We have a saying in Oklahoma that goes something like this, "If you don't like the weather just stick around for 24 hours." Despite having lived in the rainforests of Nigeria West Africa when I was a child and the concrete jungles of St. Louis, Missouri, later in life, I've been a plains dweller most of my life. I can testify the weather here in Oklahoma and on the vast Southern Plains of the U.S. is almost never boring, thoroughly engaging, sometimes violent and threatening, and guaranteed to keep you on your toes.
Thunderstorms are sights to behold, often streaked with lightning zigzagging and zinging across the prairie floor and magnificent thunderheads, cumulonimbus clouds that boil up thousands of feet in the sky, refracting sunlight into radiant technicolor light shows. Sometimes the storms come with peppery hail and /or straight-line winds that can knock anyone foolish enough to stay out in them silly.
If we take these storms in a mythical context -- and some of them definitely approach legendary status – I can easily imagine the ancient Nordic god of thunder, Thor, raising a giant hammer and drumming away, laughing as we scurry for cover. When he finishes his solo, he lumbers to sleep off his raucous party-making in some dim sky chamber, and within minutes storm clouds skitter and are gone. The sun peeks through wispy clouds and a sky awash in cerulean blue bursts into view.
Dramatic weather is part of living in Oklahoma. We joke about it, complain, discuss it and cuss about it when it slaps us around -- then we just get on with our lives. But lately it seems the drama has taken a decidedly turbulent and extreme turn. This past winter we had a record-breaking blizzard in Oklahoma City with 14.5 inches of snow on Christmas Eve. In May we had an intense hail storm with portions of the city reporting softball, even grapefruit-sized hail and hail drifts of one-five inches. You can read my account of that storm here and watch a You Tube video that will make you wonder if it was a scene stolen from the rather silly film "The Day After Tomorrow."
Last Monday, June 14, 2010, a heavy rain event -- almost 10 inches in about six hours -- turned out to be a one-in-500-year event for Oklahoma City according to the Oklahoma Climatological Survey ticker. This thunderstorm roared into the metro area wreaking all manner of havoc, turning normal every day city streets into kayaking thoroughfares, and streams and creeks into dangerously raging flash flood zones that left several folks clinging to trees prior to rescue, and loads of flooded houses and basements.
"Between 4:45-10:45 a.m., 9.58 inches of rainfall fell, which surpasses the 500-year 6-hour maximum rainfall event of about 8.0 inches. In other words, for that 6-hour period, we surpassed the most that would be expected every 500 years (i.e., we've beat the 500-year rainfall event for OK...C). In fact, it has also bested our 500-year 12-hour event already, which is about 9.2 inches AND the 100-year 24-hour event, which is also about 9.2 inches. The 500-year 24-hour event for OKC is about 12 inches, so that mark is also up for grabs today." June 14, 2010 Mesonet Ticker
Lots of folks around here are joking about what comes next -- frogs raining from the skies, plagues of locusts and flies, and if the North Canadian River that runs through our city turns to blood – one of the ten plagues in the book of Exodus in the Bible -- will it only be the seven miles renamed Oklahoma River in the heart of Oklahoma City?
Maybe it’s time to skip the plague and end-time talk and figure out what’s really happening. I can observe extreme weather from my own backyard all day long but unless I've been keeping a notebook of observations for the past 50 years (and I haven't) there's no way to know whether extreme weather events are happening more often or what that might mean. Thankfully we have plenty of organizations and scientists who have been doing just that.
The slide above is from Katharine Hayhoe, a highly-respected expert on climate change, an expert reviewer for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and a professor of geosciences at Texas Tech University. I saw her speak on climate change a couple of weeks ago at the annual Oklahoma Sustainability Network conference. The information shown in the slide above is from "Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Year 2009" and shows a clear increase in the average number of days with very heavy precipitation over the last half century. Hayhoe also notes that record high temperatures and heat waves are now two times more frequent.
Since an increase in heavy precipitation or high temperatures often results in disasters of one kind or another, I took a look at the number of major disaster declarations in Oklahoma since 1955 on FEMA’s website and came up with this chart. It shows a rather dramatic uptick in federal disaster assistance over the last decade, which correlates with the uptick in average days of very heavy precipitation. Admittedly there are other variables at play in declaring a weather event a disaster such as aggressive politicians with demanding constituencies. Nonetheless it’s a piece of information worth considering in context with other information on extreme weather events and how they relate to a changing climate.
In this chart note weather-related events such as floods and cyclones trend upward while earthquakes, unrelated to weather, are about the same. Source: United Nations Environment Programme / GRID-Arendal.
Note that wildfires, related to dry conditions caused by drought and high temperatures, are increasing as well. The trend line is similar to that showing an increase in disasters and extreme weather events worldwide. Source: Katharine Hayhoe, Department of Geosciences, Texas Tech University.
And according to Hayhoe we’re seeing an increase in the power of hurricanes linked to warming ocean temperatures.
We probably all know that a singular weather event does not climate change make because weather isn't climate; weather is how conditions change from day to day and is essentially unpredictable more than a few days out (and professional meteorologists fully cop to that). We will continue to have record cold days and in fact may have more extreme cold and hot events.
Climate however is the long-term average of weather over decades, so it is somewhat predictable and what we're seeing in these charts is a predictable rise in extreme weather events due to a changing climate.
Not surprisingly the upward trend line for extreme weather also correlates with the upward trend in global average temperature and levels of CO2. Notice how high the current CO2 level is in this chart – higher than anything in the record over the last 800,000 years.
In this chart Hayhoe notes what happens next unless we make some big changes.
And what happens next with higher emissions is projected in this chart. Note the ugly redness in Oklahoma and Texas. Imagine 11 to 13 weeks or about three months of temperatures above 100 degrees. Hayhoe lays it all out in no uncertain terms and more, and also addresses the objections climate change deniers ruckus about in this online slide show.
The three singular events we've experienced here in Oklahoma in the past six months could be just coincidentally extreme events. But given all the evidence that seems unlikely, and that means they could be indicative of an increase in extreme weather events brought to us by climate change -- a new usual.
So how do we prepare for the new usual -- changes associated with climate change such as extreme and erratic weather events? Hayhoe used this quote from John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor, of Harvard University. Holdren doesn’t pull any punches in an age when so many seem to dodge, hedge and hem haw. Refreshing.
“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”
It’s not hopeless but I believe we have to act now if we wish to avoid more extreme scenarios. In upcoming posts I’ll explore mitigation and adaptation choices and strategies for every day people in the Age of the New Usual.
