Whether you believe that climate change is largely a man-made problem or part of the earth’s natural evolution, the newest data makes one thing clear: Our climate is truly screwed up.
The feds are reporting that America smashed all previous records in 2011 with 12 weather disasters that produced $1 billion or more in damage. How bad was the weather? With the year not yet complete, the U.S. experienced more $1billion disasters in 2011 than in the entire decade of the 1980s, even when the figures are adjusted for inflation.
Wow.
Another dismaying fact is that all this damage was caused by twisters, floods, snow, drought, heat and wildfires – a record year without a major hurricane.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration added two disasters to the list Wednesday, bringing the total to 12. The two are wildfires in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, and the mid-June tornadoes and severe weather.
NOAA uses $1 billion as a benchmark for the worst weather disasters.
According to news reports, extreme weather in America this year has killed more than 1,000 people. National Weather Service Director Jack Hayes said the dozen billion-dollar disasters alone add up to $52 billion.
The old record for $1 billion disasters was nine, in 2008.
Hayes, a meteorologist since 1970, said he has never seen a year for extreme weather like this, calling it “deadly, destructive and relentless.”
This year’s total may not stop at 12. Officials are reportedly still adding up the damage from the Tropical Storm Lee and the pre-Halloween Northeast snowstorm, and so far each is at $750 million. And there’s still nearly a month left in the year.
Half the billion-dollar disasters were tornado outbreaks in one of the deadliest years on record. More than 540 people were killed in those six tragedies. In four days in April, there were 343 tornadoes in the largest outbreak on record, including 199 in one day, which is another record.
Texas had more than a million acres burned by wildfire, a record for the state, and Oklahoma set a record for the hottest month ever in the United States. The Ohio River Valley had triple the normal rainfall, which caused major flooding along the Mississippi River.
Scientists blame the catastrophes on an unlucky combination of global warming and freak chance. They say even with the long-predicted increase in weather extremes triggered by man-made climate change, 2011 in the U.S. was wilder than they had predicted.
Yet, it would be easy for environmentalists to say that this is all about global warming, but the climatologists who study these things say that’s a simplistic conclusion.
For example, the six large outbreaks of tornadoes cannot be attributed to global warming, scientists say.
“The degree of devastation is extreme in and of itself, and it would be tempting to say it’s a sign of things to come, though we would be hard-pressed to see such a convergence of circumstances occurring in one single year again for a while,” said Jerry Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
