2023 hottest year by a huge margin

 From The Guardian

2023 “smashed” the record for the hottest year by a huge margin, providing “dramatic testimony” of how much warmer and more dangerous today’s climate is from the cooler one in which human civilisation developed.

The planet was 1.48C hotter in 2023 compared with the period before the mass burning of fossil fuels ignited the climate crisis. The figure is very close to the 1.5C temperature target set by countries in Paris in 2015, although the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken.

Scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) said it was likely the 1.5C mark will be passed for the first time in the next 12 months. The average temperature in 2023 was 0.17C higher than in 2016, the previous record year, marking a very large increase in climate terms. The primary cause of this increased global heating was continued record emissions of carbon dioxide, assisted by the return of the natural climate phenomenon El Niño.

The high temperatures drove heatwaves, floods and wildfires, damaging lives and livelihoods across the world. Analysis showed some extreme weather, such as heatwaves in Europe and the US, would have been virtually impossible without human-caused global heating.

The CCCS data also showed that 2023 was the first year on record when every day was at least 1C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial record. Almost half the days were 1.5C hotter and, for the first time, two days were more than 2C hotter. The higher temperatures increased from June, with September’s heat so far above previous averages that one scientist called it “gobsmackingly bananas”.

Samantha Burgess, the CCCS deputy director, said: “2023 was an exceptional year, with climate records tumbling like dominoes. Temperatures during 2023 likely exceed those of any period in at least the last 100,000 years.”

Prof Bill Collins, at the University of Reading, UK, said: “It is a shock that 2023 unarguably smashed the global temperature record. More global warming is expected to cause even wetter winters in the UK and yet more flooding.”

Hundreds of scientific studies have shown the climate crisis is causing more extreme and more frequent extreme weather. While 2023 was perceived by many as a year in which global heating accelerated, scientists said the higher temperatures were in line with the predicted result of increased carbon emissions. However, the speed and intensity of severe weather impacts alarmed many experts.

A separate analysis by Japan’s Meteorological Agency produced very similar results as Copernicus, with 2023 a record 1.43C above pre-industrial levels and beating the previous record by 0.14C.

Prof Andrew Dessler, at Texas A&M University in the US, said the record set in 2023 was not surprising: “Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest [on] record. This in turn means that 2023 will end up being one of the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

Summer of 2023 hottest ever recorded

From The Guardian  (Of course, they're referring to the Northern Hemisphere summer--the Southern Hemisphere summer, which begins in November, will likely also be much hotter than normal.)

The summer of 2023 was the hottest ever recorded, as the climate crisis and emerging El Niño pushed up temperatures and drove extreme weather across the world.

In June, July and August – the northern hemisphere summer – the global average temperature reached 16.77C, which was 0.66C above the 1991 to 2020 average. The new high is 0.29C above the previous record set in 2019, a big jump in climate terms.

The data, from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), showed that August was about 1.5C warmer than the preindustrial average for 1850 to 1900, although the goal of the world’s nations to keep global heating below 1.5C will be considered broken only when this temperature is sustained over months and years.

Heatwaves, fires and floods have destroyed lives and livelihoods across the globe, from North and South America, to Europe, India, Japan and China.

“Our planet has just endured a season of simmering – the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres. “Scientists have long warned what our fossil fuel addiction will unleash. Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope with, with extreme weather events hitting every corner of the planet.”

The oceans have been especially hot in recent months. The C3S data showed that for every day in August, global average sea surface temperatures beat the previous record set in March 2016, which was also an El Niño year. North Atlantic Ocean temperatures reached a new record of 25.19C on 31 August. Antarctic sea ice extent has also been extremely low for the time of year.

Samantha Burgess, at C3S, said: “Global temperature records continue to tumble in 2023, with the warmest August following on from the warmest July and June, leading to the warmest boreal summer in our data record going back to 1940.” The findings are based on computer analysis of billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.

Dr Friederike Otto, at Imperial College London, said: “Breaking heat records has become the norm in 2023. Global warming continues because we have not stopped burning fossil fuels. It is that simple.skip past newsletter promotion

“Studies by World Weather Attribution have shown that climate change has dramatically intensified some of the most devastating weather disasters in the summer of 2023. The hot, dry and windy conditions that fuelled the wildfires in Quebec Canada were made at least twice as likely because of climate change. The extreme heatwaves that impacted Europe and North America were made 2.0-2.5C hotter because of climate change.”

The human-caused climate crisis was undeniably to blame for the deadly heatwaves that struck Europe and the US in July. Both would have been virtually impossible without the global heating driven by burning fossil fuels, scientists found.

In August, the Guardian interviewed 45 of the world’s leading climate scientists, who said that the increased heating seen in 2023 was completely in line with the predictions they had been making for decades. They said the effects were more severe than expected due to communities being more vulnerable than anticipated, making efforts to protect people more urgent than ever.

How climate change impacts the Indian Ocean Dipole

 From Phys.Org

With a new analysis of long-term climate data, researchers say they now have a much better understanding of how climate change can impact and cause sea water temperatures on one side of the Indian Ocean to be so much warmer or cooler than the temperatures on the other—a phenomenon that can lead to sometimes deadly weather-related events like megadroughts in East Africa and severe flooding in Indonesia.

The analysis, described in a new study in Science Advances by an international team of scientists led by researchers from Brown University, compares 10,000 years of past climate conditions reconstructed from different sets of geological records to simulations from an advanced climate model.

The findings show that about 18,000 to 15,000 years ago, as a result of melted freshwater from the massive glacier that once covered much of North America pouring into the North Atlantic, ocean currents that kept the Atlantic Ocean warm weakened, setting off a chain of events in response. The weakening of the system ultimately led to the strengthening of an atmospheric loop in the Indian Ocean that keeps warmer water on one side and cooler water on the other.

This extreme weather pattern, known as a dipole, prompts one side (either east or west) to have higher-than-average rainfall and the other to have widespread drought. The researchers saw examples of this pattern in both the historical data they studied and the model's simulation. They say the findings can help scientists not only better understand the mechanisms behind the east-west dipole in the Indian Ocean, but can one day help to produce more effective forecasts of drought and flood in the region.

"We know that in the present-day gradients in the temperature of the Indian Ocean are important to rainfall and drought patterns, especially in East Africa, but it's been challenging to show that those gradients change on long time-scales and to link them to long-term rainfall and drought patterns on both sides of the Indian Ocean," said James Russell, a study author and professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown. "We now have a mechanistic basis to understand why some of the longer-term changes in rainfall patterns in the two regions have changed through time."

In the paper, the researchers explain the mechanisms behind how the Indian Ocean dipole they studied formed and the weather-related events it led to during the period they looked at, which covered the end of the last Ice Age and the start of the current geological epoch.

The researchers characterize the dipole as an east-west dipole where the water on the western side—which borders modern day East African countries like Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia—is cooler than the water on eastern side toward Indonesia. They saw that the warmer water conditions of the dipole brought greater rainfall to Indonesia, while the cooler water brought much drier weather to East Africa.

That fits into what is often seen in recent Indian Ocean dipole events. In October, for example, heavy rain led to floods and landslides in Indonesian islands of Java and Sulawesi, leaving four people dead and impacting over 30,000 people. On the opposite end, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia experienced intense droughts starting in 2020 that threatened to cause famine.

The changes the authors observed 17,000 years ago were even more extreme, including the complete drying of Lake Victoria—one of the largest lakes on Earth.

"Essentially, the dipole intensifies dry conditions and wet conditions that could result in extreme events like multi-year or decades-long dry events in East Africa and flooding events in South Indonesia," said Xiaojing Du, a Voss postdoctoral researcher in the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and Brown's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, and the study's lead author. "These are events that impact people's lives and also agriculture in those regions. Understanding the dipole can help us better predict and better prepare for future climate change."

The dipole the researchers studied formed from the interactions between the heat transport system of the Atlantic Ocean and an atmospheric loop, called a Walker Circulation, in the tropical Indian Ocean. The lower part of the atmospheric loop flows east to west across much of the region at low altitudes near the ocean surface, and the upper part flows west to east at higher altitudes. The higher air and lower air connect in one big loop.

Interruption and weakening of the Atlantic Ocean heat transport, which works like a conveyor belt made of ocean and wind currents, was brought on by massive melting of the Laurentide ice sheet that once covered most of Canada and the northern U.S. The melting cooled the Atlantic and consequent wind anomalies triggered the atmospheric loop over the tropical Indian Ocean to become more active and extreme. That then led to increased precipitation in the east side of the Indian Ocean (where Indonesia sits) and reduced precipitation in the west side, where East Africa sits.

The researchers also show that during the period they studied, this effect was amplified by a lower sea level and the exposure of nearby continental shelves.

The scientists say more research is needed to figure out exactly what effect the exposed continental shelf and lower sea level has on the Indian Ocean's east-west dipole, but they're already planning to expand the work to investigate the question. While this line of the work on lower sea levels won't play into modeling future conditions, the work they've done investigating how the melting of ancient glaciers impacts the Indian Ocean dipole and the heat transport system of the Atlantic Ocean may provide key insights into future changes as climate change brings about more melting.

"Greenland is currently melting so fast that it's discharging a lot of freshwater into the North Atlantic Ocean in ways that are impacting the ocean circulation," Russell said. "The work done here has provided a new understanding of how changes in the Atlantic Ocean circulation can impact Indian Ocean climate and through that rainfall in Africa and Indonesia."

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

 

World inflation has peaked, but .....

Well, at last I have updated all my databases.  Almost all!

This chart shows the CPI inflation rate for the Big 8 economies (US, UK, Europe, China, Japan, India, Brazil, Russia) weighted by GDP, alongside the percentage of 43 world economies where the CPI inflation rate is above 6%.  The moral of the story is that inflation is falling in the Big 8, and also in the world as a whole.  

Inflation is falling because the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is fading (in the sense that it's not making inflation worse, so year-on-year rates are falling); because commodity prices are declining; because growth is slowing; and because China's inflation rate has gone negative (one sign of just how weak China's economy really is).  It'll prolly take another year, perhaps longer, for Big 8 inflation to get back to 2%. 

I think it quite likely that the longer-term underlying inflation rate has risen, because the key reason it got so low is offshoring and just-in-time manufacturing.  Goods were efficiently assembled from parts in different countries.  The progress of offshoring has stopped and reversed.   The war has shown that relying on other countries for key parts of your own country's manufacturing could be problematic, even disastrous.  Even in the absence of war, the lockdowns in China showed just how dependent manufacturing in developed countries was on the free flow of parts.  Tesla, which produces all its own chips, was unaffected by supply-chain breakdowns.  There is a lesson there for other CEOs.

We will never get back to the two decades of low inflation we have come to regard as the norm.  Whereas central banks struggled to raise inflation over these two decades, it is likely that they will now struggle to keep inflation at 2%.  Central to this is the realisation by the West that relying on China could be as strategically perilous as our naïve belief that Russia could be trusted and that we could rely on her for all our gas and oil.   I remember when Stephen Roach in 1989 (or thereabouts), when he was at Morgan Stanley, pointed out that the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the opening of Eastern Europe and China to world trade would drive the long-term rate of inflation down, and it did.   What we are seeing now is the partial reversal of this trend.  We no longer trust that politics will not impede trade. Globalisation is no longer fashionable.

Moreover, global warming has pushed up food inflation.  Who would have thought that alternating droughts and floods would push up food prices?  Amazing.  Well, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.  It will only get worse.

In other words, the fall in world inflation may be slower than in the cycles of the last 30 years, even if we have a deep recession, and underlying inflation will remain stubbornly high.  This has important implications for bond yields and PE ratios.  The major bull markets in asset prices were driven by a secular downtrend in inflation.  If that trend is over, valuation rates for all asset classes will rise, and that will keep their prices from rising.

Climate change made Europe's lethal floods more likely

 From The Economist

IN A YEAR scarred by one extreme weather event after the next, the question of how far climate change is to blame has continually come to the fore. On August 23rd a group of climate scientists issued its preliminary assessment of the role of climate change in the devastating floods that killed more than 220 people in Germany and Belgium last month. The researchers estimate that global warming has made such extraordinary rainfall up to nine times as likely as in the pre-industrial age.

Between July 12th and 15th a slow-moving low-pressure system, named “Bernd” by meteorologists, poured heavy rain onto Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The images of widespread destruction served as a stark reminder that even the richest nations were unprepared for such unusual events.

But what role might climate change have played? Climate-modelling studies had already warned that western and central Europe would experience more pluvial and river flooding as accumulating greenhouse gases continue to push global average temperatures upwards. This was confirmed in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published earlier this month.

The climate scientists behind Monday’s report—organised by the World Weather Attribution group, a research coalition—used climate models to compare the July floods with what might have happened in a hypothetical world in which average temperatures were the same as before the industrial revolution. Similar studies have been used to assess other recent extreme-weather events. They have concluded that a Siberian heatwave in 2020 was made as much as many thousand times more likely by human greenhouse-gas emissions, and that the heatwave in the Pacific Northwest earlier this year would have been virtually impossible in the absence of global warming.

Such “climate attribution” studies are far easier to carry out for anything related to extreme heat, because there is a direct and relatively simple relationship between global warming and air temperature. Anything involving water, however, is more complex. A hotter atmosphere can hold more moisture and so deliver fiercer downpours, but these also depend on local and regional weather conditions and, crucially, floods are not created just by rainfall. They also depend on a great number of topological and geological factors, such as the depth and saturation of soil, the shape of the landscape and the capacity of waterways. The same amount of water will have very different consequences if it falls on a flat plain or in a long, narrow mountain gully.

In mid-July, unusually heavy rain fell on top of already wet terrain, making the flooding more severe. Around the Ahr and Erft rivers in Germany, for instance, 93mm bucketed down in a single day; in Belgium, around the Meuse, 106mm fell in two days.

The team modelled the odds of this kind of precipitation falling in different areas (130km by 130km for the purposes of the study) between the north of the Alps and the Netherlands, and ran the simulations under two different scenarios: one in which the world was 1.2°C warmer than in pre-industrial times, as it is today, and one in which the world had not warmed at all.

They found that climate change made the kind of extreme rainfall recorded in July between 1.2 and nine times as likely as in the hypothetical unwarmed world. (The wide range reflects the breadth of results produced by different climate models.) The modelling also found that climate change has increased the amount of rain that can fall in one day in Western Europe by 3-19%. Running the models in another hypothetical world that is 0.8°C warmer than today’s (or 2°C warmer than in pre-industrial times) increased the chances of an event further still, by 1.2-1.4 times.

Even in today’s climate, the heavy rainfall last month was “a very rare event”, says Maarten van Aalst of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, who contributed to the study. The team estimates that locations in western Europe can expect similar rainfall only once every 400 years.

That is less reassuring than it sounds. The study shows, in accordance with the IPCC report, that the risk of these rare extreme events is rising and will become greater still as the world continues to warm. What is more, if different regions in Western Europe are each likely to suffer such events only once every four centuries, they are likely to happen somewhere in the whole continent much more often.

Nile delta flooding

 River deltas are perhaps the most vulnerable places on Earth to flooding, because they're made of sediment brought by the river which drops as soon as the flow slows, meaning that the banks of sand and silt are barely above sea level.    The Mississippi delta, the delta of the Rhine-Maas (The Netherlands), the Nile, the Ganges (Bangladesh with its 110 million people), the Mekong, Pearl River, Yangtse ......

From  a tweet by Simon Kuenstenmacher

The IPCC report: 7 key takeaways

 From The Age

Every seven years or so, like a recurring global spasm, scientists from around the world update their understanding of how the planet is heating up, what the impacts will be and what we might do about it.

Known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the resulting reports serve as what one contributing author calls a “golden book” of climate science in three volumes plus a synthesis report.

The first volume of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) was released on Monday and lays out in exacting detail in about 4000 pages how jamming our atmosphere with greenhouse gases is altering the climate.

What’s changed from previous Assessment Reports?

Temperatures, for one thing. The mean temperature at the surface – where we live – has warmed 0.24 degrees since the 2013-14 Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) evaluated data to 2011. Let’s call it a quarter. We’re now about 1.1 degrees warmer than the 1850-1900 baseline and, given the slow process of how our extra emissions trap more heat from the sun, we will heat further even if carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gas pollution ceased today. (Spoiler: They won’t.)

Apart from more refined estimates, AR6 has stepped up regional forecasts including carving Australia into four zones. The blame humans carry for altering the climate – known as attribution research – also gets more prominence. (Spoiler: we are responsible for virtually all of it.)

Do these reports do much?

