On attribution and adaptation

Hey there,

Whether because of the wars rippling across the world or an intuition that more bad news would follow over the weekend, I heard a clarion call of anxiety all of last week as I, in all my great fortune, was safe, fed, and happily enjoying climate week (and the opera on Saturday.)

It’s disorienting to enjoy one’s life as incomprehensible horrors unfold elsewhere in the world. So, if you’ve had enough exposure to that type of ‘content’ of late, feel free to skip this one, as I’m going to discuss Helene, the storm that just ripped through the south.

OPINION

If you ever see bears climbing 50 feet up into trees, you should trust their instincts. Something terrible is coming.

That's just what some bears near Asheville were doing a few days ago before Helene, a tropical cyclone (synonymous with hurricane) that went from Cat 1 to 4 in 12 hours, hit Florida, Georgia and then caused unprecedented flooding in the Carolinas. Winds reached 140 miles per hour, hundreds of people are dead, countless roads are down, and other critical infrastructure, like 360 electric substations in the Carolines is imperiled and may need to be rebuilt, not just repaired. This also means countless people are without power (possibly for a long time), water, and other critical things. Further, new studies suggest past hurricane death tolls have been undercounted, as excess deaths attributable to hurricanes can continue for a long time.

The damage and destruction also hit a lot of people without public flood insurance. The photos and videos are heart-wrenching. There is something about our modern age that is perhaps too much for our bodies and souls to handle. We were not necessarily 'built' to absorb so much suffering through our little screens; there used to be enough suffering to go around in any given village. I digress; there's more to this story to unfurl.

Attribution complexity

There’s an analogy I’ve always found insightful from Roger Pielke that reads as follows:

Pielke also states:

Some may chafe at my invoking Pielke; he’s a bit divisive in climate science circles. Pielke readily recognizes that greenhouse gas emissions drive global warming and climate change. His beat is just that the way we talk about climate change as “causing” or contributing to the impact of certain weather events is flawed, at times at least.

Global warming increases the risk of some catastrophic storms, in some ways, more than others. Specifically to hurricances and tropical cyclones, warming changes the way storms form, where they make landfall, and can make them intensify more quickly, as well as driving more inland flooding. Here’s what the IPCC has to say about tropical cyclones:

The main message here is (and I’m paraphrasing), “Tropical cyclones have changed over the past four decades, and it’s because of something other than natural flux alone.” The note about the frequency of cyclones rapidly intensifying, which happened with Helene, is noteworthy. Still, there’s a lot of hedging, with words like “likely” and “(medium confidence)”. Attribution of specific weather events or even broadly observed trends to climate change is difficult to do, in the present day, with significant confidence.

That said, while I myself started with caution re: attributing Helene to global warming, as more research came out this week, I changed my mind. It now seems like Helene was (unfortunately) the 'perfect' storm. There’s a strong case the characteristics of the storm are highly illustrative of our changing climate. Exactly what we saw with Helene, namely rapid intensification and unprecedented inland flooding, are hallmark signs of a storm that wasn’t nearly as ‘possible’ even a few decades ago. So, while my personal journalistic do / don’t on extreme weather is…:

• Do emphasize that climate change is the continuous observation of changes in the likelihood and characteristics of storms like Helene over time.

• Do say that global warming makes some things, like heavier rains as a hotter atmosphere holds more water vapor, more likely (that’s just physics).

• Don’t call every instance of extreme weather a climate disaster. It wears the power of those words out (even if there are hundreds of climate disasters every year).

…In Helene’s case, the data seems pretty clear. This storm was made worse, if not possible altogether, by a warmer world.

As an aside, I do want to also hit home the point re: caution against overattribution of all extreme weather to global warming. For more on that front, read on here.

Beyond attribution: Adaptation

As (newly married!) Lana Del Rey sings in one of my fav songs of hers: "Here's the deal."

The need for 100x better preparedness and adaptation for extreme weather preceded this storm, as well as countless other devastating storms before it, like Hurricane Katrina. What Helene like so many storms before it did was illustrate how inadequately prepared for extreme weather events much of the world is. Extreme weather, whether exacerbated by global warming or not, awakens us to the need for adaptation that has always existed, sitting in the corner, waiting for us to care (and allocate resources towards it). Ironies—the universe's ever-present manner of winking at us—like the fact that one of the world's top climate and weather data centers is located in Asheville, which is also rated one of the least risky places from a “climate hazard” perspective, crystallize this.

