August 2020 was the second-warmest on record, the Northern Hemisphere just experienced its warmest summer yet, and the Earth as a whole recorded its third-hottest three-month season.
That’s according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on an alarming warming trend.
But President Trump seemed to be dismissing the news Monday when he suggested in a visit to the fire-ravaged Golden State that “it will start getting cooler. You just watch.”
In fact, Trump wasn’t the only high-profile politician to weigh in on the topic Monday as Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden insisted climate change is making wildfires, hurricanes and superstorms worse. Gov. Gavin Newsom said climate change is driving the state’s record heat waves and wildfires as “the hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting drier.”
So what does the science say?
First off, are we in store for a cooling off, as Trump suggested?
“There’s no evidence that California is likely to encounter cooling,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. “Climate model projections show that a warming trend is virtually certain to continue as long as global warming continues.”
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the planet’s average surface temperature “has risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.” Most of the warming, the agency says, occurred in the past 35 years, with the six warmest years on record taking place since 2014.
Diffenbaugh said that even places such as the Midwest that had seemed years ago to be cooling while other areas warmed have now “transitioned into areas of less warming rather than an area of cooling.”
How about Biden’s claim that global warming is driving all manner of destructive weather from wildfires to storms and floods? Is that scientifically sound?
A Climate Science Special Report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program said the global temperature increase over the 115 years from 1901 to 2016 has led to the warmest period in the history of modern civilization and linked it to record-breaking climate-related weather extremes in recent years.
As a consequence, it said, daily tidal flooding is accelerating in more than 25 Atlantic and Gulf Coast cities. Heatwaves have become more frequent in the U.S. since the 1960s, while extreme cold temperatures and cold waves are less frequent. And large forest fires in the western United States have increased since the early 1980s and are projected to continue.
Diffenbaugh said evidence shows hurricanes have become wetter, and together with rising sea levels, there’s evidence of increasing flooding from them.
What about California becoming hotter and drier, as Newsom said?
Diffenbaugh’s own research points to increasing odds in the Golden State of warm years coinciding with low rainfall, which fire officials say in turn increases the intensity of fires as they leave vegetation drier and less fire resistant.
“The warming in California,” he said, “has increased the risk of drought periods in California.”
[vemba-video id=”politics/2020/09/14/trump-wildfires-climate-change-coronavirus-collins-dnt-lead-vpx.cnn”]Video: Trump ignores climate change science
“Currently, climate change has caused rare California heat waves to be 3 to 4 degrees warmer than they would have been without the human interference in the climate system. How much warmer they will be in the future depends on how much more climate change occurs.”
Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory specializing in extreme weather events in a changing climate, said California heat waves have become several degrees hotter.
“Currently, climate change has caused rare California heat waves to be 3 to 4 degrees warmer than they would have been without the human interference in the climate system,” Wehner said. “How much warmer they will be in the future depends on how much more climate change occurs.”