These IPCC reports aren’t meant merely to gather dust (though they do), but inform governments (Intergovernmental is a clue) and the public (that might nudge those policymakers to act).

Since the first assessment report (presciently dubbed FAR) in 1990 said, “the climate is warming, folks”, we’ve belched 1 trillion tonnes (1,000,000,000,000) of CO2 by burning fossil fuels and clearing land. It’s also 41 per cent of all the estimated emissions since 1750, so if it’s a pedal we’re hitting, it’s not the brake. Temperatures, particularly since the 1970s have been going one way, and the best climate models are doing an increasingly good job at matching observations.

1.5 degrees and all that

Remember Paris and that 2015 climate summit where almost 200 nations agreed to keep warming to between 1.5 degrees and “well below 2 degrees”? Well, this instalment of AR6 is meant to guide leaders when they gather (or Zoom into) a summit in the less glamorous Glasgow in November. (The other two reports, on impacts and what emissions action we could take, won’t land until next year.)

Remember, though, that 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees are both arbitrary. Look at Greece this week, Canada or California last month, or our home-fired Black Summer last year to get a glimpse of how juicing the climate is already raising the odds of extreme nasties. Heatwaves are one of them.

Oh, and as the 1.5-degree target represents a 20-year average, don’t be surprised if we cross that marker in an El Nino year (when the Pacific Ocean unhelpfully doesn’t absorb as much heat and gives some back) this decade. We hit that mark in a month during the 2015-16 El Nino, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s Blair Trewin.

Barbecued and soaked Australia

The improved resolution of climate models has allowed this IPCC report to provide a closer look at how regions of the world might fare as the planet heats up.

Land warms faster than the ocean, and that happens to be where most of us live. In Australia, we’ve warmed about 1.4 degrees so far, since 1910. Projected warming doesn’t make for a happy scene, particularly for maximums, and that’s not considering heatwave spikes.

Rainfall is likely to be heavier when it comes, as the atmosphere holds about 7 per cent more moisture per degree. Unfortunately, southern Australia will remain on its drying trend, particularly in winter, as west-to-east storm tracks shifting closer to Antarctica. Other unpleasant outcomes await those living near the coast as sea levels rise, while the “intensity, frequency and duration of fire-weather events are projected to increase throughout Australia” the report states with “high confidence”.

Mid-century carbon neutrality?

The third AR6 report will explore in more detail what fossil pathways we might saunter down, but this one gives us a taste of what we can expect. It presents five specific options, ranging from low to high emissions, and includes methane, nitrous oxide (think fertiliser) and other heat-trapping gases.

Taking the lowest scenario (awkwardly named “shared socio-economic pathway”) won’t get us to net-zero emissions or so-called climate neutrality this side of 2050.

Remember, that target is what many rich nations have signed up for, while the Morrison government says it’s a “preferred” goal. Better not get stuck on a higher or moderately high emissions path or we’ll never get there.

So, how much can we burn?

Let’s say every time you flip on an electric toaster or drive your car (assuming you’re not offsetting both by buying renewable energy or planting a tree, or so on), you’re helping warm up our planet. (Big picture: every trillion tonnes of CO2 likely causes a best-estimate of 0.45 degrees warming.)

Now, we burn or emit about 42 billion tonnes of CO2 a year. The AR6 report puts a range of probability risks around what we might aim for. If it’s to keep warming to 1.5 degrees or stay thereabouts, and we think we’d like a 50-50 chance, then we have 500 billion tonnes of C02 to go, or 12 years of current pollution levels.

Or as Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes puts it: “I don’t want my future based on the toss of a coin.” Who flies in a plane with a 50 per cent risk of crashing?

Tipping points and other unfathomables (for now)

Professor Pitman is not alone in thinking we’re all but set for 1.5 degrees of warming. Pep Canadell, one of the AR6 report authors and senior CSIRO researcher says “there’s a lot of warming all the way to 2050. And it’s coming fast”.

The report, if anything, errs on the side of caution, noting the limited data on so-called “low probability, high impact” events such as the disintegration of Antarctic ice sheets (think more than 15 metres of sea-level rise) or the halt of the Gulf Stream. For the latter, (fancy name: Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), the report says “there is medium confidence that there will not be an abrupt collapse before 2100″. Not so reassuring if you live in northern Europe.

 

What keeps people like Professor Pitman awake at nights, though, is the prospect that the biosphere won’t behave as it has for the past couple of centuries of our carbon-plus experiment. The AR6 report notes that as emissions rise, the land and ocean won’t be so cooperative and take up as much of the extra emissions we’re sending up.

“That’s a big, big deal,” he said. “The specific human cuts of emissions necessary to achieve any particular CO2 level becomes harder.“

If the atmosphere keeps it, we’d better come up with some good ways to take it back out, and fast.

[Read more here]

Extreme rainfall in China

From Yale Climate Connections 

At least 33 people are dead and 8 missing in Zhengzhou, China, after a July 20 extreme rainfall event of nearly unimaginable intensity. Zhengzhou, a megacity of more than 10 million – and the world’s biggest manufacturing base for iPhones and a major hub for food production and heavy industry – recorded an astonishing 644.6 mm (25.38 inches) of rain in the 24 hours ending at 21Z July 20. This is literally more than a year’s worth of rain: Its average annual precipitation (1981-2010 climatology) is only 640.9 mm (25.24 inches).

The disaster follows on the heels of the extreme rainfall event that killed more than 200 people in Germany and Belgium last week. Both disasters have preliminary damage estimates in excess of $10 billion. [What was that about stopping climate change being too expensive?] 

