Eight catastrophic floods in 11 days: What's behind intense rainfall around the world?
Source: NBC News
Scientists say climate change is likely having an impact on rainfall and flooding, but understanding precisely what that relationship is can be tricky.
Sept. 12, 2023, 5:03 PM EDT
By Denise Chow
The catastrophic flooding in Libya that has left as many as 10,000 people feared dead is just the latest in a string of intense rainfall events to hammer various parts of the globe over the past two weeks.
In the first 11 days of September, eight devastating flooding events have unfolded on four continents. Before Mediterranean storm Daniel sent floodwaters surging through eastern Libya, severe rains inundated parts of central Greece, northwestern Turkey, southern Brazil, central and coastal Spain, southern China, Hong Kong and the southwestern United States.
Seeing this many unrelated extreme weather events around the world in such a short period of time is unusual, said Andrew Hoell, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory.
…
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/eight-catastrophic-floods-11-days-s-intense-rainfall-world-rcna104620
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kimbutgar
(27,248 posts)
lapfog_1
(31,904 posts)maybe longer.
Welcome to the Anthropocene... a lot of people are going to die. We have never had 8 billion people on this planet with the type of conditions that are going to be the new normal.
Feeding them all is going to be a challenge.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)Hansen et al. (1981): Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide
Attilatheblond
(8,878 posts)Throw in the human tendency to ignore maintaining infrastructure like dams and .... surf's up in some inland areas.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)The wet get wetter, and the dry get drier.
Attilatheblond
(8,878 posts)Hoping El Nino brings rain to the southwest this winter, but the old weather patters and models are not working so much these days.
Ford_Prefect
(8,612 posts)lapfog_1
(31,904 posts)all of them. I stored ALL of the collected climate data for a decade.
I knew the models predicted this before I got to NASA.
I just didn't know how long before... so I made the safe conservative "prediction".
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)The thing to understand about Hansen is that he started out looking at Venus, and then, one day, a lightbulb lit, and he said, “This could happen on Earth!” and his career took a rather radical turn.
Did you work with James Lovelock?
lapfog_1
(31,904 posts)Hansen... Jose Zero ( can't forget that name ), lots of others. I'm really bad with names.
I was the "rescue" architect of a NASA program called EOSDIS (Earth Observation System - Distributed Information System - NASA loves acronyms... well all the federal government loves acronyms). When I say rescue architect... the original Contractor (who I won't name) was waaay behind and over budget... to the point where the Director's office became involved... at the urging of the Vice President... some guy named Al Gore. I sat on the technical review committee... and proposed that we use a system that I had already designed and which my local team implemented... and the Goddard guys and the White Sands guys just redirected the data stream to my facility... and we stored PBs of Earth Science data ( back when a PB was actually a big deal ).
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)NASA itself is an acronym, so…
James Lovelock may be best known for formulating the “Gaia Hypothesis” in a response to a request for him to develop a simple test for life that could be carried to Mars on the Viking probes.
He came up with his test, but realized it could be performed by remote sensing (i.e. no interplanetary probe required.)
lapfog_1
(31,904 posts)The great thing about government acronyms... is that within the acronym there is often the first letter of another acronym.
ok, I remember that paper... didn't remember his name, no idea if I met him or not... probably not.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)Wang et al. 1976
Wang, W.-C., Y.L. Yung, A.A. Lacis, T. Mo, and J.E. Hansen, 1976: Greenhouse effects due to man-made perturbation of trace gases. Science, 194, 685-690, doi:10.1126/science.194.4266.685.
Nitrous oxide, methane, ammonia, and a number of other trace constituents in the earth's atmosphere have infrared absorption bands in the spectral region 7 to 14 p,m and contribute to the atmospheric greenhouse effect. The concentrations of these trace gases may undergo substantial changes because of man’s activities. Extensive use of chemical fertilizers and combustion of fossil fuels may perturb the nitrogen cycle, leading to increases in atmospheric N₂O, and the same perturbing processes may increase the amounts of atmospheric CH₄ and NH₃. We use a one-dimensional radiative-convective model for the atmospheric thermal structure to compute the change in the surface temperature of the earth for large assumed increases in the trace gas concentrations; doubling the N₂O. CH₄, and NH₃ concentrations is found to cause additive increases in the surface temperature of 0.7°, 0.3°, and 0.1°K. respectively. These systematic effects on the earth’s radiation budget would have substantial climatic significance. It is therefore important that the abundances of these trace gases be accurately monitored to determine the actual trends of their concentrations.
WhiteTara
(31,260 posts)it's what spurred Earth Day.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)https://www.earthday.org/history/
Ford_Prefect
(8,612 posts)BlueIn_W_Pa
(842 posts)is because of cheap, high energy density from oil. No oil and the "extra 6 billion" are going to have a hard time - and we have to cut oil consumption.
lapfog_1
(31,904 posts)we basically eat oil.
