WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nature is pummeling the United States this year with extremes.
Unprecedented
triple-digit heat and devastating drought. Deadly tornadoes leveling
towns. Massive rivers overflowing. A billion-dollar blizzard. And now,
unusual hurricane-caused flooding in Vermont.
If
what's falling from the sky isn't enough, the ground shook in places
that normally seem stable: Colorado and the entire East Coast. On
Friday, a strong quake triggered brief tsunami warnings in Alaska.
Arizona and New Mexico have broken records for wildfires.
Total
weather losses top $35 billion, and that's not counting Hurricane
Irene, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
There have been more than 700 U.S. disaster and weather deaths, most
from the tornado outbreaks this spring.
Last
year, the world seemed to go wild with natural disasters in the
deadliest year in a generation. But 2010 was bad globally, and the
United States mostly was spared.
This year,
while there have been devastating events elsewhere, such as the
earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Australia's flooding and a drought in
Africa, it's our turn to get smacked. Repeatedly.
"I'm
hoping for a break. I'm tired of working this hard. This is
ridiculous," said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who runs Weather
Underground, a meteorology service that tracks strange and extreme
weather. "I'm not used to seeing all these extremes all at once in one
year."
The U.S. has had a record 10 weather
catastrophes costing more than a billion dollars: five separate tornado
outbreaks, two different major river floods in the Upper Midwest and the
Mississippi River, drought in the Southwest and a blizzard that
crippled the Midwest and Northeast, and Irene.
What's
happening, say experts, is mostly random chance or bad luck. But there
is something more to it, many of them say. Man-made global warming is
increasing the odds of getting a bad roll of the dice.
Sometimes the luck seemed downright freakish.
The
East Coast got a double-whammy in one week with a magnitude 5.8
earthquake followed by a drenching from Irene. If one place felt more
besieged than others, it was tiny Mineral, Va., the epicenter of the
quake, where Louisa County Fire Lt. Floyd Richard stared at the
darkening sky before Irene and said, "What did WE do to Mother Nature to
come through here like this."
There are still
four months to go, including September, the busiest month of the
hurricane season. The Gulf Coast expected a soaking this weekend from
Tropical Storm Lee and forecasters were watching Hurricane Katia
slogging west in the Atlantic.
The insurance
company Munich Re calculated that in the first six months of the year
there have been 98 natural disasters in the United States, about double
the average of the 1990s.
Even before Irene,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency was on pace to obliterate the
record for declared disasters issued by state, reflecting both the
geographic breadth and frequency of America's problem-plagued year.
"If you weren't in a drought, you were drowning is what it came down to," Masters said.
Add
to that, oppressive and unrelenting heat. Tens of thousands of daily
weather records have been broken or tied and nearly 1,000 all-time
records set, with most of them heat or rain related:
- Oklahoma set a record for hottest month ever in any state with July.
-
Washington D.C. set all-time heat records at the National Arboretum on
July 23 with 105 and then broke it a week later with 106.
- Houston had a record string of 24 days in August with the thermometer over 100 degrees.
- Newark, N.J., set a record with 108 degrees, topping the old mark by 3 degrees.
Tornadoes
this year hit medium-sized cities such as Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa,
Ala. The outbreaks affected 21 states, including unusual deadly twisters
in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Massachusetts.
"I
think this year has really been extraordinary in terms of natural
catastrophes," said Andreas Schrast, head of catastrophic perils for
Swiss Re, another big insurer.
One of the most
noticeable and troubling weather extremes was the record-high nighttime
temperatures, said Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data
Center. That shows that the country wasn't cooling off at all at night,
which both the human body and crops need.
"These events are abnormal," Karl said. "But it's part of an ongoing trend we've seen since 1980."
Individual
weather disasters so far can't be directly attributed to global
warming, but it is a factor in the magnitude and the string of many of
the extremes, Karl and other climate scientists say.
While
the hurricanes and tornado outbreaks don't seem to have any clear
climate change connection, the heat wave and drought do, said NASA
climate scientist Gavin Schmidt.
This year,
there's been a Pacific Ocean climate phenomenon that changes weather
patterns worldwide known as La Nina, the flip side to El Nino. La Ninas
normally trigger certain extremes such as flooding in Australia and
drought in Texas. But global warming has taken those events and
amplified them from bad to record levels, said climate scientist Jerry
Meehl at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Judith
Curry of Georgia Tech disagreed, saying that while humans are changing
the climate, these extremes have happened before, pointing to the 1950s.
"Sometimes it seems as if we have weather amnesia," she said.
Another
factor is that people are building bigger homes and living in more
vulnerable places such as coastal regions, said Swiss Re's Schrast.
Worldwide insured losses from disasters in the first three months this
year are more than any entire year on record except for 2005, when
Hurricane Katrina struck, Schrast said.
Unlike
last year, when many of the disasters were in poor countries such as
Haiti and Pakistan, this year's catastrophes have struck richer areas,
including Australia, Japan and the United States.
The
problem is so big that insurers, emergency managers, public officials
and academics from around the world are gathering Wednesday in
Washington for a special three-day National Academy of Sciences summit
to figure out how to better understand and manage extreme events.
The
idea is that these events keep happening, and with global warming they
should occur more often, so society has to learn to adapt, said former
astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, NOAA's deputy chief.
Sullivan,
a scientist, said launching into space gave her a unique perspective on
Earth's "extraordinary scale and power and both extraordinary elegance
and finesse."
"We are part of it. We do affect
it," Sullivan said. "But it surely affects us on a daily basis -
sometimes with very powerful punches."
News Source: AP News