According to meteorologist Minghao Zhou, a Ph.D. student at SUNY Albany, the city’s maximum one-hour rainfall rate between 8 and 9Z July 20 (4-5 p.m. local time) was a staggering 201.9 mm/hr (7.95 inches/hr). This amount shattered China’s national record for highest one-hour rainfall of 168.3 mm/hr (6.63 inches/hr) for all 2,418 national weather stations in mainland China, previously set at Maoming, Guangdong.

Heavy rains continued into Wednesday in Zhengzhou, with the city recording a total of 787.9 mm (31.02 inches) in the 72 hours ending at 12Z July 21. Fortunately, the latest run of the GFS model calls for no additional heavy rains in the city in the coming week.

Much of the moisture for this record extreme rainfall event was supplied by a large-scale monsoon circulation off the coast of China, which was also feeding moisture to two typhoons: Typhoon Cempaka, a category 1 storm that was making landfall southwest of Hong Kong, and Typhoon In-fa, a category 2 storm that was headed westwards toward the Chinese coast, north of Taiwan. The monsoon moisture, boosted by the circulations of the two typhoons, fed into an upper-level trough of low pressure passing over northern China’s Henan Province, generating intense rainfall over Zhengzhou. The rainfall was likely increased as a result of air approaching Zhengzhou that travelled uphill into the foothills of the Tai-hang Mountains, causing extra cooling and condensation as the moist air rose upwards (upslope enhancement). A region of nearly stationary thunderstorms set up, leading to the astounding rainfall totals.

As the planet’s oceans and atmosphere warm more as a result of increased amounts of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, more water vapor is entering the lower atmosphere, increasing the odds of extreme rainfall events.

Studies using high-resolution global climate models have found that both average and extreme precipitation from China’s summer monsoon rains will increase during the 21st century (see this 2011 paper in Climate Dynamics, and the 2015 book, The Monsoons and Climate Change: Observations and Modeling). The authors of the book, Hirokazu Endo and Akio Kitoh, concluded: “State-of-the-art climate models project that both the amount and intensity of Asian summer monsoon rainfall are likely to increase under global warming, and that the rates of increase will be higher than those in other monsoon regions.”

Authors of an August 2020 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, “Each 0.5°C of Warming Increases Annual Flood Losses in China by More than US$60 Billion,” found that annual average flood losses in China between 1984 and 2018 were $19.2 billion (2015 U.S. dollars), which was 0.5% of China’s GDP. Annual flood losses increased to $25.3 billion annually during the period from 2006 to 2018. The study predicted that each additional 0.5 degree Celsius of global warming will increase China flood losses by $60 billion per year. Losses of this magnitude will pose a significant challenge to the Chinese economy.

In 2020, Earth’s most expensive weather disaster was the summer monsoon flooding in China, which caused $35 billion in damage. According to statistics from EM-DAT, the international disaster database, that total ranks as the third-most expensive non-U.S. weather disaster since accurate records began in 1990, behind 1998 flooding in China ($48 billion 2021 dollars) and 2011 flooding in Thailand ($47 billion 2021 dollars).

July 23 update: According to Steve Bowen of insurance broker Aon, this week’s flood in Zhengzhou will cost at least $10.1 billion; losses elsewhere in the surrounding province will push the damage tally higher. China experienced $1.35 billion in flood damage in June, and another billion-dollar Chinese flood disaster may well occur early next week, when Typhoon In-fa is predicted to move very slowly near the megacity of Ningbo (population 8 million); In-fa is likely to dump over 20 inches of rain along the coast near Ningbo. The nearby city of Shanghai (population 26 million) will also be at risk of damaging rainfall from In-fa; the 12Z Thursday run of the HWRF model predicted Shanghai would receive over 20 inches of rain from In-fa through Tuesday.

Thanks go to Minghao Zhou, @Minghao_Zhou,  for providing much of the material for this post. Bob Henson also contributed. All dollar figures in given are in U.S. dollars.

Sketch of how extreme rainfall in Zhengzhou, China was related to (1) moisture transport enhanced by the monsoon gyre, (2) deepening upper-level trough, and (3) leeward inverted trough and upslope flow
Source: Minghao Zhou

I am so angry

 For a long time, it was possible to say that climate change was just a lot of leftist bleeding-heart pointy-headed intellectuals whingeing. I mean, data? Trends? Charts? How we laughed.

But we can all see, with our own eyes, that it's happening. 50 degrees C in Canada? C'mon, Canada? Bushfires north of the Arctic circle? Record heat, again and again. One-in-a-thousand-year floods/droughts happening every second year. Temperatures so high that people are just dying. It's happening right now, everywhere.

And the oil and coal companies did their level best to misinform and to lie, to harass climate scientists, to buy politicians, to stop or slow the transition to clean energy. They deserve no pity, no indulgence. The collapse of our environment is now obvious, and they have made it worse.

It is true that even paid-off and depreciated coal is now more expensive than new-build wind and solar, almost everywhere. But the coal miners and power stations are not going to go quietly. They're going to ask for subsidies to keep going. They're calling them 'capacity supports', just in case renewables don't provide all the power needed. Never mind that for the billions they're asking, we could put in enough batteries to give us power for hours and hours.

They're labelling themselves 'green', with lots of feel-good ads featuring families and chortling babies, happy little penguins, green forests. They are not. There is no such thing as green oil or clean coal. But if they can bamboozle us for another few years, then their jobs and their bonuses and their Bentleys are safe.

We need to cut emissions by half this decade. By half. If we do that, then the decade-by-decade rise in temperatures, currently ~0.2 degrees C, will also halve, and we stand a chance of limiting the increase to 1.7 degrees by 2050. We're already up by 1.2 degrees since pre-industrial levels.  And look how bad things are now!

