DAILY TRIFECTA: Mother Nature's Invisible Hand Has Us By The Short & Curlies
She's got the whole world in her hands
TITLE: Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South
https://apnews.com/article/rainfall-helene-carolina-tennessee-georgia-climate-change-flood-fcba634e14a0ffa1a8e1fa85d7e2b390
EXCERPTS: More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.’'
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much of it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
In a quick analysis, not peer-reviewed but using a method published in a study about Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall, three scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab determined that climate change caused 50% more rainfall during Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
TITLE: Death and Destruction From Helene Show Climate Crisis Isn't in a Bargaining Mood
https://www.citywatchla.com/climate/29629-death-and-destruction-from-helene-show-climate-crisis-isnt-in-a-bargaining-mood
EXCERPT: The same day that Helene slammed into the Gulf, Hurricane John crashed into the Mexican state of Guerrero, dropping nearly 40 inches of rain and causing deadly and devastating floods in many places including Acapulco, which is still a shambles from Hurricane Otis last year. In Nepal this afternoon at least 148 people are deadare dead and many still missing in the Kathmandu Valley. Just this month, as one comprehensive twitter thread documented, we’ve seen massive flooding in Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Marseilles, Milan, India, Wales, Guatemala, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, with the Danube hitting new heights across Central Europe. It is hard to open social media without seeing cellphone videos from the cars-washing-down-steep-streets genre; everywhere the flows are muddy-brown, and swirling with power.
But all that water has to come from somewhere—the extra vapor in the air implies that in some places water is disappearing skyward, and those stories are at least as dangerous, if not as dramatic in a daily way. (How do we know that drought is on the increase? That’s easy—a new “drought emoji” of a dead tree is about to be approved).
Brazilian president Lula traveled to the Amazon last week to highlight the intense drought gripping the region; it’s fueled fires that have covered as much as 60 percent of the county with smoke. It used to be that Amazon fires were mostly the work of prospectors and would-be farmers, using the dry season to get rid of the forest; now, though, many of the fires are burning in pristine areas far from active attempts at deforestation. It just gets dry enough that the rainforest can catch fire. As Manuela Andreoni reported in the Times, Lula’s new environment minister, the highly credible Marina Silva, has cracked down on the bad guys, but it hasn’t been enough to stop the burning
“Maybe 2024 is the best year of the ones that are coming, as incredible as it may seem,” said Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. “The climate models show a big share of the biome is going to become drier.”
In essence, the Amazon rainforest is an exquisite mechanism for passing moisture from the ocean to the interior, but as more of the forest disappears that mechanism is quickly breaking down—and with implications for regions as far away as California.
All of this is a way of saying something I’ve said too many times before: we’re out of margin. We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day. (117 Fahrenheit in Phoenix yesterday, the hottest September temperature ever recorded there, smashing the old daily mark by…eight degrees).
The bottom line is, we’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals; physics isn’t in a bargaining mood. Every battle is dishearteningly existential now.
TITLE: Where Americans Have Been Moving Into Disaster-Prone Areas
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/30/climate/americans-moving-hurricane-wildfire-risk.html
EXCERPT: The country’s vast population shift has left more people exposed to the risk of natural hazards and dangerous heat at a time when climate change is amplifying many weather extremes. A New York Times analysis shows the dynamic in new detail:
• Florida, which regularly gets raked by Atlantic hurricanes, gained millions of new residents between 2000 and 2023.
• Phoenix has been one of the country’s fastest-growing large cities for years. It’s also one of the hottest, registering 100 straight days with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this year.
• The fire-prone foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada have seen an influx of people even as wildfires in the region become more frequent and severe.
• East Texas metro areas, like Houston, Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth, have ballooned in recent decades despite each being at high risk for multiple hazards, a fact brought into stark relief this year when Hurricane Beryl knocked out power in Houston during a heat wave.
“The more that people are moving into areas exposed to hazards,” said Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia’s Climate School, “the more that these hazards can turn into disasters of larger and larger scale.”
In some places, population growth and development have already made disasters worse and more costly, leading to widespread damage and destruction, major stress on infrastructure and soaring losses for insurers and individuals alike. Yet studies show people continue to flock to many “hazard hotspots.”
Americans’ decisions about where to move are largely motivated by economic concerns and lifestyle preferences, experts said, rather than potential for catastrophe. Some move seeking better job prospects and a cheaper cost of living; others are lured by sunnier climates and scenic views.
“There are 20 different factors in weighing where people want to move,” said Mahalia Clark, a graduate fellow at the University of Vermont who has studied the links between natural hazards and migration in the United States. “Higher up on the list is where friends and family live, where I can afford to move. Much lower down is what is the risk of hurricane or wildfire.”
Widespread use of air conditioners has also supported Americans’ long-term southward shift, making places with hot summers but mild winters more attractive.
Yet even in booming southern metro areas, growth has not been evenly spread. Nor have departures from places like the Northeast. In many parts of the country, suburbs and exurbs have seen the biggest population gains in the last decade, while inner cities have often lost residents. The coronavirus pandemic turbocharged this trend.
This outward growth of population and development has increased many Americans’ exposure to natural hazards too, bringing more people into wildfire zones and giving tornadoes and hurricanes more chances to hit populated areas, a trend scientists call “the expanding bull’s-eye effect.”
To be sure, few places are completely safe. Much of Vermont, which is not highlighted as high risk in the maps above, saw devastating flooding last year following a record-breaking storm. But the Times’s maps focus on places with the highest risk, according to hazard data from CoreLogic, a property and risk analytics firm.
Other forces, including improvements to early warning technologies and stricter building codes, have helped reduce disaster risk and losses even as rapid population growth and development in high-hazard areas and climate change have increased the potential for harm.
“In a way, I see it as a race,” said Virginia Iglesias, a research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Earth Lab. “We are trying to mitigate,” she said, even as hazards multiply and more people move into harm’s way, “increasing the probability of disaster.”
SEE ALSO:
Climate change destroyed an Alaska village. Its residents are starting over in a new town
https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-permafrost-melting-alaska-newtok-relocation-moving-292694f057b75f75a9438c794853ee25
Helene should be a siren for Pittsburgh: Get prepared for more extreme weather
https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2024/10/01/helene-flooding-north-carolina-climate-change-green-infrastructure/stories/202410010013
Before the floods, Asheville was called a ‘climate haven.’ Is anywhere safe?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/10/01/asheville-climate-haven-flooding-hurricane/
Scenic Lake Lure ‘Post-Apocalyptic’ After Helene
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/video/lake-lure-north-carolina-helene-damage-photo-video