WASHINGTON (AP) — Frkish wther disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northst U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar wther extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.
The final draft of the report from a panel of the world's top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world alrdy wry of wther astrophes costing billions of dollars. The report says costs will rise and perhaps some loions will become "incrsingly marginal as places to live."FILE - In this Oct. 31, 2011 file photo, Thai residents carry their belongings along floods as they move to higher ground at Bangkok's Don Muang district, Thailand. Frkish wther, from this weekends October snowstorm to the long-lasting drought in the US Southwest, is striking more often. And global warming should make future wther even weirder, a special international report says. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila, File)
The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda. It says there is at lst a 2-in-3 probability that climate extremes have alrdy worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.
This marks a change in climate science from focusing on subtle changes in daily average temperatures to concentrating on the harder-to-analyze frk events that grab hdlines, cause economic damage and kill people. The most recent bizarre wther extreme, the pre-Halloween snowstorm, is typical of the damage climate scientists warn will occur — but it's not typical of the events they tie to global warming.
"The extremes are a rlly noticble aspect of climate change," said Jerry Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Resrch. "I think people rlize that the extremes are where we are going to see a lot of the impacts of climate change."
The snow-bring Nor'ster cannot be blamed on climate change and probably isn't the type of storm that will incrse with global warming, four meteorologists and climate scientists said. They agree more study is needed. But experts on extreme storms have focused more closely on the incrsing s of super-hvy rainstorms, not snow, NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said.
The opposite kind of disaster — the drought in Texas and the Southwest U.S. — is also the type of event scientists are saying will happen more often as the world warms, said Schmidt and Meehl, who reviewed part of the climate panel report. No studies have specifically tied global warming to the drought, but it is consistent with computer models that indie current climate trends will worsen existing droughts, Meehl said.
Studies also have predicted more intense monsoons with climate change. Warmer air can hold more water and puts more energy into wther systems, changing the dynamics of storms and where and how they hit.
Thailand is now coping with massive flooding from monsoonal rains that illustrate how climate is also interconnected with other manmade issues such as population and urban development, river management and sinking lands, Schmidt said. In fact, the report says that "for some climate extremes in many regions, the main driver for future incrses in losses will be socioeconomic in nature" rather than greenhouse gases.
There's an 80 percent chance that the killer Russian ht wave of 2010 wouldn't have happened without the added push of global warming, according to a study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
So while in the past the climate change panel, formed by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization, has discussed extreme events in snippets in its report, this time the scientists are putting them all together. The report, which needs approval by diplomats at the mid-November meeting, tries to msure the confidence scientists have in their assessment of climate extremes both future and past.
Chris Field, one of the lders of the climate change panel, said he and other authors won't comment because the report still is subject to change. The summary chapter of the report didn't detail which regions of the world might suffer extremes so severe as to lve them marginally habitable.
The report does say scientists are "virtually certain" — 99 percent — that the world will have more extreme spells of ht and fewer of cold. Ht waves could pk as much as 5 degrees hotter by mid-century and even 9 degrees hotter by the end of the century.
Wther Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters, who wasn't involved in the study, said in the United States from June to August this yr, blistering ht set 2,703 daily high temperature records, compared with only 300 cold records during that period, making it the hottest summer in the U.S. since the Dust Bowl of 1936.
By the end of the century, the intense, single-day, hvy rainstorms that now typically happen only once every 20 yrs are likely to happen about twice a decade, the report says.
The report said hurricanes and other tropical cyclones — like 2005's Katrina — are likely to get stronger in wind speed, but won't incrse in and may actually decrse. Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel, who studies climate's effects on hurricanes, disagrees and believes more of these intense storms will occur.
And global warming isn't the sole villain in future climate disasters, the climate report says. An even bigger problem will be the of people — especially the poor — who live in harm's way.
University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Wver, who wasn't among the authors, said the report was written to be "so bland" that it may not matter to world lders.
But Masters said the basics of the report seem to be proven true by what's happening every day. "In the U.S., this has been the weirdest wther yr we've had for my 30 yrs, hands down. Certainly this October snowstorm fits in with it."
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