Yes, the writing is on the wall for coal and oil. But their lie departments are working full time on techniques to keep the fountains of money flowing, at our cost. Don't be misled by the cutesy ads. They've never cared about us, and if they could, they would ban wind turbines and solar panels and electric cars, and bugger the climate. Bugger us.

I am so angry.

Cutesy oil company ad

Climate panic

 From The Economist

The ground under the German town of Erftstadt is torn apart like tissue paper by flood waters; Lytton in British Columbia is burned from the map just a day after setting a freakishly high temperature record; cars float like dead fish through the streets-turned-canals in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou. All the world feels at risk, and most of it is. Six years ago, in Paris, the countries of the world committed themselves to avoiding the worst of climate change by eliminating net greenhouse-gas emissions quickly enough to hold the temperature rise below 2°C. Their progress towards that end remains woefully inadequate. But even if their efforts increased dramatically enough to meet the 2°C goal, it would not stop forests from burning today; prairies would still dry out tomorrow, rivers break their banks and mountain glaciers disappear. And even if everyone manages to honour their pledges, there is still a risk that temperatures could eventually rise by 3°C above pre-industrial levels.

What happens when climate panic occurs?  I feel that that isn't far away.

Well, for a start, net-zero by 2050 will be unceremoniously dumped, and the net-zero target will be brought forward by at least a decade.  The world would go on a war footing to cut emissions.  

Just how fast could we cut emissions?  To cut emissions by 50% by 2030 would require that emissions would have to fall by a cumulative 7.5% per annum.  Could we do that without a catastrophic collapse in economic activity?  Well, in a word, yes.  

Roughly 30% of the world's emissions come from baseload electricity and another 12% from variable electricity (gas peaking).  Wind and solar are already cheaper than coal and (in gas-importing countries) than gas too.   We can take the grid to 85% wind and solar with 4 hours of storage.   The remainder could be supplied by nuclear, hydro, biomass, wave power or green gas (hydrogen or green ammonia or green methane, produced from surplus renewable electricity).  And climate panic may well reduce public hostility to nuclear power.  Existing nuclear generators will prolly be allowed to continue.  SMRs (small modular reactors) may be built, though they're unlikely to be ready in time.

Another 16% of global emissions come from road transport.  Governments could simply ban the sale of new internal combustion engine cars, lorries and buses, and they probably will, not from 2030 or 2035 bur from 2025 or earlier.  They will set stringent annual targets to get to this point, or they will introduce big subsidies for EVs, or both.  With climate panic, a slow recasting of our economies will be ditched in favour of a very rapid adjustment.  With an average life of 10 years, it will take 10 years for the whole fleet to transition to plug-ins, so that process will have to be accelerated.  There will be 'cash for clunkers' programs, designed to take aging petrol cars and trucks off the roads.  Petrol (gasoline) will be taxed more heavily.  ICEV licence fees will be upped.

And governments will be looking at every source of emissions.  Iron and steel will have to switch to making steel with green hydrogen or methane.  Air travel will be taxed heavily unless it's electric or fuelled by carbon-neutral jetfuel.  

All land clearing and forest burning would have to stop immediately.  The world would have to apply sanctions in the form of diplomatic pressure and import tariffs and bans to the countries  where this is worst: Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Borneo.  And don't think we won't.  As climate panic builds, the pressure to conform will be irresistible.

Agriculture won't be given a free pass any more, either.  Cows will be fed seaweed, to cut emissions.  Governments may even become frightened enough to tax meat. 

But above all, the world needs a carbon tax and an end to fossil fuel subsidies.  The EU's border carbon tax will be a powerful goad for the rest of the world to introduce their own carbon taxes.  Climate panic will remove any opposition to their spread.  Climate free-loaders will get short shrift.

Together, these measures could cut emissions by 90%.   Most of that could happen in the first 10 years.  And these measures, rapidly effected, would in fact limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees  above pre-industrial levels.

The world has been repeatedly warned.  The warnings have been brushed off or ignored.  Instead of a gradual adjustment over decades, starting decades ago, we have phaffed and dithered and allowed ourselves to be lied to by oil and coal companies.  And now a modest  1 or 2% a year decline will not do.  We will need a 15% per annum decline to cut emissions by 90% by 2035, to prevent temperatures rising by more than 1.5 degrees.  

As the Economist says: 'There will be nowhere safe.'  And the public is beginning to realise this, and is both frightened and angry.  Expect serious steps to cut emissions.

The climate change panic button is coming

 Record floods, record droughts, record heat, record bushfires.  Sometimes in the same place a couple of weeks apart.   It's crystal clear that global heating and climate change aren't something happening in some far distant future.  They're happening now.  And it's going to get worse, because emissions prolly haven't yet peaked, despite the slump caused by the Covid crash.  So how long before there's panic?

A general view of flood-affected area following heavy rainfalls in Schuld, Germany [Reuters].
Source: Al Jazeera

From The New Daily

This week it’s floods in Germany, 170 dead and terrible devastation.

A few weeks ago people were dying from the heat in Canada, which reached about 49 degrees Celsius in Lytton, British Columbia.

Wildfires are now breaking out across North America.

This is from the global warming that has already occurred, which is about 1.2 degrees above the pre-industrial age.

The world is now trying to stop it going above 1.5 degrees by getting emissions down to net zero by 2050.

Even if we succeed in that, which is far from guaranteed, the extreme weather events will be significantly worse and more frequent than they are now.

But at what point will governments hit the real panic button?

