Global Warming Will Bring More

US Lightning Strikes
by Becky Oskin, Senior Writer | November 13, 2014 02:00pm ET

A 50 percent increase in the number of lightning strikes within the United States can be
expected by 2100 if temperatures continue to rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, a
new study claims.
Researchers found a 12 percent increase in lightning activity for every 1.8 degrees
Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) of warming in the atmosphere, according to the study,
published today (Nov. 13) in the journal Science. Without emissions cuts, scientists
expect this century to end with global temperatures that are about 7 F (4 C) higher than
current global temps.
Because lightning often triggers wildfires, the onslaught could mean more fire damage
in the future, the study authors said.
"This is yet another noticeable change to climate and weather in the U.S. if we stay on
our current [emissions] trajectory," said lead study author David Romps, an atmospheric
scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's certainly reasonable that a 50
percent increase will lead to an increase in wildfires." About 25 million lightning flashes
are recorded yearly in the United States.

The study's biggest drawback is that the results can't forecast when or where lightning
activity will intensify.
"At this point, we don't know where the increase will take place, or when it will take
place," Romps said. Figuring this out would require a more detailed analysis of the data,
he said.
Romps and his co-authors aren't the first to forecast new weather risks that will come
with climate change. Earlier studies also warned of more lightning activity, in part
because storms may become more violent and powerful as the atmosphere warms.
In every case including Romps' new study the set of tools the researchers forecast
future lightning patterns by first looking for factors that control the timing and location of
lightning in the present day. Then, with help from climate models, the teams estimated
how these factors would change as global warming altered climate and weather.
Romps and his colleagues discovered a new combination of two factors that they say
predicts 77 percent of the geographic and time patterns seen in U.S. lightning strikes.
The first factor was precipitation, which relates to how much water vapor is available to
fuel growing storms. The second factor was what storm experts call CAPE, or
convective available potential energy, which is a measure of the atmosphere's potential
for creating towering clouds.
The researchers were surprised by how well these factors predicted current lightning
strikes, Romps said. "This success gave us confidence to say this is a metric for what
lightning would be doing in the future," he told Live Science.
The team calculated the changes in yearly precipitation and CAPE that are expected to
happen with global warming using 11 climate models, all of which assume there are no
major cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. The average of all the models resulted in a 50
percent increase in lightning activity by 2100.
That means for every two lightning strikes in 2000, there will be three lightning strikes in
2100, Romps said.
One drawback of the researchers' approach is that the factors that control lightning
activity today, such as CAPE, may have different roles in storms in the future precisely
because the climate will change. "Their approach does a reasonable job of reproducing
current patterns and time variations of lightning in the U.S.," said Anthony Del Genio, a
research physical scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York,

who was not involved in the study. "The question is whether something that works in the
current climate is also applicable to a climate change."
It's possible that the country's lightning-prone regions could become less hospitable to
storms in future decades, while other areas could see an uptick in thunderstorms.
Climate studies disagree on whether storms will become more powerful but less
frequent, or if the United States will be pounded by storm after severe storm. The
Southeast is most prone to lightning in today's climate.
"The bottom line is that this is a plausible metric to propose for lightning, but it remains
to be seen whether it gives realistic projections for the future," Del Genio said. "Other
proposed metrics are equally likely to do a good job."
Follow Becky Oskin @beckyoskin. Follow Live
Science @livescience,Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science

Climate change
Of warming and warnings
The most comprehensive climate report yet issues its shots across the bow

Nov 3rd 2014 | Science and technology

SCIENCE has spoken, said Ban Ki-Moon, the UNs secretary general. Time is not on our side.
Leaders must act. He was reacting to the latest assessment of the state of the global climate by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of scientists who advise governments.
Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC's chairman, agreed. We have little time before the window of
opportunity to stay within 2C of warming closes, he said. (Governments have promised not to let
global temperatures rise by more than that amount compared with pre-industrial levels.) Bill
McKibben, an American climate campaigner, went for broke, calling the report just short of
announcing that climate change will produce a zombie apocalypse, plus random beheadings, plus
Ebola.
The assessment, it should be said, is sobering. But it does not justify alarmism.
The IPCCs overview is its fifth since 1990. Things have moved on since the previous one, in 2007.
Scientists have become ever more certain that human activity is to blame for climate change: about
95% certain, in fact (the first report said climate change was as likely as not a product of natural
variation). The report spells out the evidence that the climate is indeed changing. Average land and

sea-surface temperatures rose by 0.85C in 1880-2012; sea levels rose by 3.2mm a year in 19932010, twice as fast as in 1901-2010; the acidity of the oceans surface has risen by 26% since the
start of the industrial revolution.
At the moment, the impact of all this change can be seen mostly on natural systems. Arctic sea ice,
for example, is shrinking by around 4% a decade, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are
losing mass. Marine species are shifting their ranges, heading toward the poles to find cooler waters.
In contrast, the impact on human welfare has so far been modest. The report calls the effect on
health relatively small [and] not well-quantified. It expresses low confidence in the idea that the
frequency and sizes of floods have been affected by climate changethough that is partly because
the records are poor. True, it says, climate change in the form of heat and drought may have
reduced yields of maize and wheat. But the effect on rice and soyabeans, the worlds other staple
crops, has not been so bad. Although humans are damaging the climate, it is less clear that climate
change is so far damaging humans that much.
If climate change is an emergency, then it is not of the kind that can be quickly reversed. Rather, the
report says, actions taken now will have little impact for decades, mainly because the climate has
exceptionally long response times. The Earth now has what is known in the parlance as a stock
problem, not a flow problem. The flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere can be adjusted,
but the stock of them already accumulated means that the expected rise in surface temperatures
between 2016 and 2035 is roughly the same in a range of projections for how things might now go.
Claims that the report is all doom and gloom therefore refer to the middle of the century and later.
Then, the IPCC suggests, there could be severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts. Inevitably,
though, forecasts that far ahead come with significant qualifications. The size of the population, for
example, makes a big difference to carbon emissions and climate change. But the difference
between the UNs highest and lowest projections for 2050 is 2.5 billion people. The climate models
themselves are a work in constant progress. Taken in sum, this latest assessment is a stern warning,
but it is not yet a promise of disaster.