Chaos works like this: if you have very little energy, things are stable. As the energy in the system increases, the range of possible states expands. At some points, the system can fall into predictable chaotic patterns: in weather, this would be knowing the general force of storms and cyclones, having a basic idea of how big these things are.
As the energy increases, the range of possible states continues to expand, and what you used to know about ‘how big tornadoes are’ stops being useful.
I’ll repeat that: as the energy increases (as the climate imperceptibly creeps upward in temperature), you stop being able to predict how big things like storms and cyclones will be.
If the CLIMATE stopped heating, and cooled off, the WEATHER would return to the tornado sizes people are used to.
It’s not going to do that.
As the CLIMATE continues to heat, by seemingly meaningless numbers (what’s a degree or two? right?), the WEATHER can and will start throwing up outlier events, storms and tornadoes that are unprecedented in size and destructiveness.
The more chaos in the system, the more often you get these outlier events, and the more extreme these outlier events become. Even worse, the outlier events become the new boundaries of normal. Which means the outlier events that are based on the new normal are far more destructive when they do eventually happen.
Look at the tornado seasons here in the Midwest and South over the last five years. Greensburg, Kansas was literally wiped off the map by an EF5 scale tornado in 2007 Parkersburg, Iowa was crushed by an EF5 storm in 2008. Mufreesboro, Tennessee suffered an EF4 storm on Good Friday in 2009. Yazoo City, Mississippi was flattened last year by a massive tornado. Tuscaloosa, Alabama suffered mass casualties because of a system of three massive EF5 tornadoes earlier this year. Joplin, Missouri got shredded by a storm the width of ten football fields on Sunday...and it was only an EF4.
EF5 storms are minimum 200 MPH. They are events that are supposed to come along once a generation, like the Super Outbreak of 1974 through Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio. We've seen five in the last five years. We've seen three just this year.
When we see 100-year tornadoes coming along every five years, when we see 100-year floods coming along every ten years, when we see 100-year wildfires come along every couple of years, when we see 100-year blizzards come along in months like April and May, there's a problem. There's too much energy in the system. It's like driving on a wobbly tire faster and faster. The more energy you put into spinning it, the more energy you add to the system, the more pronounced and extreme the wobbling gets, until the wheel or the axle are damaged and/or break completely.
That's what's happening with out weather patterns now. What would have been outliers 50 years ago are commonplace events now. It's the new outliers that the system heralds that we have to look out for. If EF5 tornadoes become a yearly event in America, will we need an EF6 or EF7 category to measure storms of 250 or 300 MPH, the really unprecedented ones that are the new outliers, our new "once in a generation" storms?
This is the real issue. And until one of these massive superstorms hits and flattens an entire county of major American metropolitan area, with casualties in the thousands, we won't pay attention. And by then it will be far too late.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment