Things Are Going to Get Extreme

When thinking about climate adaptation, it's hard to figure out exactly where to start. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said we could expect an increase of:

Source: The Washington Sun

• milder cold days
• warmer hot days
• heat waves
• heavy precipitation
• droughts
• intense cyclones
• high sea levels

I've seen a lot of this on the news. And whenever one of these events occurs I am reminded that climate change brings the threat of similar events. But what really scared me during my research, my 'oh wow' moment, was looking at these 4 squiggly graphs.



PR (probability ratio): P1/ P0 where P1 is the probality of an event happening
after a given global mean warming  and P0 is the probability of it happening
before the industrial revolution.

FAR (fraction of attributable risk): 1-PR which yield the amount that humans
contributed to the probability of a set of events occurring

Blue: Daily weather that had a 1 in 100 chance of happening before the industrial revolution

Red:  Daily weather that had a 1 in 1000 chance of happening before the industrial revolution

Source: Fischer, Knutti, 2015

These graphs are the predictions of 25 different models and show the expected trends for heavy precipitation (a & c) and extreme heat (b&d). For both heat and precipitation, the more unusual the event the more its frequency will increase. These same events will probably be, in part, due to human activity. (Fischer, Knutti, 2015) Knowing the resulting death and distruction from extreme events, society needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. The scale of the temperature increase and our respective blame dwarfs the increase for heavy precipitation, which was not what I expected growing up on the East Coast of the US.

Looking at these graphs, knowing that we are currently at .85^oC global increase, the international goal of 2^oC seems recklessly high. And seeing how the current COP21 pledges would result in a 2.7^oC increase, adaptation need to be swift. Therefore, I plan on first looking at preparations for higher temperatures and droughts.