[“Each year we have
extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the
world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications
division at the World Meteorological Association, in Geneva. “The heat wave in
Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and
extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of
extreme weather calamity.”]
By Sarah Lyall
 |
Stefan Rampfel/European Pressphoto
Agency
As with other
parts of Europe, a fierce early winter storm blanketed the
Harz Mountains
in Germany last month.
|
WORCESTER, England — Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its
rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the
unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around
the world, extreme has become the new commonplace.
Especially lately. China
is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30
years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so
freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights
recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.
Bush fires are raging across Australia,
fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm
bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United
States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out
simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since
records began.
“Each year we have
extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the
world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications
division at the World Meteorological Association, in Geneva. “The heat wave in
Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and
extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of
extreme weather calamity.”
Such events are
increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr. Baddour said, a sign that
climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense,
unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds.
Here in Britain, people
are used to thinking of rain as the wallpaper on life’s computer screen — an
omnipresent, almost comforting background presence. But even the hardiest
citizen was rattled by the near-biblical fierceness of the rains that bucketed
down, and the floods that followed, three different times in 2012.
Rescuers plucked people
by boat from their swamped homes in St. Asaph, North Wales. Whole areas of the
country were cut off when roads and train tracks were inundated at Christmas.
In Megavissey, Cornwall, a pub owner closed his business for good after it
flooded 11 times in two months.
It was no anomaly: the
floods of 2012 followed the floods of 2007 and also the floods of 2009, which
all told have resulted in nearly $6.5 billion in insurance payouts. The Met
Office, Britain’s weather service, declared 2012 the wettest year in England,
and the second-wettest in Britain as a whole, since records began more than 100
years ago. Four of the five wettest years in the last century have come in the
past decade (the fifth was in 1954).
The biggest change, said
Charles Powell, a spokesman for the Met Office, is the frequency in Britain of
“extreme weather events” — defined as rainfall reaching the top 1 percent of the
average amount for that time of year. Fifty years ago, such episodes used to
happen every 100 days; now they happen every 70 days, he said.
The same thing is true
in Australia, where bush fires are raging across Tasmania and the current heat
wave has come after two of the country’s wettest years ever. On Tuesday, Sydney
experienced its fifth-hottest day since records began in 1910, with the
temperature climbing to 108.1 degrees. The first eight days of 2013 were among
the 20 hottest on record.
Every decade since the
1950s has been hotter in Australia than the one before, said Mark Stafford
Smith, science director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship at the Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.
To the north, the
extremes have swung the other way, with a band of cold settling across Russia
and Northern Europe, bringing thick snow and howling winds to Stockholm,
Helsinki and Moscow. (Incongruously, there were also severe snowstorms in
Sicily and southern Italy for the first time since World War
II; in December, tornadoes and waterspouts struck the Italian
coast.)
In Siberia, thousands of
people were left without heat when natural gas liquefied in its pipes and water
mains burst. Officials canceled bus transportation between cities for fear that
roadside breakdowns could lead to deaths from exposure, and motorists were
advised not to venture far afield except in columns of two or three cars. In
Altai, to the east, traffic officials warned drivers not to use poor-quality
diesel, saying that it could become viscous in the cold and clog fuel lines.
Meanwhile, China is enduring
its worst winter in recent memory, with frigid temperatures recorded in Harbin,
in the northeast. In the western region of Xinjiang, more than 1,000 houses
collapsed under a relentless onslaught of snow, while in Inner Mongolia,
180,000 livestock froze to death. The cold has wreaked havoc with crops,
sending the price of vegetables soaring.
Way down in South
America, energy analysts say that Brazil may face electricity rationing for the
first time since 2002, as a heat wave and a lack of rain deplete the reservoirs
for hydroelectric plants.
The summer has been punishingly hot. The temperature in Rio de Janeiro climbed
to 109.8 degrees on Dec. 26, the city’s highest temperature since official
records began in 1915.
At the same time, in the
Middle East, Jordan is battling a storm packing torrential rain, snow, hail and
floods that are cascading through tunnels, sweeping away cars and spreading
misery in Syrian refugee camps. Amman has been virtually paralyzed, with cars
abandoned, roads impassable and government offices closed.
Israel and the Palestinian territories
are grappling with similar conditions, after a week of intense rain and cold
winds ushered in a snowstorm that dumped eight inches in Jerusalem alone.
Amir Givati, head of the
surface water department at the Israel Hydrological Service, said the storm was
truly unusual because of its duration, its intensity and its breadth. Snow and
hail fell not just in the north, but as far south as the desert city of Dimona,
best known for its nuclear reactor.
In Beirut on Wednesday
night, towering waves crashed against the Corniche, the seaside promenade
downtown, flinging water and foam dozens of feet in the air as lightning
flickered across the dark sea at multiple points along the horizon. Many roads
were flooded as hail pounded the city.
Several people died,
including a baby boy in a family of shepherds who was swept out of his mother’s
arms by floodwaters. The greatest concern was for the 160,000 Syrian refugees
who have fled to Lebanon, taking shelter in schools, sheds and, where possible,
with local families. Some refugees are living in farm outbuildings, which are
particularly vulnerable to cold and rain.
Barry Lynn, who runs a
forecasting business and is a lecturer at the Hebrew University’s department of
earth science, said a striking aspect of the whole thing was the severe and
prolonged cold in the upper atmosphere, a big-picture shift that indicated the
Atlantic Ocean was no longer having the moderating effect on weather in the
Middle East and Europe that it has historically.
“The intensity of the
cold is unusual,” Mr. Lynn said. “It seems the weather is going to become more
intense; there’s going to be more extremes.”
In Britain, where
changes to the positioning of the jet stream — a ribbon of air high up in the
atmosphere that helps steer weather systems — may be contributing to the
topsy-turvy weather, people are still recovering from the December floods. In
Worcester last week, the river Severn remained flooded after three weeks, with
playing fields buried under water.
In the shop at the
Worcester Cathedral, Julie Smith, 54, was struggling, she said, to adjust to
the new uncertainty.
“For the past seven or
eight years, there’s been a serious incident in a different part of the
country,” Mrs. Smith said. “We don’t expect extremes. We don’t expect it to be
like this.”
Reporting was contributed by Jodi Rudoren from
Jerusalem; Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Tzur Hadassah, Israel; Fares Akram from
Gaza City, Gaza; Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow; Ranya Kadri from
Amman, Jordan; Dan Levin from Harbin, China; Jim Yardley from New Delhi; Anne
Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon; Matt Siegel from Sydney, Australia; Scott Sayare
from Paris; and Simon Romero from Rio de Janeiro.
