examining hundreds of reports on actual weather changes and on computer models of future changes.
Jerry Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and co-author of the new report, said “We’ve seen more extreme weather in the last 20 to 30 years.
“And we’re projecting that to continue and to get more severe.
“There will be fewer nights when the temperature goes below freezing. We’ll see more extreme heat events, more warm spells.”
It is very likely that humans are affecting the changes because of the proliferation of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from oil and coal, in the atmosphere, the scientists said.
The Washington Post has a darker spin:
As humans emit more greenhouse gases, North America is likely to experience more droughts and excessive heat even as intense downpours and hurricanes increase, according to a report issued today by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.
The 162-page study, which was led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of how global warming has helped to transform the climate of the United States and Canada over the past 50 years, and how it may do so in the future.
Warning that extreme weather events “are among the most serious challenges to society in coping with a changing climate,” the report finds that “recent and projected changes in climate and weather extremes have primarily negative impacts.”
Coming at a time when record floods are ravaging the Midwest, the new report paints a grim scenario in which unpredictable and severe weather will exact a heavy toll. While the Southwest is likely to face even more intense droughts, the scientists wrote, heavy downpours will become more frequent in some other parts of the country because of increased water vapor in the air.
