“The risk of extreme events is growing and they are affecting every corner of the world,” NOAA chief scientist Sarah Kapnick said.
The problem is especially bad when it comes to dangerous heat, said NOAA climate scientist Stephanie Herring, who edits an annual study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that calculates how much of the extreme weather in past years were worsened by climate change.
“Research is showing that these extreme heat events are also likely to become the new normal,” Herring said at the weather conference.
There’s been a dramatic upswing in the size and number of super costly extremes in the US since about 2016, Smith said. In the past seven years, 121 different billion-dollar weather disasters have caused more than US$1 trillion in damage and killed more than 5,000 people.
Those years dwarf what happened in the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s. For example, in the entire decade of the 1990s there were 55 different billion-dollar disasters that cost US$313 billion total and claimed 3,062 lives.
“It’s not just one but many, many different types of extremes across much of the country,” Smith said. “If extremes were on a bingo card, we almost filled up the card over the last several years.”
In 2022, there were nine billion-dollar non-tropical storms, including a derecho, three hurricanes, two tornado outbreaks, one flood, one winter storm, a megadrought and a costly wildfire. The only general type of weather disaster missing was an icy freeze that causes US$1 billion or more in crop damage, Smith said. And last month, Florida came close to it, but missed it by a degree or two and some preventive steps by farmers, he said.
That prevented freeze was one of two “silver linings” in 2022 extremes, Smith said. The other was that the wildfire season, though still costing well over US$1 billion, was not as severe as past years, except in New Mexico and Texas, he said.
For the first 11 months of 2022, California was going through its second driest year on record, but drenchings from an atmospheric river that started in December, turned it to only the ninth driest year on record for California, said NOAA climate monitoring chief Karin Gleason.
With a third straight year of a La Nina cooling the eastern Pacific, which tends to change weather patterns across the globe and moderate global warming, 2022 was only the 18th warmest year in US records, Gleason said.
“It was a warm year certainly above average for most of the country but nothing off the charts,” Gleason said. The nation’s average temperature was 11.9 degrees Celsius, which is 0.8 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average.
The year was 3.8cm below normal for rain and snow, the 27th driest out of 128 years, Gleason said.
NOAA and NASA on Thursday will announce how hot the globe was for 2022, which will not be a record but likely to be in the top seven or so hottest years. European climate monitoring group Copernicus released its calculations Tuesday, saying 2022 was the fifth hottest globally and second hottest in Europe.
US greenhouse gas emissions – which is what traps heat to cause global warming – rose 1.3 per centin 2022, according to a report released Tuesday by the Rhodium Group, a think tank. That’s less than the economy grew. The emissions increase was driven by cars, trucks and industry with electric power generation polluting slightly less.
It’s the second straight year, both after lockdowns eased, that American carbon pollution has grown after fairly steady decreases for several years. It makes it less likely that the United States will achieve its pledge to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, according to the Rhodium report.
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