Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change (World Weather Attribution)

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No scientist would have been secure in making such a rapid and decisive statement until a few years ago. Normally, it would take months or years to research, peer review and publish findings. Instead, WWA runs hundreds of computer simulations to compare the probability of an event occurring in the world as it exists and one in which there are no greenhouse gases added by humans. That has brought a new speed and certainty to the slow-moving and tentative world of climate science. How to fix it: Keep a migraine trigger diary and once you suspect a certain food may be the cause of your headaches, eliminate it from your diet for a couple of months to see if you get fewer headaches. This is why new rapid attribution analyses are so important. Take the heat wave this summer in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, which resulted in estimated hundreds of heat-related deaths, ruined crops and wildfire outbreaks. The town of Lytton, British Columbia, broke the temperature record for Canada three days in a row. On the fourth day, Lytton was all but destroyed by wildfire. These events were so extreme that they were very difficult to imagine, even for climate scientists like us, just two months ago. It's a standing joke that headaches are used as an excuse to avoid sex, but for many men and women coital headaches that come on at the height of passion are a real and distressing problem.

I always include simple as well as more creative ways to describe or write about weather. Sometimes, the simple word is the one you want! I included dryness and humidity in a few of the categories because it felt weird for them to get their own. Continent Latest news, analysis and comment from POLITICO’s editors and guest writers on the continent.Do you describe weather conditions in your writing? Do you have a favorite example of a weather description? Let me know in the comments! Thanks for reading, and happy writing! A good overview of the climate-change issue, the evolution of climate change in the industrial era, the politics over the issue, and the responsibilities of the industrialized world—in particular, corporations and governments—to help repair the damage. The result is a most timely book." Some thoughts as a non-scientist. It would be interesting to see how ice cores could be used to get a better attribution estimate. Their methods rely on heavy amounts of computing, which relies a lot on energy and rare earth metals (pulling in info from the recent book I read). It would be interesting to see the costs of their studies on climate changes. Didn't know that more CO2 allows for more H2O to be stored in the air, which is a pretty straightforward explanation of why emissions can lead to heavier rains. Friederike (Fredi) is a Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, one of Imperial's six hubs for research, innovation and influence on global challenges.

If you're concerned about avoiding any food-related trigger factor, see your GP or practice nurse or ask to be referred to a dietitian for specialist advice. Are the floods of 2021 in western Germany, the New York City region, and China the result of climate change or simply variable weather patterns? The same question could be, and indeed has been, posed about the wildfires in the western US and Australia, as well as the tornados, heatwaves, droughts, and cold snaps that have afflicted planet Earth in the last decade. Believing that climate change is generally responsible for the ever more prevalent angry weather is one thing, but pinning it to specific storms and catastrophes, that is another – with a whole different set of implications. Dr. Otto was part of an international team of researchers organized by the World Weather Attribution initiative who conducted a rapid analysis of the event. They found that human-induced global warming made the heat wave 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and at least 150 times as likely to occur. The report garnered headlines in part because it was released just nine days after the heat wave occurred, so it was still news. It's not just stress and nasty colds that cause headaches. Cleaning your home or sleeping in late can cause them too. We reveal 10 headache triggers and how to fix them. 1. Relaxing after stress

At a time when our inability to determine climate change's role in weather events has impacted everything from how much aid a devastated region receives to the culpability of corporations and governments, Otto's research laid out in this groundbreaking book will have profound impacts, both today and for the future of humankind. I’m interested to see how this is applied in holding fossil fuel companies to account in future, and securing compensation for natural disasters. “Attribution science is only just getting started” she writes, and Otto’s book takes us behind the scenes of an emerging science that is going to make waves in the years to come. Under the "Video" tab, you will have full access to Meterologist Joe Cioffi and his various live streams and videos, giving you a full synopsis, and explaining everything that currently happening in the Northeast area of the United States. When severe weather hits in other areas of our Nation, such as hurricanes, tornadic storms, and snowstorms, Joe also explains what to expect and what path these systems are taking.

The account of their study of Harvey is interlaced with explanations about how rising global temperatures from CO2 emissions contribute to changes in weather patterns contributing to more extreme events. She also describes the fossil fuel industry’s spending to cast doubts on climate research. She is honest about the number of weather events they studied where climate change played little or no part and the kinds of events currently not amenable to this approach. One of the most valuable aspects of this research is the information it gives governmental bodies to take steps to prepare when once rare events–floods, storms, droughts, can be predicted to be more common. She describes steps taken in Europe for the sheltering of vulnerable populations during heat waves as an example. If flooding becomes more popular, permits for construction in what were once infrequent flood plains need to be re-evaluated. Attribution science—climate forensics, or reverse engineering—is a new discipline explained in this book with passion and verve by one of its creators. Fredi Otto is destined to be one of those rare scientists whose name becomes well known in the wider world." Pressure changes that cause weather changes are thought to trigger chemical and electrical changes in the brain. This irritates nerves, leading to a headache. Grinding your teeth at night (the medical name is bruxism) makes your jaw muscles contract, causing a dull headache. This new ability to determine climate change's role in extreme weather events has the potential to dramatically transform society-for individuals, who can see how climate change affects their loved ones, and corporations and governments, who may see themselves held accountable in the courts. Otto's research laid out in this groundbreaking book will have profound impacts, both today and for the future of humankind.

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If you're prone to getting headaches, you could find that grey skies, high humidity, rising temperatures and storms can all bring on head pain. Because of human actions, the climate is changing—and not for the better. So argues Otto, whose work is at the forefront of climate science. One of the pioneers of attribution science is Friederike Otto. She describes the method in her book Angry Weather: Heat waves, floods, storms, and the new science of climate change (Photo by Felix Mittermeier, CC BY-SA 4.0). You’ve heard the discussions. An extreme drought results in unprecedented forest fires. A record and extended heatwave results in hundreds of heat-related deaths. A hurricane stalls over a major coastal city and dumps record amounts of rainfall resulting in extensive flooding, property damage, and deaths. Record spring rainfalls flood farmlands resulting in major crop losses. Commentators will cite these as yet more examples of climate change, while those denying climate change will argue that these are rare but naturally occurring events.

That has shifted the conversation in many newsrooms — traditionally cautious about going out on a limb and linking any single event to climate change. Hawkins now says: "The science has moved on and it would be great to see that reflected in the news coverage of extreme weather events." That storm hit Houston in August 2017. It wasn’t until December of that year, though, that the first attribution study was published showing that climate change made a storm with as much rainfall as Hurricane Harvey three times as likely. It took until 2020 for scientists to calculate that three-quarters of the tens of billions of dollars in economic damage suffered during the storm stemmed from the additional rainfall attributed to human-caused climate change. This is a stunning number, but by then, the news cycle had long since moved on.

How can science tease out the exact contribution of human-caused climate change to a given event without a separate, otherwise identical but human-free earth to compare it to? The first step is to characterize the event using observations: how long and hot the heat wave was or how much rain fell during the storm or how strong the hurricane was. A pioneering scientist solves a pressing climate question: Can we pin the blame for individual extreme weather events on humans? I do think perhaps he has had a lesson at school where they talked about storms and turning things off to avoid lightening, and he has turned it into this. He is certainly scared of thunder. Terrified even. Then we turn to our climate models. These are sophisticated physics-based simulations of the atmosphere, ocean and land surface that are run on supercomputers. Because we know very well the amount of greenhouse gases humans have added to the atmosphere, we can remove the human influence from climate models’ atmospheres to create a world without climate change. Using the models, we can then identify how strong, how long, how big and how likely the same event would be in that imaginary world.