Disaster weather w/meteorologist Dr Richard Rood—Climate change & extremes—Radio Ecoshock 2019-06-12
Channel: Stop Fossil Fuels
Date: 2019-07-06

Meteorologist Richard Rood explains the developing bridge between disaster weather and climate change. Even as millions of Americans feel beaten up and robbed by storms, many do not know extreme spring weather may be part of the climate crisis. Is that due to scientific caution, or a break-down in critical information? Do even experts feel shut out?

Show by Radio Ecoshock, reposted under CC License. Episode details at https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/06/there-is-no-new-normal.html

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SHOW DETAILS
Trained in the south, American meteorologist Richard Rood bridges the gap between weather and climate. Richard teaches Masters Level post-grads, while a professor of climate research at the University of Michigan. Dr. Rood is author or co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed papers and the book “Demystifying Climate Models: A Users Guide to Earth System Models”.

Speaking on the recent extremes in storms and flooding in mid-to-Eastern America, Richard Rood told USA Today “It's extraordinarily unlikely that this is just a set of typical weather events, that just happen to occur at the same time…” He concludes climate change has to be involved.

INDIRECT AFFECTS SHOW UP BEFORE DIRECT ONES
Those unexpected results of heating a planet seem to pop up sooner than events with obvious, easy-to-prove climate causes. Even when heat records are not set, back-to-back heat waves are increasing in the instrumental record since the year 2000.

The multitude of tornadoes in the Spring storms hitting the central US was shocking. “We’re currently sitting at 500 filtered *eyewitness tornado reports* during this time period. Only four periods in the official database ever exceed 500 *observed* tornadoes in 30 days: 2003, 2004, 2008, and 2011.”

A single tornado may not be record-setting. But clustered outbreaks of tornadoes may be another unexpected side-effect of global warming. However, Richard Rood said in this interview that tornadoes are small scale “and the connections to climate would be indirect”. But the shift in the position of Tornado Alley toward the east is likely due to climate change.

THE BRIDGE BETWEEN METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATOLOGY
For decades, meteorologists and climate scientists barely spoke. Now we're seeing the two sciences interact, with climate attribution showing up for particular weather events, and weather skewed by such things as Arctic sea ice melt. Climate and weather are part of the same continuum, operating on different time scales. Climate and weather scientists even share some of the same modeling software.

CLIMATE INFORMATICS
Richard’s specialty is “climatic informatics”. As Richard knows from his 20 years working with NASA, satellites and the great models are churning out data and reports about the world. Some of that data flow and models attempt to be transparent, offering access to the public. But it takes an expert to translate that data into the various models and databases used by various sciences.

“There is simply more volatility and complexity in data, technology, and user needs than can be accommodated by a command-and-control approach.”

“Vast quantities of data, better than we ever had before, are swimming behind complex portals with insufficient manuals.” In 2016, Richard Rood started on that manual with “Demystifying Climate Models,” which you can download free.

The idea of an “End-to-End System” calls up something even bigger. We need to bring the terrible discoveries by scientists about our climate crisis to every person on the planet. One “end” to the information system has to be the simple person. Meanwhile, most of my listeners who want to see real time data about current weather around the world and the big-picture patterns use earth.nullschool.net and climatereanalyzer.org.

Richard recommends Paul Edwards as historian of weather and climate science. See in particular: “A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming”

ON THE FAILURE OF TV NETWORKS TO MAKE THE CLIMATE CONNECTION
Richard says “one of the political tactics that is going on in the United States right now is to create this sort of distracting chaos that keeps people from looking at what’s going on under the hood“.

He also suspects climate fatigue in hearing about climate so much. Richard did an interview a couple of weeks ago with the Wall Street Journal. “Any time we do an interview that reaches out of the choir that’s interested in climate change, we get harassing emails.” TV meteorologists get feedback from users, and probably from advertisers.

We live directly in the weather. Weather is becoming a scarier place because of our changes to the atmosphere—so it’s good to have experts like Richard Rood to help explain why it happens.