Because net zero by 2050 is not it. [We have to halve emissions by 2030, then halve them again between 2030 and 2040, and again by 2050.  This implies that emissions have to fall by 7% per annum]

The reason many are still negotiating, prevaricating and putting it off is that governments and businesses are not looking at global warming in terms of risk, but are using scenario analysis instead.

For example, the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority issued a draft prudential practice guide on climate change in April, which included 4 degrees of warming as one of its two “scenarios” for banks to use in their future planning.

A 4 degree rise in the average global temperature would make large parts of the planet uninhabitable and lead to the total collapse of the banking system. No need for any planning.

The other APRA scenario was for 2 degrees of warming or less, consistent with the Paris Agreement, which should happen if all countries meet their Paris pledges, which so far they’re not.

And even under that scenario, the banking system barely survives.

There was nothing especially wrong with APRA’s guidance note – it was just a typical example of the arse-covering required by bureaucrats and corporate executives to cover their environmental, social and governance (ESG) obligations, with a paper trail to prove they did it.

But it highlights the problem with using scenarios instead of risk analysis.

Since most countries are now committed to net-zero emissions by 2050, even though the policies to achieve that have not been implemented, everyone can assume that the scenario of 1.5 degrees is locked in – a likelihood of 100 per cent. But that’s not correct.

Even then there would still be a two-thirds risk of it being 2 degrees instead of 1.5, because of feedback loops caused by more carbon dioxide being released by the warming that has occurred.

Current policies, unchanged, would result in 2.4 degrees of warming, which would be terrible, but there would be a high risk (about 67 per cent) of 3 degrees, which would be catastrophic.

Precise risk analysis of global warming is difficult because feedback loop tipping points are unknown and unpredictable.

It’s known that with 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming, the combination of permafrost melt in Siberia, wildfires in the world’s forests and warming of the ocean will release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which means a feedback loop could take the temperature to 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures – and perhaps beyond – no matter what we do.

I was reminded of the power of risk analysis by the recent reaction to the risk of blood clots and death from the AstraZeneca vaccine.

It appears to be something like one in 88,000, or 0.0011 per cent to get a clot.

If that happens, the chance of then dying is 4 per cent, which boils down to a 0.00044 per cent chance of dying from having the AstraZeneca vaccine.

On the strength of that risk, the UK discontinued AstraZeneca for under-40s and the Australian medical authorities have warned against it, and people are shunning it in droves and waiting for Pfizer.

The risk of catastrophe and even extinction as a result of global warming is a lot higher than 0.00044 per cent and yet most of us are still driving petrol cars and eating steaks and hamburgers, and governments are still talking about targets 30 years away (or not, in Australia’s case).

Whatever the temperature gets to – whether it be 1.5, 2, 3 or 4 degrees of warming – it would be a global average, uneven across the planet.

Anything much more than 1.5 degrees and heatwaves in some parts of the world would make them too hot to survive for some of the year, so humans couldn’t live there at all.

Daily life everywhere else would be an unbearable succession of extreme weather events, as we are seeing in Germany at the moment.

Sea level would rise by 1.5 to 2 metres, making many coastal and low-lying areas uninhabitable.

As a result, millions, possibly billions, of people would be displaced making a mess of global borders.

Banking and insurance would become impossible. The financial system would collapse.

What’s the risk of that? 10 per cent? 1 per cent?

Even if it was 1 per cent, that would be like two or three planes a day crashing after take-off in Australia – which would lead to zero take-offs until it was fixed.

At some point well before 2050, governments will be forced to switch to risk analysis for climate change, and to publish the result.

Unless scientists say the risk is zero – which they won’t – then whatever they come up with, political leaders will be forced to hit the panic button by alarmed voters.

What does the panic button look like?

I’m not sure, but here are some thoughts: Fossil fuels would be suddenly and totally banned, or made prohibitively expensive, and oil, gas and coal would instantly go bust; physical tourism would be banned and air travel confined to essentials and rich elites so the airline industry would collapse; the lithium battery and hydrogen would suddenly boom.

And so on.

Life would change more completely than it has during the pandemic.

In short, it would look like war

Cost of extreme weather quadruples in 40 years

[And that's in inflation-adjusted terms]

 From Inside Climate News

A new analysis commissioned by the nonprofit advocacy organization Environmental Defense Fund that looks at the cost of climate-linked natural disasters details how the financial impacts of fires, tropical storms, floods, droughts and crop freezes have quadrupled since 1980. 

The number of extreme weather disasters has more than doubled in 40 years.

And the cost has quadrupled

[This is just a quick summary.  You can read the full article here.]

It's becoming clearer and clearer that the costs of climate change and global heating are beginning to far exceed the costs of preventing further climate change.  As global temperatures rise, the costs will rise too--exponentially.

Extraordinary increase in high-tide flooding

Sunny day flooding Miami

From ClimateCrocks

The increase in high-tide flooding along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts since 2000 has been “extraordinary,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported, with the frequency of flooding in some cities growing fivefold during that time. That shift is damaging homes, imperiling the safety of drinking water, inundating roads and otherwise hurting coastal communities, the agency said.

“Conditions are changing, and not just in a few locations,” Nicole LeBoeuf, acting assistant administrator for NOAA’s National Ocean Service, which compiled the report, said during a call with reporters. “Damaging floods that decades ago happened only during a storm now happen more regularly, even without severe weather.”

NOAA defines high-tide flooding, also called sunny-day or nuisance flooding, as water rising more than half a meter, or about 20 inches, above the normal daily high-tide mark. The frequency of that flooding has increased because of rising sea levels, which were roughly 13 inches higher nationally last year than in 1920, the agency reported.

