Just how significant is the now-familiar meme that global warming is producing extreme weather phenomena never seen before in the US? The federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps the historic records, and they show that 2022 wasn’t extreme when it comes weather.
That’s a point that climate realist Roger Pielke Jr. makes in his Substack newsletter, accompanied by several of NOAA’s most telling time-sequence data charts. As Pielke notes, US temperatures are above the 100-year average. “In each month of the summer of 2022, U.S. maximum temperatures were higher than the long-term average,” he writes.
Warming happens. But note that 1933 and 1981 were also very hot for June, July, and August.
As for extreme events, no clear trends are obvious. Overall, writes Pielke, “In a few words, extreme weather in 2022 in the U.S. has been — well, pretty normal.”
Take a look at drought, which has gotten a lot of attention this year, although at this writing some of the most severe drought areas, such as the Mississippi Valley, are now experiencing floods. The long-term drought picture (1923-this year), using the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), shows that “drought across the lower-48 has actually decreased a bit on that time scale, but the trend is small. Once again the 1930s heavily influence any longer-term trend analysis.”
PDSI, according to its Wikipedia entry, “has proven most effective in determining long-term drought, a matter of several months….”
Pielke is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, currently on sabbatical. The “Jr.” is important because his father, Roger Pielke Sr., is also on the Colorado faculty and is a noted meteorologist, focused on climate variability and climate change. Pielke Jr. has a BA in mathematics, an MS in public policy, and a PhD in political science, all three degrees from Colorado.
Pielke somewhat snarkily comments, “I wanted to get this out before NOAA blasts out its ‘billion-dollar disaster’ press kit, along with the implication that damage from disasters tells us something about extreme weather.” But it’s a point well-taken. NOAA’s “National Centers for Environmental Information” consistently highlights the dollar costs of extreme weather on its high-profile “Calculating the Costs of Weather and Climate Disasters” web page.
NOAA’s dollar fixation is inherently misleading when it comes to tracking extreme weather events, as it measures land use and population patterns as much as or more than weather. A Dec. 8 study in the journal Frontiers in Human Dynamics, “Flocking to fire: How climate and natural hazards shape human migration across the United States,” written by two University of Vermont researchers and one from the US Department of Agriculture.
The authors write, “Controlling for socioeconomic and environmental factors, we found that people have moved away from areas most affected by heat waves and hurricanes, but toward areas most affected by wildfires. This relationship may suggest that, for many, the dangers of wildfires do not yet outweigh the perceived benefits of life in fire-prone areas. We also found that people have been moving toward metropolitan areas with relatively hot summers, a dangerous public health trend if mean and maximum temperatures continue to rise, as projected in most climate scenarios.”
Mahalia Clark, lead author of the study and graduate fellow at the University of Vermont Gund Institute for Environment, told CNN, “What I was quite surprised by is that a lot of these climate risks are not yet affecting people’s decision about where to move. It might be that (disasters) haven’t had as much time to start making their way into people’s minds to really affect them in terms of choices.”
“Moving more folks into high-risk areas is going to prove exceedingly costly,” Marlon said. “The question just becomes a matter of who is going to pay for the damages.”
–Kennedy Maize
This is the last Quad Report of 2022