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Monsoon rains are frustrating attempts to get aid to millions of people in a flooded region in Pakistan. China too is struggling with its worst flooding in years. In Russia it’s the opposite problem – too little rain. Heidi Cullen is a research scientist and correspondent at Climate Central. She’s also author of the new book “The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet.” Cullen speaks to anchor Katy Clark.
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KATY CLARK: In neighboring Pakistan, continuing monsoon rains are frustrating attempts to get aid to millions of people. They’ve been affected by some of the worst flooding the region has ever seen. Meanwhile Pakistan’s neighbor, China, is struggling with its worst flooding in years. In Russia it’s the opposite problem, too little rain, and the worst stretch of hot weather on record, which has caused rampant wildfires, perhaps hundreds of deaths, and poisonous smog. And of course here in the US we’ve been sweating through one of the hottest summers in memory. For perspective on this summer’s sometimes calamitous weather, we’re going to turn now to climatologist Heidi Cullen. She’s a research scientist and correspondent at Climate Central and author of the new book The Weather of the Future. Dr. Cullen, how does what’s happening this summer match up against what the climate models are telling us for the future. Let’s start with Russia and the record drought there.
HEIDI CULLEN: Honestly, I think the best thing we can say is that extreme heat is completely consistent with what we would expect to see as we more forward in time. And oddly enough, or ironically enough, droughts and floods are one of the things that we expect to see more of as well.
CLARK: Now, by contrast, looking south and east to China and Pakistan, we have not too little rain, but too much rain. It often rains a lot in this part of the world, but we’re seeing something unusual here, aren’t we?
CULLEN: Right. Well, I think those are the two big points to make is that, of course, natural climate variability plays such a huge role and from year to year we can expect to see moments when the flooding is really intense, other years where it’s not so bad, but when you look at the long-term observational record, we’re seeing a shift towards more intense rain fall, so what comes down, comes down heavier in more intense bursts over a shorter period of time and as the planet warms up, there’s more water vapor released into the atmosphere. Oceans get warmer, more water evaporates, and there’s more fuel for these storms when they form.
CLARK: And not to pile it on here, but we’ve just got news this weekend of a monster iceberg breaking off a glacier in Greenland. It’s the biggest in almost 50 years. Is this another consequence of extreme weather?
CULLEN: Well, this is where multiple lines of evidence become really interesting. Again you can’t attribute any single event to global warming, but with this iceberg chunking off of Petermann glacier in northern Greenland, four times the size of Manhattan. When you look at the physical mechanisms, warmer waters actually help break these chunks off, so it’s completely consistent with what we expect.
CLARK: So, can we get a little bit of a reality check here. I mean not long ago, just last winter in fact, we had just the opposite kind of weather here in the US. There were huge blizzards in Washington, in New York. And all kinds of folks were saying that that was evidence that the planet is not heating up, that climate change is nonsense. I wonder if these kinds of extreme weather events aren’t merely prompting people on either side of the debate to say, this just proves my way of thinking.
CULLEN: I think it’s so true. And I think that’s why it’s so important for us when we have these moments of extreme weather events, to try to further the debate. And I think the main takeaway is that we cannot say that this is global warming. But we also can’t say that it’s not. And the answer lies somewhere in between in the sense that there is this warming trend on top of natural climate variability. 30% of Russian’s wheat yield being lost in one year. We have to be able to be smarter than that. There’s something we can do about this in the forms of adapting our infrastructure, making improvements, so that we’re more prepared for the extremes we expect to see more of in the future. And Hurricane Katrina serves as this other example where 20 or 30 years ago we knew that New Orleans was specifically vulnerable to hurricanes and yet we didn’t act on that information. I think that that’s one of the things we really need to do when we experience these extreme events is to say, we’re not powerless to them.
CLARK: Heidi Cullen is a climatologist. We spoke with her from Climate Central in Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Cullen, thank you.
CULLEN: Thank you so much, Katy.
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