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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #41

Posted on 13 October 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 36 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, October 6, 2024 thru Sat, October 12, 2024.

Story of the week

For the third week in a row our Story of the Week involves hurricanes, most recently Hurricane Milton which led a brief life distinguished by explosive intensification, placing it as the Gulf of Mexico's most energetic late-season storm on record. The word cloud here captures the flavor of the past week's journalistic preoccupation with this storm as a feature related to and at least partially dependent on human-caused climate change. 

Thanks to our increasing the efficiency of Earth's insulating blanket of greenhouse gases, we're having an affect on all features of the weather we experience. Unless we're to be mystified, surprised and needlessly harmed by bad weather we've added to our annual odds, it's important that we be able to distinguish our effects on the geophysics we experience as rain, wind, and the other features of our restless atmosphere that we call "weather." Fortunately there's an outfit doing exactly that, an initiative called World Weather Attribution (WWA). While the center of mass of WWA is academic in nature, the organization flips the usual sequence of publication; WWA analyses frequently feature as peer-reviewed publications in major academic journals, but their initial reporting is released as rapidly as possible, for the beneifit of ephemeral public attention. 

Too late to make it into our collection of articles this week, WWA provided a detailed briefing on how Hurricane Milton was "upgraded" by our accidental tampering with our climate. In brief and as synopsized by Yale Climate Connections, here's what we know about Milton's juicing:

World Weather Attribution’s analysis found that storms with Milton’s wind speeds have become approximately 40% more frequent and the winds associated with storms of similar rarity have become nearly 11 mph (5 m/s) higher (an increase of about 10%) because of the 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3°F) of global warming since preindustrial times. Thus, without climate change, Milton would have hit Florida as a Cat 2 with 110 mph winds instead of a Cat 3 with 120 mph winds.

Bold ours. No analogy is perfect, but we all know that if we turn up the burner beneath a pot of soup the soup will seethe more vigorously. Similarly and unsurprisingly, as we turn up the temperature of the Earth we inhabit it follows that certain features of our atmosphere will tend to behave more kinetically, including hurricanes. We've followed hurricanes Helene and Milton and both followed this simple logic. In Helene's case we saw ample evidence not only of surprising intensification but also the effects of the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, whereby slightly warmer air can carry and later dump disproportionately larger amounts of moisture.

The larger story of Milton is that of violent weather inhabiting expanded brackets we ourselves have set. Is there a conclusion to this narrative? Perhaps it's that we should try to narrow the span of those brackets back to "normal" variations.

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before October 6

October 6

October 7

October 8

October 9

October 10

October 11

October 12

If you happen upon current high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

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