An Overview of Extreme Climate Shift, Its Forecasting, & How To Prevent It
Weather is something godly. In the Judeo-Abrahamic context, it isn’t so dissimilar from man’s capricious and sometimes inimical relationship with its god. However these incidents are not acts of a malignant god, but what the public calls global warming. Global warming as we know it starts with what climatologist and geophysicist Michael E. Mann calls “stagnation in wave resonance” in his article, The Weather Amplifier (Mann, 2019), however, it certainly doesn’t end there. In the same article, Mann also mentions that it was the regulation and reduction of sulfur dioxide and CO2 aerosols, leading to unabated solar insolation and increased temperatures (Mann, 2019, p. 45). Not the opposite. Now, several US government bodies have actively observed this shift, using weather sensors across the globe, but the question remains about how they are accounting for that shift. Weather mathematical predictive models are used to forecast the weather as it comes, however, it remains unclear as to how these models will adapt with the increased upward trend in weather extremes. Finally, two questions remain. How is global warming being initiated on a macroscopic scale and how can it possibly be solved?
Contextualizing the Rossby Wave
Michael E. Mann states in his article The Weather Amplifier that “Truly extreme weather tends to occur when the bends in the Rossby waves, and therefore the jet stream, are greatly amplified.” A Rossby Wave, or Longwave, is the poleward extension of warmer air, called ridging, or the equatorward extension of cold air, called a troughing. Marking the boundary between these two different air masses is something called the Polar Front Jet (PFJ) is a core or body of high winds that drive transitory air mass boundaries we refer to as frontal systems. Its behavior shifts from season to season, with west-to-east flow, moving in a long corridor across the southern CONUS; In spring and summer, the PFJ is typically weaker and farther north, traveling more or less parallel to the US/Canada border.
While this information isn’t necessarily all pertinent to what causes extreme weather, it does provide context. From June through August of 2018, large amplitude Ridge dominated much of Europe, resulting in widespread temperatures 95°F and 100°F as far north as the Scandinavian peninsula. Now strong ridging isn’t uncommon but what was unusual was the ridges source region, how long it was dominant, and just how strong it was.
The source of all these higher temps came from the Saharan desert. Northern Africa is almost incomprehensive in its size, swallowing the US and Canada with room to spare, and much of everything north of the 15th Parallel is desert. Throughout the summer, hot desert air was pumped into Europe by a high-pressure center spinning in place, circulating the warm air north. We saw the consequences of this with elderly mortality in the UK (Carrington & Marsh, 2018); severe decline in agricultural yields (Doward, 2018); shutdowns in nuclear power plants due to the water sources those plants use for coolants were too warm (Hersher, 2018); widespread wildfires in Greece (Smith, Jones & Farrer, 2018); increased rate of severe thunderstorms across Germany (Severe Weather Europe, 2018).
Higher air and sea temperatures, severe thunderstorms, elderly mortality; these are unfortunately all within the bounds of meteorological possibilities. However as Dr. Mann discusses in his paper, these climate extremes occur during persistent cases of “Standing Waves,” or when ridging is so strong that new frontal systems traveling along the Polar Front Jet are unable to push it along its natural path. In conclusion, the stagnation in the Rossby Wave is the central means of how climate change impacts our planet.
A Weather Forecaster’s Relationship With Climate Shift
There are layers and layers of networks that monitor global weather; dozens of satellites that can see through every aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum; sensors that detect everything from cloud cover to air pressure density. Trillions of bytes of data are produced every single day, and every single byte is collected and correlated. Every byte of weather data finds its way in the computer banks of supercomputers with one singular purpose; predict the weather. These systems use the hour by hour changes in the atmosphere as the baseline for their next forecasting run, which refresh roughly every six hours. They do however have significant downfalls. Foremost is the limited range of time that these models cover; The second is data-sparse areas and region optimization. Now with all these factors in mind, the question still stands. Can these models account for extreme climatic shifts in their forecasts going forward? The answer lies in something called a Climate Model, as well as the forecasters who use them.
