Underwater and on fire: US climate change magnifies extremes

Published September 19, 2020

America's worsening climate change problem is as polarized as its politics. Some parts of the country have been burning this month while others were underwater in extreme weather disasters.

The already parched West is getting drier and suffering deadly wildfires because of it, while the much wetter East keeps getting drenched in mega-rainfall events, some hurricane related and others not. Climate change is magnifying both extremes, but it may not be the only factor, several scientists told The Associated Press.

“The story in the West is really going to be ... these hot dry summers getting worse and the fire compounded by decreasing precipitation,’’ said Columbia University climate scientist Richard Seager. “But in the eastern part more of the climate change impact story is going to be more intense precipitation. We see it in Sally.”

North Carolina State climatologist Kathie Dello, a former deputy state climatologist in Oregon, this week was talking with friends abut the massive Oregon fires while she was huddled under a tent, dodging 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain falling on the North Carolina mountains.

“The things I worry about are completely different now,” Dello said. “We know the West has had fires and droughts. It’s hot and dry. We know the East has had hurricanes and it’s typically more wet. But we’re amping up both of those.”

In the federal government’s 2017 National Climate Assessment, scientists wrote a special

“We certainly are getting extremes at the same time with climate change,” said University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles, one of the main authors.

Since 1980, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tracked billion-dollar disasters, adjusting for inflation, with

Fifteen of the 22 billion-dollar droughts in the past 30 years hit states west of the Rockies, while 23 of the 28 billion-dollar non-hurricane flooding events were to the east.

For more than a century scientists have looked at a divide — at the 100th meridian — that splits the country with dry and brown conditions to the west and wet and green ones to the east.

Seager found that the wet-dry line

And it's getting more extreme.

Nearly three-quarters of the West is now in drought, according to the

Meager summer rains are down 26%

California also is suffering its worst fire year on record, with more than

“Climate change is a major factor behind the increase in western U.S. wildfires,” said A. Park Williams, a Columbia University scientist who studies fires and climate.

“Since the early 1970s, California’s annual wildfire extent increased fivefold, punctuated by extremely large and destructive wildfires in 2017 and 2018,” a

During the western wildfires, more than a foot rain fell on Alabama and Florida as Hurricane Sally parked on the Gulf Coast,

The week before Sally hit, a non-tropical storm dumped half a foot of rain on a Washington, D.C., suburb in just a few hours. Bigger downpours are becoming more common in the East, where the summer has gotten 16%

In August 2016, a non-tropical storm

In the 1950s, areas east of the Rockies averaged 87 downpours of five inches or more a year. In the 2010s, that had soared to 149 a year, according to data from NOAA research meteorologist Ken Kunkel.

It’s simple physics. With each degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) that the air warms, it holds 7% more moisture that can come down as rain. The East has warmed that much since 1985, according to NOAA.

While climate change is a factor, Seager and Williams said what’s happening is more extreme than climate models predict and there must be other, possibly natural weather phenomenon also at work.

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann said that La Nina — a temporary natural cooling of parts of the equatorial Pacific that changes weather worldwide — is partly responsible for some of the drought and hurricane issues this summer. But that’s on top of climate change, so together they make for "dual disasters playing out in the U.S.,” Mann said.

As for where you can go to escape climate disasters, Dello said, “I don’t know where you can go to outrun climate change anymore.”

“I’m thinking Vermont,” she said, then added Vermont had bad floods from 2011’s Hurricane Irene.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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