Attention to the Unseen

NASA By Christian Jakob, Monash University and Michael Reeder, Monash University Eight days ago, it rained over the western Pacific Ocean near Japan. There was nothing especially remarkable about this rain event, yet it made big waves twice. First, it disturbed the atmosphere in just the right way to set off an undulation in the jet stream – a river of very strong winds in the upper atmosphere – that atmospheric scientists call a Rossby wave (or a planetary wave)….

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David Wallace-Wells writes: The phrase Jay Inslee used was “permanent emergency.” This was before Lytton — the town that had, days earlier, set Canada’s all-time heat record, drawing waves of “heat tourists” as witnesses to “desert heat” north of 120 degrees in a place where typical June highs were in the mid-70s — burned to the ground just 15 minutes after the arrival of smoke. It was before wildfires raging in British Columbia produced their own pyrocumulus thunderstorms, which produced…

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The New York Times reports: Heat waves and the “heat domes” that can cause them aren’t rare, but the recent weather that’s been smothering the Pacific Northwest has little precedent in at least four decades of record-keeping. To understand the magnitude of the departure from historical norms, it helps to visualize it. The map above, created by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, analyzes temperatures since 1979. It shows the extent of the…

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Kathy Baughman McLeod writes: Summer is hot. This is among the most basic weather concepts that we learn as children and accept without question. Heat and even heat waves have always been a reliable hallmark of the season between the June solstice and the September equinox. And yet recent weather has far outstripped that norm. For most of last week, the daily high temperature in Phoenix reached or exceeded 115 degrees, breaking records even in that desert city. This weekend,…

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AFP reports: Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, according to a landmark draft report from the UN’s climate science advisors obtained by AFP. Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas — these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30. The choices societies make now will…

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Quartz reports: The U.S. hasn’t seen anything quite like this. Over the weekend, temperatures soared to new triple-digit heights across the American West. The immediate cause was a “heat dome,” a mass of high-pressure air trapping heat beneath it, one far stronger and larger than normal. But what we saw this weekend is what climate scientists have been predicting for decades. And it’s a taste of what’s to come. “It’s surreal to see your models become real life,” Katharine Hayhoe,…

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The Washington Post reports: The amount of heat Earth traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land, according to new research from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented,” said Norman Loeb, a NASA scientist and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The Earth is warming faster than expected.” Using satellite data, researchers measured what…

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