Is Hurricane Ian a Staggering Event? The Report to the ACS Disaster Analysis Group on Hurricane Irm Yerbae

As I write this Friday, there are no detailed estimates of damage from Hurricane Ian, which came like a wrecking ball across southwestern Florida, except that they are likely to be, as my colleagues wrote Thursday evening, “staggering.”

I am not talking about the costs of physical damage, but the costs of human suffering. That is almost incomprehensible. It is also difficult to know at the moment. It is hard to get around in the area.

The roads and bridges were laid to waste. The homes and businesses on barrier islands are very old and old fashioned.

Climate Change in the Classroom: A Tale of Two Pseudoscalars During One Tropical Storm, and Why Were They So Hard to Get Around?

Their models found that low-income regions that tend to have warm weather suffer the most from increased temperatures, despite their emissions often being much lower than those of wealthier regions (see ‘Unequal burden’). Countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, and Mali were among the worst hit, with per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) reduced by around 5% annually compared with what it would have been without human-driven heatwaves. By contrast, the GDP reduction in countries such as Canada and Finland is only around 1%.

In many other respects, the meeting was depressing. Delegates reaffirmed their commitment to the goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement — to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial temperatures — while making no further commitments to phase out fossil fuels. This is a shocking dereliction of duty. For warming to be limited to 1.5 °C, emissions need to fall by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030. According to the latest UNFCCC report, published in October, they are set to increase by more than 10%. There is still no coordinated plan to turn these figures around. With some 45,000 people registered to attend COP27 — a record — many are questioning whether a planetary emergency can be tackled in this way.

The gap between scientists and forecasters was on full display when Hurricane Ian hit Florida in September. The storm gathered strength over abnormally hot water in the Gulf of Mexico – water made hotter by human-caused global warming.

When the scientists have selected a topic, they immediately begin to dig into historical records and running models in order to see what role climate change played in disasters. The final report is usually published within days or weeks of an extreme weather event. The whole point of World Weather Attribution is that quick answers are the whole point of publishing, and this is a big departure from the typical publishing pace of academic publishing. The scientists are able to fill a void that could otherwise be occupied by climate change denial by releasing studies while an extreme event is still dominating headlines. In the case of the UK heat wave, World Weather Attribution was ready with its report just nine days after temperatures reached their peak.

And federal forecasters, such as those at the National Hurricane Center, could also be effective messengers for climate information, says Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies extreme weather. If the predictions were part of the warnings that people already trust when a storm is bearing down, confidence in them would be higher, he argues.

Climate context is harder to include in real-time weather warnings. Kapnick has experience in working on extreme- event attribution studies.

She says that the public’s fascination with climate change has led to a review of how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration informs the public.

A large body of research shows that warmer oceans can make hurricanes worse by causing storms to dump more rain. The storm surge is more destructive because of the sea level rise. And research also suggests that climate change may make it more likely for storms to rapidly intensify, which also happened to Ian. People have little time to flee when storms get very destructive, so they are dangerous.

Rhome told Don Lemon that climate change can’t be linked to one event. On the whole, storms may be worsening due to climate change. But to link it to any one event, I would caution against that.”

Indeed, a preliminary analysis by Wehner and other climate scientists in the days after Ian made landfall estimated that climate change caused the storm to drop at least 10% more rain than it would have without global warming.

Climate finance: where will we go? What will we learn from the loss and damage fund of the UNFCCC 27 November 20-20 November agreement?

More support for electric vehicles is included, along with policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as well as interest in flood-proofing your home.

It’s not certain how long those attitudes will last after a disaster. Figuring that out is an active area of research. “There is a time in which you may want to help people understand what risks are and make connections to climate change,” Wong-Parodi says.

“I think that’s really important as we move forward, because it has implications for how we may want to communicate to the public about these types of events,” says Wong-Parodi.

COP27, the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, broke up at dawn on 20 November. The final communiqué came just hours before the football World Cup kicked off in Qatar, continuing a time-honoured tradition of these summits going into extra time before any sort of result is achieved.

One undoubted step forwards, however, came with the historic agreement to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund. This is the first time that countries that have been devastated as a result of climate change will benefit from the associated costs. It represents a completely new kind of fund, going beyond the existing mechanisms for funding the costs of adaptation to climate change.

It’s taken three decades to get to this point, at least in part because of arguments between richer and poorer countries on a whole raft of issues. A lack of agreed definitions and a fear that richer countries may end up being liable for trillions of dollars in losses and damage are some of the reasons why these are.

At everyCOP there are arguments over money. It is thought that they will return at COP28, which is due to be held in the United ArabUAE in a year or two. The size of the fund, who will be responsible and which countries will benefit hasn’t been decided.

This is an excellent idea, not least because it will help to establish areas in which experts largely agree — or disagree — and so identify instances in which further research could help to unpick outstanding questions. It does not go far enough. The IPCC should also prepare an evidence synthesis on climate finance itself. The lack of such a synthesis means that even the most basic concepts and methodologies are disputed, says Romain Weikmans, a researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, who is one of those pushing the IPCC to take on this task. Loss and damage are only part of the ins and outs of adaptation finance.

Money pledged for investment in flood defences or wind energy are counted by donor countries. The money received by the project on the ground is what the low and middle income countries prefer to count. Loans are the lion’s share of climate finance, and LMICs would prefer to count grants or other money that doesn’t have to be repaid. The question is about scope. If a new housing development in an area of high temperatures is fitted with special cool roofs, say, some would like to count the whole development as climate finance, whereas others would say just the roof part qualifies.

The way the system is set up means that if a government wants the advice it must make a formal request. That request is due now. Blutus Mbambi, co-founder of the Centre for Climate Change Action and Advocacy in Lusaka, Zambia, tells Nature that it was shocking to see how long negotiators in Sharm El-Sheikh spent in debates over the text, and how little evidence they had before them to make their decisions. Before the next round, it is necessary for research to get match fit.

Climate Change Was to Blame: Friederike Otto During the July 19th Heat Wave at 40.3 Degrees Clocks in the UK

The UK experienced a taste of the weather on July 19th. Temperatures reached 40.3 degrees Celsius—soaring past the previous record by more than one-and-a-half degrees. Dozens of homes in east London were destroyed by fires, while elsewhere in the country, the heat pushed the power grid close to the point of failure. It was the deadliest summer heat wave since 2003 when more than 2,800 excess deaths were found among people over the age of 65.

Friederike Otto was in her office at Imperial College London ready to answer the question that would be thrown at her over and over again during the next week: Was climate change to blame?