Extreme weather events have dominated the news this summer, with reports on extensive wildfires in Canada; dangerous flooding in India, Japan, and the Eastern US; severe heat waves in Spain, China, the United States, and Mexico; and the hottest day ever recorded on Earth.
Extreme weather events have dominated the news this summer, with reports on extensive wildfires in Canada; dangerous flooding in India, Japan, and the Eastern US; severe heat waves in Spain, China, the United States, and Mexico; and the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. A recent study conducted by scientists at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute (BAERI) and NASA Ames Research Center provides a thorough examination of how these extreme events will worsen as our planet’s temperature creeps upwards, and where these events are more likely to clash and combine in ways that significantly impact people’s lives and livelihoods. The study uses a publicly available NASA dataset, the NASA Earth eXchange – Global Daily Downscaled Projections (NEX-GDDP), that can “zoom in” on projected changes to a local scale, allowing any community in the world to start preparing today.
The study looked at a world when warming exceeds two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times. It focused on the geographic patterns of projected changes to key climate variables, including changes to air temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, solar radiation, and wind speed. Two degrees of warming is widely considered to be a critical threshold above which Earth will witness the dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change. According to the study, two degrees of warming is expected to occur sometime in the 2040s, though variation exists across projections from different climate models.
Read more at Bay Area Environmental Research Institute
Image: Projected mean air temperature changes in the 2040s with respect to the baseline period (1950-1979) when the Earth will likely reach 2°C of global warming compared to pre-industrial levels. (Credit: Taejin Park)
