Why intense heat waves are more likely because of climate change
Why intense heat waves are more likely because of climate change
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The scorching heat across five continents in recent days, scientists say, provided yet more proof that human-caused global warming has so raised the baseline of normal temperatures that once-unthinkable catastrophes have become commonplace.
Hundreds fell in the United States, where tens of millions of people across the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard have been sweltering amid one of the worst early-season heat waves in memory.
That much of this week’s heat unfolded after the dissipation of the El Niño weather pattern — which typically boosts global temperatures — shows how greenhouse gas pollution has pushed the planet into frightening new territory, researchers say.
Whether the unyielding trend of record heat will ease soon, with an expected transition from El Niño to its cooler counterpart, La Niña, isn’t yet clear, scientists said.
Carbon dioxide traps heat, so the temperature of the planet is rising,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
For some 80 percent of the world’s population — 6.5 billion people — the heat of the past week was twice as likely to occur because humans started burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to data provided to The Washington Post by the nonprofit Climate Central.
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If we really cared about the warming component of climate change, we would stop funding natural gas and dump all the money we would have spent on natural gas infrastructure on renewables. We would roll back the ship fuel sulfur ban (which has a cooling effect) and rely on corrective measures for pollution problems in exchange for preventative measures for warming problems.
Because of methane leakage and other factors, natural gas is only a net-positive effect over coal in terms of greenhouse effect somewhere between 20 to 100 years down the line (imo reasonable estimates put this at around 40-50 years). Until then, natural gas has a more significant warming effect than coal because of obscenely high rates of methane leakage during transmission and distribution (which are underreported by relevant agencies to the order of 2-5x).
There is no one solution to climate change, but the question now is whether we care about it as the only problem or just one of a myriad of problems caused by human activity.
We will only care about it once the rich have divested from all the assets that will become worthless if we truly recognized the significance of what's happening.