Climate: The Class of 2020

 Competition brought out the overachievers on both the east and west coast this year.  There were 30 graduates from the east coast when we usually have 12. What an effort! They went by the names: Eta, Fay, Gonzalo, Marco, Iota, Vicky, Teddy, Kyle, Hanna, Arthur, Isais, Delta, Rene, Josephine, Theta, Nana, Cristobal, Edouard, Bertha, Wilfred, Zeta, Sally, Paulette, Omar, Laura, Dolly, Rene, Epsilon, Alpha, Gamma, and Beta. 13 could be considered high achievers when our yearly average is 6.  There were six overachievers when we would normally expect 3. It appeared the east coast class of 2020 would win by a mudslide.

The West Coast finished strong. The class was huge, the largest ever with overachievers. The list included: Hopkins, Rockwell, Tatham, Morgan, Claremont, Hennessey, Markley, Green, Spanish, Bear, Creek, Pine, Box, Sheep, Cameron, Doe, and Elkhorn just to mention a few. It could be said the west coast class of heated activity was a tornado of pyrocumulonimbus proportions.

COVID and the President have sucked most of the oxygen out of the media this year while we continually set new hurricane and wildfire records. We had thirty named Atlantic Storms, 13 Hurricanes, and 6 major hurricanes.

Out west 2020 California wildfires set old records ablaze. Five of the six largest California wildfires ever recorded scorched the California earth. 4.78 million acres were blackened obliterating the landscape and torching the previous record of 1.98 million acres. Oregon and Colorado had their hair set on fire too. The Cameron Peak Fire was the largest ever in Colorado. It joined the other Colorado fires to burn more acreage than ever before.

This year the US set an all-time record for the number of billion-dollar disasters. On a good note, none of the billion-dollar disasters was on the magnitude of Hurricane Harvey whose winds and flooding alone wrecked 450 billion dollars of damage when it hit New Orleans in 2017.

Disaster hit close to home, too. Midland, Mi had an intense storm that pushed the Tittabawassee River to record flood levels, leveling two dams and prompting the evacuation of 10,000 Michiganders from their homes.

The Class of 2020 US disasters had a sleeper on the plains,  MS Dee Ray Cho. Yep, on August 10th, Dee blew through Iowa and Illinois reaching wind speeds of 140mph. Buildings, vehicles, power lines, grain elevators, and crops were flattened. Dees damage: 7.5 billion dollars. Not bad for a gal who specializes in straight line winds.

All extreme weather is caused by multiple factors. Thus, any hurricane, derecho, or heat and wind driven wildfire has many elements required to occur to manifest violently. Today climate change is always an element, but how much is it responsible? There are scientists who determine the percentage chance climate change is the primary culprit.

Scientists use climate attribution models to determine the probability a past weather event would have occurred if not for climate change. Thus, climate change is rarely singled out as solely responsible. Saying this, some studies have determined some extreme weather events would have had “zero chance” of occurring if not for climate change.

As far as hurricanes go, meteorologists and climate scientists have been stunned by how quickly hurricanes intensified in 2020 and how much more flooding they have created. Climate change has been identified as the lead cause of rapid intensification and massive downpours.

Veteran firefighters and meteorologists have routinely expressed shock at how today’s fires have blown up compared to fires years before. Again, climate change has its fingerprints all over the class of 2020 wildfires.

The damages from extreme weather are tracked by both the National Academies of Science and NOAA*. The following quote comes from the conclusion of an October of 2019 Proceedings of the National Academies of Science study titled, Evidence for sharp increase in the economic damages of extreme natural disasters.

“We document an increasing trend in extreme damages from natural disasters, which is consistent with a climate-change signal.

 Our study offers simple, yet relevant, implications. First, public disaster risk management and the insurance industry may face increasingly large economic losses. Second, adaptation efforts may be critical in temperate (not only tropical) areas. Third, if part of the increases in the frequency and strength of natural disasters is attributable to climate change, mitigation is a logical instrument to reduce trends in damages.”

The cause of rapid climate change is our fossil fuel habits. If we, being humankind worldwide, want to avoid rapid intensification of storms and wildfires with their ensuing economic damage and human suffering, we must demand global leaders unite to rapidly transition to clean energy sources. The first logical step is to rejoin the Paris Agreement whose sole purpose is unified climate mitigation.

The class of 2020 natural disasters is the worst on record for the number of billion dollar events.  As bad as 2020 has been, it may also be the year we woke up.  That would make 2020 the most important year in history.

*Our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a detailed cost analysis of the economic impacts of weather on the USA. The sight is called the National Center for Environmental Information. NCEI

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