“It was virtually impossible without climate change,” says Wehner.Īnother way to say that? Climate change caused last summer’s extreme heat wave. When scientists analyzed how climate change affected that heat wave, they found something startling. Temperatures reached 120 degrees in parts of Canada, and hit 115 degrees in Oregon and Washington. Many cities, such as Phoenix, Las Vegas and Houston, set new heat records almost every summer.īut scientists can go even further, using supercomputers and advanced statistics to analyze the most extreme heat waves, like the one that killed hundreds of people in Canada and the Pacific Northwest in 2021. and Texas experienced record-breaking temperatures during a heat wave this June. Millions of people living in more than a dozen cities in the Western U.S. You can see those extra degrees in action when heat records fall over and over. “For garden variety heat waves – like the hottest day of the year, or the hottest day every 10 years – in the U.S., climate change has increased that heat wave’s temperature by 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit,” Wehner explains. “It seems obvious that as the global climate warms, heat waves would also warm,” says Wehner. Heat waves have the clearest connection to global warming. Or that without global warming, the disaster would not have happened at all.Ĭlimate change makes every heat wave worse For some types of weather, it’s become possible to say exactly how much worse it was because of climate change. Now, scientists can answer those questions with more and more certainty. “You have some extreme weather disaster, and people want to know: Did climate change flood my house? Did climate change make it so hot that my power went out?” says Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies how climate change influences extreme weather. But such sweeping statements can feel impersonal, when really what you want to know is: has climate change affected me? Extreme weather is more likely as the Earth gets hotter. Or a powerful hurricane that seemed to materialize overnight.Ĭlimate change is part of that story. Or a thunderstorm that dropped a scary amount of rain.
Maybe it was a heat wave that was hotter and longer than you’d ever experienced. On Sunday, a weather system will settle across Middle Georgia and will be responsible for more wet weather, she said.Chances are, if you live on Earth, you’ve experienced some strange, or downright dangerous, weather in the last few years.
Lopez said to expect widely scattered showers Saturday all throughout the Southeast. On Saturday and Sunday, rain chances increase to 70%, according to the latest forecast. More of the same heat, humidity and afternoon thunderstorms are in Friday’s forecast, but metro Atlanta is looking at some changes for the weekend. “There is concern with some of these thunderstorms, as they kind of move in or generate from the north and just slowly try to push to the south, for some heavy rain and some of those strong winds that can of course knock down some trees,” she said. Lopez said thunderstorms could pop up at any time through the evening drive before the rain activity slowly tapers off into the overnight hours. we’ll see a good chance of rain really anywhere across North Georgia.” “And by the time we get up into the 90s, those thunderstorms are going to start to flare up,” she said.
0 kommentar(er)
