A report released this week by Environment Missouri suggests climate change could make extreme weather events, such as droughts and storms, more common and possibly more severe.
The new report, “In the Path of the Storm: Global Warming, Extreme Weather, and the Impacts of Weather-Related Disasters in the United States,’’ examines county-level weather-related disaster declaration data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for 2006 through 2011.
The report does not cite any information about the possibility of more tornadoes or the probability of more severe ones, such as the EF-5 tornado that struck Joplin on May 22. The research into climate change and tornadoes is inconclusive, said Ted Mathys, state advocate for Environment Missouri.
Mathys, in a teleconference on Thursday, said 2011 was a particularly bad year for extreme weather in Missouri and across the country.
“Nearly all of Missouri’s 6 million residents have lived through extreme weather in recent years, harming our economy and our public safety,” Mathys said. “Given that global warming will likely fuel even more extreme weather, we need to cut dangerous carbon pollution now.”
The report urges the federal government to move ahead with addressing climate change by limiting emissions of carbon dioxide from vehicles and coal-fired power plants, the largest single source of the carbon pollution.
Mathys said all 115 Missouri counties have been affected by at least one weather-related disaster since 2006. Among the hardest hit in Southwest Missouri has been Webster County, one of only 10 counties in the U.S. that has been struck by 10 weather disasters since 2006.
The public can track recent weather disasters by county, using an interactive online map at www.EnviromentMissouri.org. The portion of the map for Jasper County does not reflect the Joplin tornado since it cannot be tied to climate change.
“We know that extreme weather is happening,” Mathys said. “We know that it is causing very severe problems for every county in Missouri, and we know that global warming increases the likelihood that we’ll see even more extreme weather in the future.”
The extreme flooding of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in 2011, which caused the inundation of 200 square miles of farmland in Missouri, is one of the extreme weather events highlighted in the report.
The report details the latest science on the projected influence of climate change on rain, snow, heat, drought, wildfires, hurricanes and coastal storms.
The report states that research shows the U.S. has experienced an increase in heavy precipitation events, with the rainiest 1 percent of all storms delivering 20 percent more rain on average at the end of the 20th century than at the beginning.
The trend toward extreme precipitation is projected to continue in a warming world, while higher temperatures and drier summers will likely increase the risk of drought for certain parts of the country.
Climate change and tornadoes
While the intergovernmental panel on climate change recently concluded that it is “virtually certain” that hot days will become hotter and “likely” that extreme precipitation events will continue to increase worldwide, it said there is little scientific consensus about the impact of global warming on events such as tornadoes.
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