2011 — A Year of Climate Extremes. Can 2012 be Far Behind?

by Maureen Nandini Mitra – January 20, 2012

14 Major Weather and Climate Disasters Cost the US $55 Billion in Damages

It’s raining in Berkeley today. After an unusually long, dry winter spell that had everyone worried, the clouds finally burst yesterday afternoon. I don’t much like cold, grey skies and wet streets, but like most Californians, I’m happy to put up with the gloomy weather for the sake of our parched patch of Earth. Weird climate, after all, is the new normal these days.

Twenty-eleven has been quite a year of climate extremes, hasn’t it? Prolonged drought in Texas, blinding snowstorms in the Northeast, raging wildfires in Arizona and New Mexico, floods stretching from North Dakota to Mississippi, tornadoes in the Rockies and the Midwest, tropical storms landing in the Gulf Coast and going on to weak havoc as far up north as New York and Pennsylvania… just one onslaught after another.

When I was compiling data for an article on climate change and adaptation for the Journal’s 2011 fall issue last year, I thought we had it bad. Halfway through the year, extreme weather related disasters had cost an estimated $23 to $28 billion. Now it seems the damages were far, far worse than I’d expected. A new report, released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) yesterday says the US had a total of 14 “major billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” in 2011.

Let me clarify, each of these events caused at least $1 billion in damages. Some cost more, a lot more. NOAA officials confirm that the total damage was a whopping $55 billion! The most expensive year in the 1980-2011 record was 2005, when Hurricane Katrina impacted the Gulf Coast. Last year was, as the report says, “a record-breaking year for climate extremes.”

“In my weather career spanning four decades, I’ve never seen a year quite like 2011,” Jack Hayes, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, says in a recorded statement regarding the report. “Sure we have had years with extreme flooding, extreme winter snowstorms and even extreme tornado outbreaks. But I can’t remember a year like this, in which we experienced record-breaking extremes of nearly every conceivable type of weather,” he says. And if the beginning of 2012 is any indicator, looks like we are in for more of such weather extremes in the coming months.

While it’s not clear yet if all of these weather anomalies are directly linked to global warming, most climatologists agree that there has been an increase in such climate extremes because of rising global temperatures. "We know through scientific observations that the global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is primarily due to human-induced emission of heat trapping gases. Every weather event that happens now takes place in the context of this changed environment," NOAA spokesman John Ewald, told me in an emailed statement today.

We are the primary drivers of our changed environment. It's a rather scary thought. But in it also lies a seed of hope. If we have the power to change our environment for the worse, we also have it in us to change it for the better. Or, at the very least, prevent it from getting worse. But sadly, we continue to be a nation without a comprehensive strategy to lower our greenhouse gas emissions. And that, to me, is the most shameful thing of all.

 

Some highlights from the report:

• Warmer-than-normal temperatures were anchored across the South, Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast.
• Delaware had its warmest year on record, while Texas had its second warmest year on record.
• The epicenter of the heat was the Southern Plains, where Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas all had their warmest summer (note: not year, only summer months) on record.
• With the exception of Vermont, each state in the contiguous U.S. had at least one location that exceeded 100 degrees F. Summertime temperatures have increased across the U.S. at an average rate of 0.11 degrees F per decade.
• Texas, ravaged by exceptional drought for most of 2011, had its driest year on record. In contrast, seven states in the Ohio Valley and Northeast —Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — had their wettest year on record.
• Precipitation extremes, combined with meltwater from a near-record snow pack, contributed to historic flooding along several major rivers across the central United States.
• Record breaking drought and wildfires devastated the southern Plains.
• Record breaking tornado season in spring. Over 1,150 tornadoes during the March-May period. The 551 tornado-related fatalities during the year were the most in the 62-year period of record. The deadliest tornado outbreak on record (April 25-28th) and the deadliest single tornado (Joplin, Missouri) contributed to the high fatality count.

 

 

Maureen Nandini Mitra, Managing Editor, Earth Island Journal.
In addition to her work at the Journal, Maureen is a columnist for The Faster Times and writes for several other magazines and online publications in the US and India. A journalism graduate from Columbia University, her work has appeared in the San Francisco Public Press, The New Internationalist, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, The Caravan and Down to Earth.

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