The first thing to bring up is what exactly goes into a model. A model is, in the most basic terms, a program that predicts the coming weather. It also requires data points to complete this function. Humidity, temperature, air pressure, wind speed/direction, as well as cloud cover observations, are all collected and fed through specialized supercomputers across the globe. Now the primary systems that compute this data aren’t the supercomputers themselves, but layers and layers of something called a differential equation. Here is an example of a set of equations, all relating to fluid motion, mass, temperature/humidity & pressure:
Geographic location, proximity to water, urban structures, latitude, and elevation are also factored in. The systems have a high enough resolution to generate separate predictions for neighboring towns. There are about 40 models in use across the world. The GFS, GALWEM, ECMWF, and the ICON-EU are models that I as a weather forecaster use daily, and I’ve found these four models to be some of the best and most reliable systems in use today. In a roundabout way, a weather model is perhaps the most advanced facets of computer sciences that exist today. They are however limited in their range of time like I mentioned.
With a 384-hour forecast range, the Global Forecast System or GFS is easily the most extended range model in use today. However there are a couple of downsides; I’ve found the GFS to be good for only 72 hours; secondly, following that 72-hour mark, its resolution and predictive capacities fall apart rapidly, effectively guessing and forecasting based on the output of its equations. Now, this is suitable for when taking a general look at what the next week will look like, but beyond that, it’s effectively useless for forecasting with any accuracy or fidelity. So if a standard model does not have the capacity for genuinely long-range forecasting, what fills the gap? What can look decades into the future and help us see these rising trends of climatic extremes?
The answer, as I said, lies in the climate model. A climate model is the natural extension of the standard predictive model, but covers a broader geographical range and timespan. They are built to predict how average conditions will change in a region over decades instead of days. The other differentiating factor is its output. Climate models simulate atmospheric, oceanic, and land processes such as long term ocean circulation and glacial melts. Typically scientists are the primary customer of this product, using climate models to experiment and hypothesize future climate trends. As for the question of accuracy, the more data you feed a model, the more accurate it will become and scientists have loaded this boat to bursting. The standard weather model will use current conditions; however, scientists will load past and present weather conditions to make a myriad of scenarios they will use to hypothesize on future conditions.
How Climate Change is Initiated
The forewarning of our planet’s doom at the hands of global climate change comes from both the hyperbolic output of our media who want viewership and the dead severe warnings of our scientists who have lost their patience. For many climate change and global warming fall into a more abstract concept and is just too large to imagine, but there are definite starting places that initiated this gargantuan shift; industrial greenhouse gas and aerosols production and their subsequent; and a decrease of reflective ice allowing for increased solar insolation. It’s in my opinion that it is mostly too late to save the world and millions of people will die or be displaced over the next century, but there are hopeful people with plans to limit and reverse the damage already done.
We have known about the greenhouse gasses since the 1840s, and coincidentally that is the same time frame we attribute as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The emergence of massive factories burning coal in insane quantities to fuel this new industry gave rise to an unprecedented level of air pollution. Regulation eventually came. Britain passed its Alkali Acts of 1863 to regulate the production of gaseous hydrochloric acid and ultimately the Alkali Order of 1958 which put all smoke producing large industry under tight government supervision. In the United States, the most significant change came with the Clean Air Act of 1963. Michael E. Mann points out in his paper (Mann, 2019, p.47) that it was after this point that the highest rate of temperature increases started. He posits that the decrease in CO2 and aerosols that diffuse and reflect incoming solar radiation, despite saving rivers, lakes, and forests from phenomena like acid rain, combined with desertification caused by the destruction of entire biomes all come together to boost global temperatures on an unprecedented scale.
Ice has been the most significant factor of temperature stabilization in this world thanks to something called albedo, how much an object reflects incoming solar radiation. As Laura Faye Tanenbaum puts in her article, Sun and Sky, Snow and Ice published to NASA.GOV in 2017:
“… Albedo is part of what has stabilized Earth’s climate for millennia, because under normal conditions, the white of the polar ice reflects light energy back to space, keeping average global temperature stable. The more area covered by ice, the more heat reflected back to space. The more ice that melts, the more heat absorbed. Increasing temperatures are melting more ice, which exposes darker brown and green land and dark blue ocean. Those darker surfaces have a lower albedo, so they absorb more of the heat from the sun’s rays (p.3)”
Without the high albedo areas of sheet ice present across the Arctic and Subarctic regions of the world, temperatures will only continue to rise.