We use it to plant, weed, and harvest the crops. We use it as fertilizer for those crops. It then transports the crop to food processors, and then to market, etc.
Possibly the largest single input to what we eat is oil.
And it gets even worse for most meat products that we eat.
I remember reading all about the Hubbert Peak Oil papers back almost 20 years ago now. He wasn't wrong... but failed to take into account technology... in this case Fracking. Fracking has allowed us to get much more of the oil locked in small pockets of rock deep underground, making old "depleted" oil wells producers again.
But Hubbert wasn't wrong, we will... eventually... run out of oil to extract.
Not to mention that we must stop burning oil or these now seemingly constant weather disaster will only get worse.
Think. Again.
(22,456 posts)"Scientists say climate change is likely having an impact on rainfall and flooding, but understanding precisely what that relationship is can be tricky."
Talk about downplaying climate change!
Elessar Zappa
(16,385 posts)The statement is true. The relationship is very complex.
Think. Again.
(22,456 posts)"...Scientists say climate change is likely having an impact on rainfall and flooding ..."
LIKELY??
The vast majority of scientists say climate change is most definitely having an impact on rainfall and flooding.
"...but understanding precisely what that relationship is can be tricky."
TRICKY??
Earth's ecological systems are almost infinitely complex, tricky is certainly not a correctly descriptive word to use for the difficulties involved in tracing the multitude of interdependent relationships, reactions and influences taking place.
republianmushroom
(22,326 posts)
COL Mustard
(8,222 posts)I see some guy building a boat, I'm getting out of town!
Rural_Progressive
(1,107 posts)"Seeing this many unrelated extreme weather events around the world in such a short period of time is unusual"
bucolic_frolic
(55,140 posts)More rain. Silly headline.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(28,493 posts)by Jeff Goodell.
It's even worse than you know.
He also wrote The Water Will Come, which is about rising sea levels. What he's learned since that book, which came out in 2017, is scary, to say the least.
Delphinus
(12,522 posts)are important reads.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(28,493 posts)Also, The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe. It basically says that we are in a crisis mode, a fourth turning as he describes it. It's difficult to describe the thesis in less than several hundred words, but basically our culture/society has been through a number of turnings starting at the end of the 15th century England. We are now in the most recent Fourth Turning, during which EVERYTHING changes.
Think about what's going on now. Climate change. Diseases, like Covid. Social changes like helping poor people. Or not helping them. Lots and lots of such things.
What Howe essentially says is, "Brace yourself. Things are going to become VERY different very soon."
I now have a context for a lot of what is happening these days.
Delphinus
(12,522 posts)I will add that book to my list of things to read. I tell you, there are days I am glad I am old (and I've not even read the book yet!).
royable
(1,426 posts)crowded into places that are more easily habitable, such as river valleys and flood plains.
Could also have to do with increasing fraction of the population living in terrible poverty.
If there's torrential rainfall in a place no one lives, or lives downstream from, we don't care so much.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)Rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, oceans…
PoindexterOglethorpe
(28,493 posts)than the planet can actually sustain.
I'm guessing that this planet can maintain no more than one billion people, and we crossed that threshold a long time ago.
Without a serious reduction in population, there's no hope.
Evolve Dammit
(21,777 posts)threat to the USA over 10 years ago. It's not improving with age. They were right (and incredibly) largely ignored.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)The Observer: Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
- Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
- Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years
- Threat to the world is greater than terrorism
Sat 21 Feb 2004 20.33 EST
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
…
Evolve Dammit
(21,777 posts)S--- together?? I am not optimistic "we" will (meaning the "industrialized nations".)
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)The US can’t even get it together as a country!
If, by some miracle, we do get it together, and I hope that we do… I’m afraid we may be a little bit late for the wake (if you know what I mean…)
Evolve Dammit
(21,777 posts)OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)I’m afraid multiple tipping points may have been crossed, naturally, like dominoes, one may have quickly led to another etc.
They are not independent.
Evolve Dammit
(21,777 posts)Blues Heron
(8,838 posts)and transport it. All that extra heat is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)In addition, that water vapor has mass. The air is heavier, has more momentum, more energy to dissipate…
hatrack
(64,888 posts).
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)What did physics ever do to you‽
lapfog_1
(31,904 posts)hey, I know, we will just pass NEW laws... yeah, that's the ticket!
I remember I story I heard of in college where some town in Missouri (maybe) decided the the value of Pi should be exactly 3.141 so they passed a law that made it so.
