Inside Climate News reporter Bob Berwyn on Sea Change Radio with sad COP29 protest rules . Hurricane seasons go strange: new science from Dr. Hosmay Lopez of NOAA. American Senator Sheldon Whitehouse with real news from COP29. He says climate action is going ahead all over the world, and cannot be stopped – even in America. Is it too late for denial?
I’m Alex Smith. Welcome to Radio Ecoshock.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
JUST SHUT UP!
Robot over a microphone: “Activists! No Voices! Just hum in designated spaces”.
Is this sci-fi? No, those are the rules at COP29 the climate conference recently in Baku, Azerbaijan. Long-time environment reporter Bob Berwyn was there for Inside Climate News. He reported real news from the COP, in this 13 minute selection from Sea Change Radio.
For the past 14 years, Alex Wise presents Sea Change Radio weekly on non-profit radio stations, and from the web site www.cchange.net This is great green radio. You can get the full interview with reporter Bob Berwyn from COP29 here. And this to your sites and life: cchange.net
Bob Berwyn: COP29 In Azerbaijan November 19, 2024
You will more surprising truth from the COP later in this program. Spoiler alert: our speaker is an American politician. Double alert: he delivers real news, stuff I did not know, and makes a slight case for hope.
But first, let’s go to our scientific interview. As four typhoons roared across the Philippines and South China Sea, new science from NOAA predicts erratic, extreme hurricane seasons ahead.
TWISTS IN HURRICANE SEASONS
HOSMAY LOPEZ
Our feature interview is with with NOAA scientist Hosmay Lopez. His team found strange changes in hurricane seasons are coming as Earth warms. Are they already here?
Climate change means surprises. New science suggests we may be fooled by quiet hurricane years, and then hit by a terrible storm season, complete with massive damage and loss of lives. That strange new reality comes from a study just published in Science Advances: “Projected increase in the frequency of extremely active Atlantic hurricane seasons”.
Here to explain is the lead author Dr. Hosmay Lopez. Hosmay is an oceanographer working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. He researches extreme weather and is a team leader for a NOAA project that develops a seasonal outlook for U.S. landfalling hurricanes.
Listen to or download this 21 minute interview with Hosmay Lopez in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
According to this paper, at 2 degrees C of warming, storm experts and models predict there may be two fewer tropical cyclones per year, on average. But some storm years would be much worse. The natural tendency to have quiet and active years will become more extreme in coming years – due to climate change. Would some hurricanes be stronger in a warming world, would they come in strings, or even concurrently?
It sounds like a hotter world brings many years of relative quiet on the storm front. People in hurricane zones might relax and rebuild. Safety will be interrupted by storms stronger than what we have seen, or a barrage of strong hurricanes, like the twins that hit Lake Charles, Louisiana in 2020. Hurricane Laura blew through with wind damage and flooding, followed six weeks later by Hurricane Delta. Four typhoons in ten days just struck the Philippines in November 2024. The future has arrived.
HOW LA NINA ENCOURAGES HURRICANES
In a 2022 paper, Hosmay Lopez found changes in the way El Nino operates as the planet warms. A recent paper, published September 2024 in Nature, agrees, this time with paleoclimate records. Changes in El Nino changes in hurricane activity in the Atlantic.
The La Nina cooling in the Eastern Pacific leads to above average sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic. La Nina also reduced wind shear over the Caribbean and tropical Atlantic. Instability and storms result. Conversely, El Nino conditions can reduce hurricanes in the Atlantic. Unlike the oceans, the atmosphere connects the Atlantic and Pacific into one inter-related system.
What did Lopez and colleagues conclude about this key hurricane factor? “Our major findings, based on CESM-LENS and CMIP6 model projections, are that El Niño in the late 21C is projected to (1) grow at a faster rate, (2) persist longer over the eastern and far eastern Pacific, and (3) to produce larger and distinct remote impacts in surface temperatures and precipitation.”
With El Nino appearing more often and growing longer, there should be longer periods of relative quiet, or at least few major hurricanes in the Atlantic. That is part of the point of this new study. Global warming tips the tropical Atlantic toward more quieter hurricane years in future decades – but does not prevent punctuation by La Nina years. Then hurricane Hell may break loose.