How To Undo the Damage
Despite all the damage done, there have been promising advances in the opposite direction with concrete and observable impacts. Over the last twenty years, much of the western world has been transitioning toward more of reusable and natural production of energy, with solar, wind, and nuclear being the most promising and abundant. WindEurope reported that in 2017 alone nearly 169 gigawatts of power were produced by European on/offshore wind farms, accounting for 12% of the EU’s electricity demand (WindEurope, 2018, p.19).
Perhaps the singular thing that has done the most damage is the industrialized meat industry, which only has increased in scale to mirror the rise of the Earth’s population. Between adding to global deforestation, being the single highest producer of methane, and requiring more freshwater than all human activity combined. I am more pessimistic that any real improvements will come in time for the reason that the human population will only continue to increase. At this point, cultured meat looks to be a promising start, but specific challenges still lie ahead; the pace of production required to replace the wholesale meat industry; how to deliver nutrients and oxygen through the medium of cultured meat; allergic reactions in populations introduced to cultured meats.
I still find myself being fairly pessimistic when it comes to reversing the damage done by food supply agriculture because it is the the most critical factor when minimizing future man-made change in the climate. The meat industry, specifically, is too big to replace and the smaller, local scale efforts to shift dependence from super-producers to farm-to-table techniques are too low impact.
Conclusion
In 1992 a report titled the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity”, the Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1700 independent scientists, and the majority of the living Nobel Laureates in scientific fields gave a severe warning to the world that humanity and its world were on a collision course. Twenty-five years later, in November 2017, the report “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” was published in the Journal of Bioscience. With 15,000 signatures from scientists hailing from 184 countries, it is perhaps the most up to date and severe warnings issued to the world. Their viewpoint concludes that we have initiated a mass extinction event, the sixth in 540 million years, that will culminate in the utter devastation of our world within the next century, at least if we can’t undo the damage. I am a pessimist, and I believe that much of what these scientists have warned will come to past. Millions will die, more will be displaced, and much of our world will be rendered uninhabitable for humans. Despite my grim outlook and these scientist’s forewarning, much of the industries that have done so much damage in the past have made efforts to limit their footprint on the world; general conscientiousness have grown in the western world; technologies hitherto never seen have the potential to limit the damage going forward and entirely reverse it in others. I would address the reader to excuse the alarmist and bleak tone, as this is merely an introduction to climatic shifts toward extreme weather. I hope to convey the important message that thousands of scientists this last century but I would not wish to leave you, the reader, without any hope that we might survive the coming century.
References:
Online Documents
WindEurope. (2018). Wind in power 2017, WindEurope Business Intelligence, 6–17
Online Journal Articles
Mann, M. E. (2019). The weather amplifier, Scientific American, 320(3), 40–49
Godfrey, H. J., Aveyard, P., Garnett, T., Hall, J. W., Key, T. J., Lorimer, J., . . . Jebb, S. A. (2018). Meat consumption, health, and the environment. Science Magazine, 361(6399), 1–15.
Doward, J. (2018, July 28). Farmers in drought summit amid fears of food supply crisis. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/28/farmers-drought-summit-food-supply-fears-crisis-heatwave
William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome, Mauro Galetti, Mohammed Alamgir, Eileen Crist, Mahmoud I. Mahmoud, William F. Laurance, 15,364 scientist signatories from 184 countries, World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 12, December 2017, Pages 1026–1028,
Online Articles
Carrington, D., & Marsh, S. (2018, August 03). Deaths rose 650 above average during UK heatwave — with older people most at risk. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/03/deaths-rose-650-above-average-during-uk-heatwave-with-older-people-most-at-risk
Hersher, R. (2018, July 27). Hot Weather Spells Trouble For Nuclear Power Plants In Europe. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/632988813/hot-weather-spells-trouble-for-nuclear-power-plants?t=1553791812969
Smith, H., Jones, S., & Farrer, M. (2018, July 24). Greece wildfires: Scores dead as holiday resort devastated. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/23/greeks-urged-to-leave-homes-as-wildfires-spread-near-athens
Tenenbaum, L. F. (2017, September 18). Sun and sky, snow and ice — Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. Retrieved from https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2594/sun-and-sky-snow-and-ice/
