Worst Weather in Two Centuries

If it has seemed like we've been hearing an awful lot in recent months about extreme weather, about record this and record that, it's because the weather has, as a matter of fact, been extremely extreme.  How extreme?  Well, on his Wunderblog, Jeff Masters has just posted an astonishing summary of 2010's top twenty extreme weather events, in which he documents the most wild and unusual weather in decades.

"Every year extraordinary weather events rock the Earth. Records that have stood centuries are broken. Great floods, droughts, and storms affect millions of people, and truly exceptional weather events unprecedented in human history may occur. But the wild roller-coaster ride of incredible weather events during 2010, in my mind, makes that year the planet's most extraordinary year for extreme weather since reliable global upper-air data began in the late 1940s."  

At the end of the post, he goes further, and suggests that in the last year and a half the world may have experienced its the most wild and unusual weather since 1816, the famous "Year Without a Summer" caused by the eruption of the Tambora volcano.  Only this time, of course, there's no volcano to blame.

Dies Mirabilis

His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,
And dark is His path on the wings of the storm. 

I like to order my life in sync with the Church calendar.  During Lent, I am happy to be somber and sober, attentive to the darkness and brokenness of the world, aware of sin and its destructive effects.  That wasn’t hard this year, with a tsunami in Japan and war in Libya.  But during Easter, I am determined to look on the bright side, to gaze about me and see that Christ is making all things new, that life is triumphing over death and light over darkness.  I will not be distracted by doom or gloom in the headlines, for Christ is risen!   

But this week came a shattering reminder that we are still very much in the “not yet” of redemption’s already/not yet dialectic, a reminder that our world is still broken, that “the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.”  All through the day and night of Wednesday, April 27th, massive storms tore unprecedented paths of destruction across the American South.  The state of Alabama was blitzed unrelentingly by countless tornadoes, almost all of them, it seemed, enormous and deadly.  In dozens of towns and cities, residents awoke Thursday morning to heaps of rubble and corpses.  

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Extreme Weather and Climate Change

A long-standing pet-peeve of mine is the way that, in the endless tug-of-war in the media and blogosphere over climate change, both sides try to score cheap points by pointing to isolated extreme weather events as evidence for or against the phenomenon.  "Ha, there were several big blizzards this winter!  Global warming my foot!"  "No, actually more blizzards is evidence of global warming, believe it or not!"  Extreme events like Hurricane Katrina or the Great Russian Heat Wave are waved as poster-children for the dangers of climate change, so right-wingers gleefully poke holes in the science of attempted attribution.  You may recall that I posted on this subject, with particular reference to hurricanes, a few months ago.

Ricky Rood over at Weather Underground, the source for the best weather blogs around, has posted an excellent essay on the "Perils and Pitfalls of Event Attribution."  Although personally convinced of the reality and seriousness of climate change, Rood argues that the tendency of some climate scientists and the media to focus on individual extreme events and attribute them to climate change is counterproductive, bad science, and indeed impossible by definition.  It reduces this crucial public discussion to cheap sound bytes and blaring headlines, drawing attention away from substantive verifiable claims:

"It is hard to see how playing the game of defining extreme events and then attributing that event to “climate change” can ever be won. In fact, it seems like it is a game that necessarily leads to controversy, and controversy is the fuel of talk radio, blogs propagating around the world, and the maintenance of doubt."  

The essay is well worth reading for weather buffs or environmental ethics buffs (yep, I'm talking to you, Byron. ;-))

Hurricanes in a Warming World

Eh, what the heck...I'll come out of the closet and spice up this theology-heavy blog.

As I recently posted on my old blog (which I falsely predicted would be resurrecting), the much-touted link between climate change and more frequent and more intense hurricane turns out to be much trickier than you would think.  The catastrophic and hyperactive 2004 and 2005 Atlantic hurricane seasons naturally led people to fish about for an explanation for the chaos, and it wasn’t hard to find a few scientists ready to line up and point the finger at global warming.  It stood to reason, of course, that if hurricanes fed on warm ocean water, and the world was getting warmer, including the oceans, then hurricanes would get more numerous and stronger.  At least, that was the bastardized form of the argument that was repeated often enough in the media to become accepted fact.  The actual scientists recognized that other factors would come into play and the relevant papers generally projected an actual decrease in number of tropical cyclones, with a slight increase in average intensity, and a marked increase in maximum potential intensity (which depends largely on water temperatures).  

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