“Heat Wave” games provide some insight into mounting problems
By ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, July 5, 2020
The first comprehensive worldwide assessment of heatwaves down to regional levels has revealed that in nearly every part of the world heatwaves have been increasing in frequency and duration since the 1950’s.
The research published in Nature Communications has also produced a new metric, cumulative heat, which reveals exactly how much heat is packed into individual heatwaves and heatwave seasons. As expected, that number is also on the rise.
In Australia’s worst heatwave season, an additional 80°C of cumulative heat was experienced across the country. In Russia and the Mediterranean, their most extreme seasons baked in an additional 200°C or more.
“Not only have we seen more and longer heatwaves worldwide over the past 70 years, but this trend has markedly accelerated,” said lead author Dr. Sarah Perkins Kirkpatrick from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
“Cumulative heat shows a similar acceleration, increasing globally on average by 1°C-4.5°C each decade but in some places, like the Middle East, and parts of Africa and South America, the trend is up to 10°C a decade.”
The only heatwave metric that hasn’t seen an acceleration is heatwave intensity, which measures the average temperature across heatwaves. This is because globally we see more heatwave days and heatwaves are lasting longer. When the average temperature is measured across longer heatwaves any shifts in intensity are almost undetectable. Only southern Australia and small areas of Africa and South America show a detectable increase in average heatwave intensity.
The study also identified that natural variability impacts on heatwaves can be large at regional levels. This variability can overwhelm heatwave trends, so regional trends shorter than a few decades are generally not reliable. To detect robust trend changes, the researchers looked at how the trends had changed over multi-decade intervals between 1950-2017. The changes were stark.
For example, the Mediterranean, saw a dramatic uptick in heatwaves when measured over multi-decade spans. From 1950-2017, the Mediterranean saw an increase in heatwaves by two days a decade. But the trend from 1980 to 2017 had seen that accelerate to 6.4 days a decade.
The regional approach also showed how the trends vary. Regions like the Amazon, north east Brazil, west Asia and the Mediterranean are experiencing rapid changes in heatwaves while areas like South Australia and North Asia are still seeing changes but at a slower rate.
However, no matter whether these changes are rapid or slow, it seems inevitable that vulnerable nations with less infrastructure will be hit hardest by extreme heat.
“Climate scientists have long forecast that a clear sign of global warming would be seen with a change in heatwaves,” said Dr Perkins Kirkpatrick.
“The dramatic region-by-region change in heatwaves we have witnessed over the past 70 years and the rapid increase in the number of these events, are unequivocal indicators that global warming is now with us and accelerating. “This research is just the latest piece of evidence that should act as a clarion call to policymakers that urgent action is needed now if we are to prevent the worst outcomes of global warming. The time for inaction is over.”
Reference: “Increasing trends in regional heatwaves” by S. E. Perkins-Kirkpatrick and S. C. Lewis, 3 July 2020, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16970-7
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Final Project: Heat Wave | Student Game Projects | Creating Video Games | Comparative Media Studies/Writing | MIT OpenCourseWare
When disasters strike, Red Cross Red Crescent volunteers are often among the first to provide relief to the victims. But in most cases, acting before a disaster to mitigate its effects can save more lives. For heat waves, linking early warning with early action involves taking precautions like having older citizens drink more water.
Heat Wave, the game, provides the player with a scenario that mimics a heat wave forecast, and pairs it with actions your character can take to mitigate its effects. — Miriam Proznitz, Team Heat Wave
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See also: Global Temperatures May Take Decades to Respond to Emissions Reductions: Study, Nathan Solis, The Courthouse News, July 7, 2020
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“The Arctic Is On Fire, and We Should all Be Terrified”
From an Article by Bridget Read, The Cut, July 6, 2020
Photo: “The Arctic Is On Fire” Kirill Shipitsin/TASS/Getty Images
Not that you don’t have a lot on your mind already, but may I suggest one additional topic of alarm for consideration: Siberia is on fire.
Siberia, the proverbial coldest place, situated way up at the top of the globe in the Arctic circle, is experiencing record warm temperatures, melting sea ice, and massive wildfires — changes to the environment that even the scientists most urgently tracking the climate crisis didn’t expect to see for another several decades.
As New York’s David Wallace-Wells wrote of one town that hit triple-digit temperatures on June 20, “In a world without climate change, this anomaly, one Danish meteorologist calculated, would be a 1-in-100,000-year event.”
“We always expected the Arctic to change faster than the rest of the globe,” one researcher told the Washington Post. “But I don’t think anyone expected the changes to happen as fast as we are seeing them happen.”
Siberian towns are experiencing a heat wave throughout the region, with many smashing centuries-old temperature records, records that are now being broken year after year.
Scientists say that the area is warming at three times the rate of the rest of the world, due to a phenomenon called “Arctic amplification,” in which melting ice exposes more dark sea and lake waters, turning zones that were once net heat-reflecting into heat-absorbing. And temperatures rise even more.
The effects of that increase are myriad and terrifying. Melting snow creates dry vegetation for wildfires, which have reached record levels this summer, sending out giant plumes of smoke and releasing more greenhouse gases than ever before.
Some of these are troublingly named “zombie fires,” which don’t actually go out in winter, but burn under the snow and ice only to erupt in the air once again once the snow melts. People in Siberia are at risk of infrastructure collapse as towns built for the cold strain under new, extreme conditions while the melting of Arctic ice contributes to sea level rise and irregular weather patterns around the world.
Perhaps scariest is the potential calamity of total permafrost melting: Permafrost is a layer of continuous ice that covers nearly a quarter of the land mass in the Northern Hemisphere, in which approximately 1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon are trapped. That’s more than twice the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere. If, with previously stable permafrost subject to never-before-seen heat, it is released, we could reach a tipping point beyond human intervention.
With much of the world consumed by the coronavirus pandemic, and with the United States engaged in a reckoning on racial injustice on top of reaching a record number of virus cases, temperature records in Siberia might seem like a faraway problem.
But seemingly separate crises are not so disconnected; studies recently show, for example, how warming affects poor pregnant women in the U.S., and Black expecting mothers in particular, a disparity that will get even worse as warming continues. “When we develop a fever, it’s a sign. It’s a warning sign that something is wrong, and we stop and we take note,” a Colorado-based Arctic researcher said to the Post.
“Literally, the Arctic is on fire. It has a fever right now, and so it’s a good warning sign that we need to stop, take note and figure out what’s going on.”
https://www.thecut.com/2020/07/the-arctic-is-on-fire-siberia-terrifying.html