What also comes to mind is that while attribution of specific events is often difficult, a warmer atmosphere will make things worse on the whole in the future for sure. Most of the IPCC's hedging about present-day attribution stops once they forecast out to 2050 and beyond. They're unequivocal that, say, a 2.5°C warmer world vs. the 1.2°C warmer world we live in right now will be worse. Exxon predicted that back in 1980, too:

So, what do we do? For one, Alex Laplaza and I have a dedicated piece on adaptation from last year that outlines opportunities and challenges in scaling up adaptive efforts across different sectors.

Adaptation measures may cost a lot upfront, but the damages they save can far outweigh those costs. Part of the challenge is that costs that adaptive measures can help prevent aren’t just financial, they’re often environmental (i.e., often mispriced / unpriced). The negative environmental externalities of a storm like this in addition to financial ones are too many to count. For one example, for too long, toxic coal ash has been kept in uncovered ponds, many of which likely overflowed as Helene dropped trillions of gallons of water on an old coal mining region. That coal ash will now pollute the environment.

Still, even on the economic front, there’s plenty of appreciable adaptation imperative. Helene forced a critical quartz mine to halt its output. High-purity quartz from the mine is important to the global semiconductor supply chain, which everyone in AI is all gaga about. Turns out one storm can still humble the AI gods.

Better attribution → better adaptation

In service of better adaptation, we also need and will benefit from better attribution. If we attribute every extreme weather damage to global warming willy-nilly, it actually can confuse efforts to allocate resources effectively.

For example, a widely cited statistic is that damages from storms have increased in terms of cost, even when adjusted for inflation. This is true:

That said, it’s worth distinguishing how much of the increase in storm damages is because storms are getting worse vs. because the world has much more infrastructure and many more people, much of which has been built and many of whom have moved into vulnerable areas rather than away from them. The hypothetical difference in adaptation is the one between building more sea walls vs., say, educating people on where else to consider moving.

As wrote Kate Yoder in Grist this week:

Better attribution, climate science, and models should also make use better at this.

The net-net

Here are my 3 main takeaways:

The Earth’s climate is an incredibly complex system: As a species, we’re not even great at predicting wind or rain in a given area 7-days out. What we don’t know and can’t predict well outweighs what we do know and can. It likely will for some time.

But our modeling capacities and scientific understanding is getting better. Nor does what we don’t know undercut the value of what we do, like that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, which can make storms stronger, inland flooding worse, and that better climate models and derivatives thereof are coming to market. 

There’s a growing, dare I say, desperate need for more adaptation, no matter what: Regardless of what we attribute the strength, path, and acceleration of any storm to, each storm that makes landfall, damages infrastructure, hurts people and wildlife, and disrupts ecosystems is another bold underline under the word adaptation. We needed it yesterday, twenty years ago, and now more than ever.

Full understanding of climate change in all its complexity is not a necessary catalyst to improve weather and climate models, make better flood maps, build better insurance options and better climate models to inform said insurance businesses, create more resilient infrastructure, improve reliability and decarbonize backup power generation, and fund more robust disaster relief response efforts and programs.

Adaptation should also be a simple opportunity for bipartisanship. Plus, we can afford it, especially as it saves money in the long (and short) run. So far we just choose to spend tax dollars elsewhere. The U.S. will spend close to 4x more money just to update its ‘nuclear triad’ as part of our 60-year nuclear armament to deter Russia (and now China) than the IRA has spurred in clean energy deployment and manufacturing investment.

The storms will keep coming, whether in the Global West, where they’ll be covered at length, or elsewhere, where they’ll be covered less.

JOBS

Aerosol Chemistry Research Associate or Senior Research Associate, Rainmaker

Speaking of adaptation…

Rainmaker, an early-stage company focused on climate resilience and adaptation by developing and deploying cloud seeding technology (literally making it rain more), is hiring an Aerosol Chemistry Research Associate Research (or Senior Associate) to conduct technical and complex research projects on aerosol characterization studies—Master's degree in physical sciences or engineering preferred. The role is based in El Segundo, CA. More here.

P.S., for more on the business, listen here for our podcast with the CEO, Augustus Doricko.

Bye for now,

— Nick