Possibly in the Journal of Irreproducible Results?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Irreproducible_Results#:~:text=The%20Journal%20of%20Irreproducible%20Results,magazine%20about%20science%2C%20for%20scientists.
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)22/7 or √10 will get you more than close enough for the back of an envelope.
Maybe they got tired of engineers doing a calculation like 5 × 3.14159265 (“You realize that you’ve only got one “significant digit” in that calculation. Right?”)
I say if they want to use 3.141, let ’em.
hatrack
(64,888 posts)I HATE that!!
Evolve Dammit
(21,777 posts)
Marthe48
(23,175 posts)Just a toss-up if putin will launch before the water rises to drown us.
Evolve Dammit
(21,777 posts)Marthe48
(23,175 posts)I'd prefer Mother Nature be the cause. Nuke or Nature won't be pretty, but at least natural causes won't pollute Earth for eons and eons.
Evolve Dammit
(21,777 posts)Voltaire2
(15,377 posts)That property belongs only to Russia and the USA. Both nations retain catastrophic level nuclear arsenals.
Evolve Dammit
(21,777 posts)Ford_Prefect
(8,612 posts)But the road to understanding climate change stretches back to the tweed-clad middle years of the 19th century—when Victorian-era scientists conducted the first experiments proving that runaway CO2 could, one day, cook the planet.
In other words, “global warming was officially discovered more than 100 years ago.”
* * *
Early climate research grew out of the astonishing ferment of science in that century. Scientists were formulating the basis of our modern understanding of thermodynamics, and its connection to chemistry and molecular physics. One was Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician and physicist who spent his career pondering the mechanics and equations governing heat transfer. He was intrigued by a puzzle: Why was the Earth as warm as it was? When he estimated how much energy from the sun hit our planet, he figured the Earth ought to be colder than it is.
The answer, he proposed, must be the atmosphere: It was somehow preventing heat from escaping. In an 1824 paper, he hypothesized that gases in the atmosphere must create barriers that acted to trap heat. Fourier didn’t yet know what molecular mechanisms were trapping the heat. But in an 1837 paper for The American Journal of Science and Arts, he surmised that over a long period of time, the amount of heat held in by the atmosphere could change — altered by both the Earth’s natural evolution and human activity. “The establishment and progress of human society, and the action of natural powers, may, in extensive regions, produce remarkable changes in the state of the surface, the distribution of the waters, and the great movements of the air,” he predicted. “Such effects, in the course of some centuries, must produce variations in the mean temperature for such places.”
Eunice Newton Foote identified and predicted how the atmosphere would change as CO2 increased.
John Tyndall intrigued by the question of what caused the ice ages did a series of experiments to identify the likely atmospheric culprits.
progressoid
(53,179 posts)Who are you going to believe, scientists or a second rate AM radio host?
SCantiGOP
(14,719 posts)The abnormal weather is all being caused by the Climate Hoax.
IcyPeas
(25,475 posts)One in Jupiter, Florida, so if that one becomes submerged... no problem... he can move to his other house. See, this is why we should all own multiple houses.
WestMichRad
(3,254 posts)I was thinking it had just happened, but it was in July. They also had bad floods in ‘21 and ‘22. Yikes!
Not to make light of all the catastrophic flooding, but Portugal had a different sort of flooding: storage tank rupture caused streets in a Portugal town to be flooded with red wine:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/13/levira-portugal-wine-flood-how-damage-litres-destilaria
OKIsItJustMe
(21,875 posts)A “climate skeptic” co-worker asked me after that if I was really serious about that “Climate Change” business, and if I thought we would see another flood like that one. He was looking to buy a nice cabin by the river, and the owners told him that it had flooded, but it was a “500 year flood” and it had never flooded before.
I said, “Well, yeah, that was a ‘500 year flood,’ but I read in the paper that the year before that, we had a ‘250 year flood’ and the year before that we had a ‘100 year flood.’ Do you know what the odds against a string like that happening at random are?” He said, “it’s been a while…” I said, “Invert and multiply.” He thought a moment, whistled appreciatively, and said, “That’s a pretty big number!” I said, “Yeah… something’s changing…”
He retired, and bought the cabin anyway. A few years later, I heard from another co-worker that it had flooded in the most recent flood… “Isn’t that terrible‽” he asked, and I agreed, “Sure is!”
Magoo48
(6,721 posts)Generally, the first world will not be inconvenienced.
Now is the time to begin teaching adaptive engineering and speculative survival concepts in all schools and universities K-thru…..Make these courses of study free at every institution of higher learning from now on.
BlueIn_W_Pa
(842 posts)Voltaire2
(15,377 posts)We have entered the find out stage of the climate catastrophe. It just gets worse until we either get serious about a sustainable global economy, or die off in such vast numbers that we stop making it worse that way.
