Make Nexus Hot News part of your morning: click here to subscribe.July 27, 2018
Extreme Heat 🔥 & A Weird Jet Stream: A Climate Change Double Whammy
Temperature records are shattering across the globe, and
wildfires 🔥 are raging from Yosemite to the Arctic Circle. To slightly misquote the seminal climate change anthem All Star, “My world’s on fire, how bout yours? That is not the way I like it and I have paralyzing existential dread about the future of our planet.”
Climate change is playing two different roles in this string of astonishing record-breaking weather.First off, the overall warming driven by carbon pollution is amplifying heatwaves. Studies show global warming is responsible for pushing temperatures past prior record levels in 82 percent of record-setting heat extreme events around the world in recent years. In this event, an unusual jet stream pattern is the engine driving the extreme heat, and global warming is likely providing the extra fuel that is driving the extreme heat past prior records.
Then there’s
the jet stream. The engine driving many extreme weather events often is a major change in global atmospheric circulation, and the current global heat waves follows that pattern. And climate change is increasing the frequency of unusual jet stream configurations, such as the one driving the current extreme heat. The resulting heat is obliterating records, pushing temperature extremes way past historic levels.
Climate scientist Michael Mann explained: “The extreme weather we're seeing around the Northern Hemisphere, such as heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires, is related to an unusual, undulating pattern in the jet stream. The other part of this that's atypical is that this undulating pattern doesn't usually hold longer than a few days. But this one isn't going anywhere. Our work shows that this sort of pattern, which has been associated with many of the most extreme, persistent weather events in recent years, including the 2003 European heat wave, 2010 Moscow wildfires, 2011 Texas and Oklahoma drought, and 2016 Alberta wildfires to name a few, is becoming more common because of human-caused climate change, and in particular, because of amplified Arctic warming.”
As is the case with many extreme weather events, coverage of these unnatural disasters in media has been mixed. Chris Hayes sparked a widespread discussion on Twitter when he tweeted that covering climate change in broadcast news is a “ratings killer”. (And a recent Media Matters analysis shows how infrequently broadcast covers climate change in relation to the heatwave: just one segment out of 127 mentioned climate change.)
A new analysis by Public Citizen’s Cover Climate project found that during the record-breaking June-July heatwave in the US, the top 50 papers published 204 heat-related articles, with just 23 mentioning climate change.
One bright spot, the research shows, is that there were no climate denial pieces in response to the heatwave. That’s not the same worldwide, as Carbon Brief’s Leo Hickman points out. Both the
Daily Mail 🙉 and
The Sun 🙊 published opinion pieces
denying the climate connection to the UK’s heatwave (
tHaTs jUsT hOt AiR ).
But scientists and journalists are pushing back, calling for better, more thorough coverage. The New York Times updated a piece on Greece’s devastating wildfires to include the climate connection after they were called out on Twitter for the omission. (
Greece, by the way, is in the middle of its
hottest year ever recorded.) In response to Hayes’ tweet, journalists like Eric Holthaus and Emily Atkin who cover climate issues pointed out how successful climate-focused stories have been. David Wallace-Wells, whose story “The Uninhabitable Earth” was the most read piece in the New York Magazine’s history, wrote a follow-up yesterday posing a stark question:
How did the end of the world become old news?Climate scientists know that these extremes will continue to become more extreme unless we limit global temperature rise and curb carbon pollution. So keep tweeting. Write letters to the editor. Support science. And when you need a five minute break from fighting the good fight, turn on some Smash Mouth and read this
FT Diary of a sweaty climate skeptic.🦕 “I bet you anything this heat will be over by Christmas. We’ll be wearing jackets.”