Climate change is real, like it or not

The scientists know - and the economists know

A lot of thoughts have been going through my mind this week both with regards to actual weather and what is currently happening in our society and government. Now that we have reached the end of the week, I want to take some time to synthesize my thoughts.

Saturday, June 21 is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of astronomical summer. (Note: The solstice is on June 21 in Universal Time Coordinated - for most of North America it actually occurs late in the evening of June 20.) The summer solstice is now also “Show Your Stripes” Day, the day when the meteorological community tries to raise awareness about global warming using the “climate stripes” graphics developed and popularized by British climate scientist Ed Hawkins. The stripes are intended to be a simple visualization of the long-term trend in global temperatures; each stripe represents the average temperature for a given year compared to the 1971-2000 average, red stripes are warmer than average, blue colder. The graphic shown above is the climate stripes graphic for Oklahoma City, the metro area where I live; you can clearly see the shift from blue to red with time.

Our climate is indisputably warming. This graphic from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is one that I like to show people skeptical of this point, as I feel like it’s very easy to understand. It shows the number of all of the various types of daily and monthly climate records set over various time periods back to the last year. You can clearly see how strongly warm records dominate cold records; a warming climate does not mean it will not ever get cold, but what it does mean is that over the long run, warm extremes will become warmer and more prevalent. This is exactly what is shown by this graphic, and this is a trend that can be seen globally and over many years.

Just this week, other weather and climate events were in the news that reinforce this message. Zack Labe is an outstanding climate scientist with Climate Central who has done extensive work on Arctic climate, and he posted today that Arctic sea ice is now at a record low. Arctic sea ice has been shrinking and thinning now for decades as the graphic above shows; I encourage you to visit Zack’s website for more visualizations of these trends.

As the eastern United States prepares for a prolonged, extreme heat wave, many other parts of the globe are already experiencing their own record breaking heat waves. I talked in this morning’s newsletter about the record heat in the western US. Western Europe is currently dealing with record heat, including some local monthly records in Spain and France where temperatures reached 42C (108F). You can also see areas of dark red in central Asia and near Japan on the surface temperature anomaly map . Both of these areas also are experiencing record warmth, with 40C (104F) in Russia and 36.5C (98F) setting local monthly records in Japan. Again, there are areas of below normal temperatures on the map - but as with the NCEI records above, the “cold” is less extreme and less widespread than the warmth.

We unfortunately had significant killer flash flood events that occurred in West Virginia earlier this week, and as I wrote in a special post about the science of flash flooding a couple of months ago, rainfall rate plays a major causative role in flash flood events. There is compelling evidence that climate change is resulting in higher rainfall rates in thunderstorms due to increased capacity for the atmosphere to hold moisture in a warmer world.

I point out all of these events from just this week to bring context to a study that NASA scientists released this week showing that the frequency, intensity and length of extreme weather events is increasing, and increasing at a more rapid rate than was expected due to climate change. While the scientists cautioned that the dataset is not long enough yet to provide a clear connection between the increase and climate change, it is worrisome that an increasing trend in extreme events was predicted by climate change science, and observations suggest that trend is happening over the last several years and actually at a greater rate than anticipated.

This study was of particular interest to me, because I have the distinct sense that over my 35 year career weather and flood events have become more frequent and intense, especially in the last decade. Seeing that there is evidence that supports my observation is validating - but also concerning in the sense that these trends are resulting in increasingly greater societal impacts.

With everything else going on with the economy, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s comment a few months ago (and that became a social media talking point again this week) about the impacts of climate change on the economy did not get a ton of media coverage (at least that I saw). His statements, however, are very consistent with concerns I have been hearing in the last few years from colleagues that work with the insurance and finance industries: increased impactful weather and water events combined with increased vulnerabilities (i.e., expanding bull’s eye effect) is leading to more uninsurable regions, which will eventually lead to areas where “in 10 to 15 years” you cannot get a mortgage as Chairman Powell suggests.

So - clearly we have a serious societal threat here being posed by climate change, not only to life and property, but to our economic well-being as a nation. What are we doing about it?

Right now, the Trump administration is gutting one of the key programs the federal government has to mitigate the societal impacts from these weather and water events. Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) is a $4.6B federal grant program operated by FEMA. From the FEMA BRIC website the program “supports states, local and territorial governments and Tribal Nations as they work to reduce their hazard risk. The program aims to support communities as they build capability and capacity. BRIC also encourages and aids innovation. It helps partnerships grow; supports infrastructure projects; and fosters flexibility and consistency.”

CBS News reported earlier this week that the program - which was passed into law by Congress during the first Trump Administration - is being cut. From their article:

Projects that are now stalled as a result range from a plan to elevate six buildings on the main street in Pollocksville, North Carolina -- population less than 300 -- to a $50 million project to prevent flash flooding in New York City.

"Under Secretary Noem's leadership, we are ending non-mission critical programs," a FEMA spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News, writing that the BRIC program was "wasteful and ineffective" and "more concerned with climate change" than providing help to Americans affected by storms.

"We are committed to ensuring that Americans in crisis can get the help and resources they need," the spokesperson wrote.

The data suggests the elimination of the BRIC program will especially deprive vulnerable communities across the Southeast. In Florida, 18 of the 22 counties that stood to benefit from nearly $250 million in grants voted for Mr. Trump. Elsewhere in North Carolina, grants were canceled in areas ravaged by Hurricane Helene last year.

Emergency management has four pillars: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Response and recovery are the ones that tend to get the most focus, as they are the ones that are most visible and crucial in the days and months after a disaster. The first two, though, mitigation and preparedness, are how we avoid needing to spend so much on response and recovery. In particular, mitigation is crucial to reduce the human and societal toll that is leading to the uninsurability problem I talked about above. Through its actions and what is stated by the FEMA spokesperson in this article, the administration is making clear that their emergency management priorities for FEMA are response and recovery, apparently because investing in mitigation requires being “concerned with climate change.”

As I spent the first part of this article outlining, climate change is real. Deleting the Climate.gov website may make it harder for people to track and understand how the climate is changing, but it will not stop the increasingly devastating societal impacts. Given the evidence that extreme events may be increasing in number and intensity due to climate change, it seems critical that we have the societal infrastructure to deal with the impacts, e.g., state of the art weather and water forecasting and warning services, strong emergency management and disaster response, robust scientific research programs, etc. Everything that is occurring at the federal level though, from the proposed massive cuts to NOAA to the potential elimination of FEMA, indicates that the federal government is unlikely to rise to the challenge of providing this infrastructure. Will states, local governments and the private sector be willing and able to step up and be the safety net for society as we face the growing impacts of climate change?