These surfaces do not take on water in the way that earth does, and can lead to more severe flooding events. One factor in Houston was the sheer amount of asphalt and cement that covers the city. New Yorkers seek relief from the heat in the fountains of Flushing Meadows Park in Queens. Of course, scientists are extremely confident that warmer ocean temperatures also lead to more ferocious storms, as wind speeds pick up and supercharge the cyclone's destructive potential. Sobel says there's some new research that the storm's glacial pace of movement may also have been tied to warming temperatures, but it lacks the widespread acceptance that the water vapor theories have. It was also so destructive- the storm caused $125 billion in damage, behind only Hurricane Katrina all-time-because Harvey moved so slowly, and hovered over the Gulf Coast area for days. 2017's Hurricane Harvey was a prime example of this: the storm reportedly dropped 27 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana, and hit the city of Houston particularly hard. There won't necessarily be more of them, but they will be more severe. Total annual rainfall is only expected to increase two or three percent globally over the coming decades, but the real effects of warming will be felt in individual extreme events. Some models increase them faster than that, and some slower." It's too soon to draw direct conclusions about whether climate change had an effect on Monday's storm specifically, but it very likely fits in this established pattern. And so, the baseline expectation is that heavy rain events get heavier at about that rate also. "The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere increases roughly about seven percent per degree Celsius. "The basic thing that makes extreme precipitation events heavier in the warmer climate is that there’s more water vapor in the air, and that’s a pretty unquestioned consequence of warming," says Adam Sobel, professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia University. The videos from bystanders made the oft-and-understandably ridiculed Day After Tomorrow look a little less ridiculous. At one point, three inches of rain an hour were falling in Brooklyn, and it led to devastating scenes, particularly in the area around Carroll Street and Fourth Avenue, a topographical low point where the water ran down from neighboring Park Slope and gathered in massive volume. A summer thunderstorm rolled into town-again, not unprecedented-but the results were fairly biblical. The next day, the city got the main event of our climate-crisis teaser: the water. That followed a blackout in Manhattan's Midtown and Upper West Side earlier in the month.Īnd that was just the fire. ConEdison also reported equipment failures. Even Green Bay will go from one to 10.) This past Sunday, it was hot enough in New York to drive electricity demand to the point that the city experienced partial blackouts in Brooklyn. By midcentury, if we take no action to mitigate the effects of climate change, it will be 18 days. But recent research suggests that extreme heat events will be more and more common in the coming years. Historically, the city of New York has seen two days a year where the heat index-temperature plus humidity, or what it feels like outside-reaches 100 degrees or higher. On July 21, the temperature in New York hit 100 degrees. If You Like 100-Degree Days, You're in Luck.The Chinese Climate Hoaxsters Set Fire to Alaska.It wasn't never-before-seen, but the science indicates it will soon be the scene far more frequently. New York City just showed us what that might look like: more hot days, hotter hot days, and extreme rain events that will be more extreme. It also releases the gas, carbon dioxide, that is gathering in our atmosphere to heat up and destabilize our planet and threaten the future of human civilization as we know it. We've chosen instead to continue pulling coal and gas and oil out of the ground and to set fire to them at an alarming rate, a process which produces energy and lots of money for the people doing the burning. And the American West has a bit of a water problem, in that there isn't very much of it.īut it was America's most populous city that played host to a series of events this past week that may best encapsulate the range of horrors that await the human race now that we've proven ourselves determined to ignore the warnings of scientists. After all, it was 108 degrees in Paris on Thursday-and not Paris, Texas, either. Perhaps we'll remember the week of Jas the first teaser trailer for the apocalypse.
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