The number of days with high-tide flooding set or tied records in 19 places around the country last year, including Corpus Christi, Texas, which recorded 18 days of flooding; Galveston, Texas (18 days); Annapolis, Md. (18 days); and Charleston, S.C. (13 days). The place with the greatest number of recorded flood days was Eagle Point, Texas, in Galveston Bay; it reported high-tide flooding on 64 days, or almost one day out of five.

Those numbers represent huge jumps in a short period of time. In 2000, Corpus Christi had just three days of tidal flooding; Charleston had just two. The report notes that Charleston recorded just 13 days of high-tide flooding in the more than 50 years that measurements were first kept — the same number that occurred last year alone.

That trend is likely to accelerate, the agency said. By 2030, NOAA projected, the frequency of high-tide flooding could double or triple. By 2050, it said, that number could be five to 15 times as great, with the typical coastal community flooding between 25 and 75 days a year.

Flooding to affect twice as many by 2030

People wade in the chest deep floodwater in suburban Cainta, east of Manila, Philippines, in 2009. Such events will affect twice as many people by the end of the decade. Photograph: Pat Roque/AP
Source: The Guardian

From The Guardian:

The number of people harmed by floods will double worldwide by 2030, according to a new analysis.  The World Resources Institute, a global research group, found that 147 million people will be hit by floods from rivers and coasts annually by the end of the decade, compared with 72 million people just 10 years ago.

Damages to urban property will soar from $174bn to $712bn per year.  By 2050, “the numbers will be catastrophic,” according to the report. A total of 221 million people will be at risk, with the toll in cities costing $1.7tn yearly.

When WRI first developed its flood modeling tool in 2014, the predictions felt “like a fantasy”, said Charlie Iceland, director of water initiatives at WRI.

“But now we’re actually seeing this increase in magnitude of the damages in real time,” Iceland said. “We’ve never seen these types of floods before.”

Floods are getting worse because of the climate crisis, decisions to populate high-risk areas and land sinkage from the overuse of groundwater.   The worst flooding will come in south and south-east Asia, including in Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Indonesia and China, where large populations are vulnerable.

The effects will be less dire but still increasingly serious in the US, where the risk is highest for coastal flooding. The US ranks third among countries with the most to lose from urban coastal flooding in the next 10 years, after China and Indonesia.  Coastal flood damage in the US will soar from $1.8bn in 2010 to $38bn in 2050, with half the country’s exposed population in just three states – Louisiana, Massachusetts and Florida.   

What are now once in a lifetime floods could become daily occurrences for most of the US coastline, according to a separate study.  That’s because hurricanes are stronger, seas are higher and rain patterns are changing, all because of global heating caused by humans.

Close to point of no return

From that well known far-left organisation, The Financial Times.  Cartoon by Jeremy Banx.

Floods and bushfires

From the BBC:

Flooding and landslides in East Africa have killed dozens of people and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Australia, a period of hot, dry weather has led to a spate of bushfires.

Both weather events have been linked to higher-than-usual temperature differences between the two sides of the Indian Ocean - something meteorologists refer to as the Indian Ocean Dipole.

The Indian Ocean Dipole - often called the "Indian Niño" because of its similarity to its Pacific equivalent - refers to the difference in sea-surface temperatures in opposite parts of the Indian Ocean.

Temperatures in the eastern part of the ocean oscillate between warm and cold compared with the western part, cycling through phases referred to as "positive", "neutral" and "negative".  

The dipole's positive phase this year - the strongest for six decades - means warmer sea temperatures in the western Indian Ocean region, with the opposite in the east.

The result of this unusually strong positive dipole this year has been higher-than-average rainfall and floods in eastern Africa and droughts in south-east Asia and Australia.

"When an Indian Ocean dipole event occurs, the rainfall tends to move with the warm waters, so you get more rainfall than normal over the East African countries," Dr Andrew Turner, a lecturer in monsoon systems at the UK's University of Reading, told the BBC.

"On the other hand, in the east of the Indian Ocean, sea surface temperatures will be colder than normal and that place will get a reduced amount of rainfall."

A negative dipole phase would bring about the opposite conditions - warmer water and greater precipitation in the eastern Indian Ocean, and cooler and drier conditions in the west.

The dipole has resulted in floods in eastern Africa and bushfires in Australia. Heavy downpours have devastated parts of East Africa over the last two months, with the Horn of Africa seeing up to 300% above average rainfall between October and mid-November, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Somalia and South Sudan have been particularly badly affected, with flash floods and landslides hitting communities across the region.

Almost 300 people have reportedly died and 2.8 million people have been affected, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Meanwhile in Australia, record-breaking spring temperatures have helped spark and fan a series of bushfires across the country.

About 100 bushfires are raging in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), with the most severe forming into a "mega blaze" north of Sydney.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has warned communities to prepare for more severe fire danger, with a high chance of warmer than usual days and nights for much of the country throughout summer.

Extreme climate and weather events caused by the dipole are predicted to become more common in the future as greenhouse gas emissions increase.

In a 2014 study published in Nature, scientists in Australia, India, China and Japan modelled the effects of CO2 on extreme Indian Ocean dipoles, such as those in 1961, 1994 and 1997.

Assuming emissions continue to go up, they projected that the frequency of extreme positive dipole events would increase this century from one every 17.3 years to one every 6.3 years.

"The countries in the west of the Indian Ocean, so on the African coast, are going to see much, much more flooding and heavy rainfall relating to these events," says Dr Turner. "You're going to get more damaging impacts on crops and on infrastructure and flooding.

"On the other hand, in the east of the Indian Ocean, islands on the west side of Indonesia are going to see a greater chance of drought and reduced rainfall."

[I've only quoted part of the report.  You can read more here]