That is reinforced by more new science just published November 20, 2024. The title is: “Human-caused ocean warming has intensified recent hurricanes”. The authors find: “that human-driven SST shifts have already driven robust changes in 84% of recent observed hurricane intensities. Hurricanes during the 2019–2023 seasons were 8.3 m s 1 faster, on average, than they would have been in a world without climate change. “
Hurricane wind speeds in the Atlantic increased by 29 kilometers per hour (18 miles per hour) – in just the last six years, due to climate change. Hurricane Zeta in 2024 gained 50 kilometers an hour wind speed, 31 miles an hour, due to climate change.
Climate-driven factors, like high sea surface temperatures, can spin a hurricane up one or two categories in less than 20 hours. That increases damages and makes storm forecasting harder.
HURRICANES OF THE FUTURE
Hosmay Lopez gives an early seminar on changes in hurricane activity and seasons here on YouTube: “we might expect more extreme hurricane events to come in the future”. This YouTube is a good primer.
Seminar by Dr. Hosmay Lopez (11/8/2023)
GLOBAL WARMING DOES NOT SPREAD EVENLY
New science shows global warming is not evenly distributed. Climate change will not be the same for everyone. The paper is: “Global emergence of regional heatwave hotspots outpaces climate model simulations”. I am reaching out to the authors for an interview.
But here is just one example. Professor Ed Hawkins works at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, found at University of Reading in the UK. He reports: “Summer UK temperatures have warmed faster than global average temperature. But the very hottest days have warmed 4x faster than the global average, especially in south-east England.”
Friends, global warming is not “just” 1°C or 2°C. The effects of climate change are non-linear, especially for extremes. You can find this on Radio Ecoshock in just the last couple of weeks, like fast-fires. Scientist Andrew King told us about regional climate change in the future, with more warming in the Southern Hemisphere that the north, and an added heat bump for Australia.. Growing variability in hurricane seasons is another example.
Global is just a word. Local is where climate emerges. All this will make life even harder to predict and understand. We already have great difficulty understanding what is happening. Now it gets stranger.
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GETTING OUT OF A STATE OF DENIAL
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE
Radio Ecoshock mostly covers science and society. This is not a political show. Most politicians avoid the awful truth about climate change. But I stay on the look-out for climate truth, wherever it comes from. This is a presentation at time of COP29 in Baku by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Warning, though frank, this talk offers some hope in this world – even in America under a climate-denying Administration. The recording comes from CSPAN.
The cynical will say: “Sure, now as they leave power, a few Democrats start speaking the awful truth about climate change and fossil fuel burning.” We cannot say that of Senator Whitehouse. As you heard in this presentation, Whitehouse has given this “Time to Wake Up” talk almost 300 times. He is like an Al Gore that won’t stop. Whitehouse was Chair of the United States Senate Committee on the Budget from 2023 until January 2024.
OVER AND OUT
Next week we find out: yes, climate can really make you lose your mind. Thank you for listening, and caring about this changing world.
Listen to or download my new song “State of Denial” here.
POST-MORTEM:
WHEN ONLY COLLAPSE WILL DO
The one hour show also has final quotes from Dr. Tim Garrett, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Utah on the results of his peer-reviewed paper about physics and economies as climate changes. From the archives: Radio Ecoshock 2010.
Garrett developed a formula relating wealth and energy. His formula works going backward in time and may help understand the forward part. His analysis finds there is no “transition” that avoids catastrophic climate change.
Even the collapse of a major fossil fuel producer would not cut emissions enough. This happened in the early 1990’s when the Soviet Union collapsed. Garrett tells us, according to raw physics, only a complete and global collapse of the current civilization would save us from the worst of destabilizing heat and it’s ramifications.
Tim says even “hard times”, like the Depression of the 1930’s, applied globally, would not cut emissions enough. He wonders if a Depression might actually raise emissions. The many poor might go back to digging up coal, burning peat, or cutting down all the trees for heat and energy.
Tim presents a dark view and plenty of scientists and experts disagree. Not everyone feels free to speak their mind, while keeping their career, or in some countries, their life. Dr. Jem Bendell is a world expert on sustainability. He delivered keynote addresses as sustainability conferences. Then he concluded none of the proposed solutions were sustainable. He left the field but appears in print and videos, often from Indonesia. Check out his web site here.
Listen to or download my 2021 interview with Jem Bendell here (23 min), or read the blog.
Others have argued, for years, that billions of humans living machine-empowered lives on a small planet cannot continue long. We had scientists on Radio Ecoshock suggesting half a billion humans, with current knowledge and hopefully less invasive technologies, could live indefinitely on planet Earth. But at least half the planet would have to be left for wild plants and animals.
I don’t have the “right” answer. That is why I keep asking questions.
Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.
Alex