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2015
Ten Weather Extremes That Defined Hottest Year Ever Recorded
Communities on the frontlines of climate change have long warned that resultant floods, droughts, and mega-storms are already bringing death, displacement, and food insecurity to people across the globe, particularly those who are poor, Indigenous, or living in the global south.
Here are ten freakish weather extremes in 2015 that raised the alarm about climate chaos in 2016 and beyond and underscored the urgency of strong and effective adaptation, mitigation, and emissions reduction policies.
1. An Arctic heat wave at the end of December caused temperatures at the North Pole to spike 60 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm for the season, soaring past the freezing point and making the region hotter than cities across the United States and Europe.
2. In late December, this winter's El Nino caused severe floods across South America, including in Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina. The floods displaced over 150,000 people.
3. Heavy rains this week caused the Mississippi River and its tributaries to overflow, touching off historic flooding in the U.S. Midwest. Climate scientists say that one of the most remarkable things about the deluge is the timing. "Never before has water this high been observed in winter along the river's levee system," meteorologist Jeff Masters explained.
4. South Africa is experiencing its worst drought in a generation, with soaring temperatures and paltry rainfalls believed to be worsened by El Nino. While the long-term impacts are not immediately known, according to UN estimates, at least 29 million people in southern African nations face food insecurity.
5. Due to a prolonged and ongoing drought in Ethiopia, more than 10 million people are in need of emergency food aid.
6. In November, over 1.1 million people were impacted--and 40,000 displaced--after a powerful and rare cyclone dumped a year's worth of rain on Yemen. Humanitarian groups warned that the impact on residents was worsened by Saudi Arabia's seven-month bombing campaign that continued through the storm.
7. In October, a mega-typhoon known as Lando hit the Philippines, affecting over 1.2 million people and killing dozens. In November, 20,000 people declared at a mass march in Tacloban that "our survival is non-negotiable," calling attention to the ongoing harm from the separate Super Typhoon Yolanda (also known as Haiyan), which hit the Philippines in 2013.
8. This summer, A dramatic heat wave across the Middle East caused temperatures in Iran to soar so high it felt like 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Even accounting for regional standards, temperatures spiked from Egypt to Syria. Thousands took to the streets across Iraq, protesting dangerous power cuts, clean water shortages, and poor living conditions that were worsening the effects.
9. Pakistan this summer suffered its deadliest heat wave ever recorded, with at least 2,000 lives lost. And in neighboring India, a heat wave this summer killed at least 2,500 people. "Let us not fool ourselves that there is no connection between the unusual number of deaths from the ongoing heat wave and the certainty of another failed monsoon," India's earth sciences minister, Harsh Vardhan, said in June. "It's not just an unusually hot summer, it is climate change," he said.
10. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded earlier this month that climate change is already driving profound shifts in the Arctic ecosystem. For example, the agency reported that the loss of sea ice and climbing temperatures in the Barents Sea, off the coast of Norway and Russia, are causing "a poleward shift in fish communities. " These changes are impacting wildlife and Indigenous communities that rely on them for their survival.
But perhaps most alarming are developments that cannot be seen. NOAA revealed in May that, for the first time in recorded history, global carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere averaged over 400 parts per million (ppm) for an entire month--in March 2015. Scientists have warned that CO2 must be brought down to a maximum of 350 ppm to achieve safe levels.
As Erika Spanger-Siegfried of the Union of Concerned Scientists recently noted, climate change is causing all of these extremes.
"The specifics of what's happening where El Nino, Arctic dynamics, and underlying warming meet are, in a word, complex, and scientists are actively discussing how things might play out," explained Spanger-Siegfried. "But the collective bottom line recognizes that global warming plays a role."
Meanwhile, in a statement released this week, the humanitarian organization Oxfam International estimated that "the El Nino weather system could leave tens of millions of people facing hunger, water shortages, and disease next year if early action isn't taken to prepare vulnerable people from its effects."
'Never Seen Anything Like This Before' as 2015 Set to Be Hottest Year on Record
Dr. Blunden pointed the Times to measurements in several of the world's ocean basins, "where surface temperatures are as much as three degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average," an increase described as "substantial" given the large size of these areas. "We're seeing it all across the Indian Ocean, in huge parts of the Atlantic Ocean, in parts of the Arctic oceans," she said. The bottom line, she added, is that "the world is warming."
As Andrea Thompson at Climate Central notes, the findings show that "September 2015 was not only the hottest September on record for the globe, but it was warmer than average by a bigger margin than any of the 1,629 months in [NOAA's records]--that's all the way back to January 1880."
NOAA's latest assessment on global temperatures arrives just weeks ahead of high-profile UN climate talks in Paris, where world leaders will once again come together with the stated goal of reaching an international agreement for addressing the runaway temperatures--and associated social, ecological, and financial costs--associated with global warming and climate change.
This table, published by the Weather Underground, cites statistics generated by insurance broker Aon Benfield. It shows that this year's record temperatures coincide with 2015, which has seen numerous "billion-dollar weather disasters," all of which were driven by or exacerbated by the climate fluctuations scientists have warned would correspond with increased warming of the world's oceans and atmosphere.
These trends, coupled with the myriad other dangers associated with life on a hotter planet, have focused much of the world's attention on what will transpire in Paris when the COP21 talks begin at the end of November.
According to a recent piece by Brad Plummer at Vox.com, however--given the gap between what governments are pledging for the talks and what the science demands--the outlook is not pretty. Encapsulating the current situation with a "good news vs. bad news" paradigm, Plummer put it this way: "The good news: Every country is submitting a detailed pledge to curb greenhouse gas emissions... The bad: Those pledges, added together, aren't nearly enough to keep us below 2degC of global warming. Short of drastic changes, we're in for some serious shit."
Meanwhile, commenting on developments at meetings in Bonn, Germany, this week where climate ministers were preparing a draft text for Paris, Susann Scherbarth, a climate justice and energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, said the world's richest and most polluting nations are wildly off-target when it comes to addressing the crisis.
"Emission-cut pledges made by rich countries so far are less than half of what we need to avoid runaway climate change," Scherbarth said. "The draft Paris agreement on the negotiating table this week shows that many seem ready to accept irreversible and devastating consequences for people and the planet."
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