It’s getting hot in here
2023 temperatures have smashed records - and not in a good way. Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reveals that July 2023 was the first time that an average July temperature exceeded 1.0°C above the long-term average.
According to NOAA, “The average global surface temperature in July was 1.12°C above average, ranking it as the warmest July in NOAA’s 174-year record…[and] also likely Earth’s warmest month on record.”
Also of note, July 2023 was the 47th-consecutive July and the 533rd-consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average.”
But it’s been the oceans that have really shattered prior records, with temperatures boosted by El Niño conditions. NOAA: “Globally, July 2023 set a record for the highest monthly sea surface temperature anomaly…of any month in NOAA’s climate record, with an anomaly of 0.99 of a degree C”.
On sea ice, NOAA note “July 2023 set a record for the lowest global July sea ice extent (coverage) on record”.
More on NOAA’s findings is available here: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.shtml
We might not be in Kansas anymore
Forecasting climate damage is getting more difficult because our historical data is increasingly irrelevant.
An interesting article by Kerry Emanuel points out that “Almost all extant long-term estimates of natural hazard risk are based on historical statistics of the hazards. These estimates lie at the heart of catastrophe (CAT) modelling.”
Emanuel argues that records are often too short to enable reliable estimates about extreme weather events. More concerning, though is that the climate change we have witnessed to date makes many long-term risk estimates obsolete.
For example, the risk of a flood event similar to 2017’s Hurricane Harvey in Texas increased by a factor of between 1.5 and 6 during the 50 years before Harvey, making historical records less useful for estimating such risks.
Emanuel concludes: “The important contributions that relatively rare events make to long-term risk, coupled with the high sensitivity of such events to climate change, warrant a rapid migration toward using physically based weather hazard models in CAT modelling.”
Click below for the full text of Physically Based Weather Hazard Modelling: Accounting for Climate Change, Journal of Catastrophe Risk and Resilience (Kerry Emanuel). https://journalofcrr.com/physically-based-weather-hazard-modelling-accounting-for-climate-change/
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