2010 Extreme Weather

When I was a kid, it seemed to me that only old people talked about the weather; these exchanges  seemed too chatty, too giddy, something to do with a lifetime of too many cocktails I thought. I, on the other hand was grave, hypnotized by the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over us, for which we practiced every week in school. The ever-present Apocalypse.
Now that I am approaching that age, I am finding a personal  irony in the way that Nature, with ever-greater frequency, seems to want to remind us that the apocalypse, if there is to be one,  may also come in the form of ... weather. Bad weather, and lots of it.
Consider 2010: already by Thanksgiving the year was headed for the record books for localized periods of extreme cold, extreme heat, extreme snow, and extreme downpours. Russia burned, and 30% of Pakistan was under water.
And just in December:
- Europe was stuck for weeks in travel chaos with heavy snows. Airports management under scrutiny by EU commission. Moscow airport management under scrutiny after an ice storm shut-down.
- US East coast from the Carolinas to Maine shut down on the day after Christmas  by a monster 'snowicane' (a dense blizzard with hurricane winds); 7,000 flights cancelled, and there too, airport and cities management criticized for the snow fail.
- SoCal/LA: worst flooding in decades, when several months' worth of rain fell in one storm.
- Southeast: multiple record cold temperatures in Florida. Southwest: unseasonably warm.
- India: record-breaking cold wave; Kashmir's  Lake Dal freezes over.
- Days of torrential rain in Queensland, Australia,  flooding over an area bigger than France and Germany combined, military called in.

Now, these are all weather events; to be sure. But since these are precisely the sort of weather events predicted to increase in frequency as the atmospheric quotient of CO2 continues to rise, I think we can in the very least have a strong suspicion that we are seeing the beginnings of predicted climate chaos due to the effects of anthropogenic CO2, which before the Industrial Revolution was at 260 ppm, and which  this year reached 390 ppm.

In the next years we can apparently expect to see such extreme weather events with greater frequency, here and there throughout the world. The near term toll will be an overall  fraying of infrastructure, a growing drain on national, local, and individual resources, a slow-down in public services and efficiencies. We can expect urgent discussions, as are going on in Europe now, about how to better prepare for these contingencies. But as long as  we continue boosting atmospheric CO2,  the extremes will continue to be further record-breakers, and we will always be behind the curve.

More on 2010 weather and climate chaos in Ecoversity.org's Case Focus.


December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

Postscript, Dec 31: "Tornadoes fueled by unusually warm weather pummeled the South and Midwest on Friday, killing at least six people and injuring dozens more across Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois. Forecasters said storms could hit along a stretch from near Chicago to New Orleans later in the evening as New Year's Eve celebrations begin.". One man who survived: "It sucked me out of my house and carried me across the road and dropped me," Chris Sisemore of Cincinnati told The Associated Press on Friday. "I was Superman for a while. ... You're just free-floating through the air. Trees are knocking you and smacking you down."
 And  a 100-Car Pileup In North Dakota... Happy New Year!