Hurricane Helene is a humanitarian crisis – and a climate disaster.  Behind the violence of extreme weather is that of the fossil fuel industry, and Americans are suffering for it. Guardian  Rebecca Solnit 4 Oct 2024  The weather we used to have shaped the behavior of the water we used to have – how much and when it rained, how dry it got, when and how slowly the snow in the heights melted, what fell as rain and fell as snow. Climate chaos is changing all that, breaking the patterns, delivering water in torrents unprecedented in recorded history or withholding it to create epic droughts, while heat-and-drought-parched soil, grasslands and forests create ideal conditions for mega-wildfires.Water in the right time and quantity is a blessing; in the wrong ones it’s a scourge and a destroying force, as we’ve seen recently with floods around the world. In the vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, noted that his state’s farmers “know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods, back to back.” Farmers around the world are dealing with flood, drought and unseasonable weather that impacts their ability to produce food and protect soil. The rainfall from Hurricane Helene turned into a torrent on the Nolichucky River in east Tennessee that at its height was almost twice the normal flow of Niagara Falls. The water in that river and others overtopped dams and triggered fears that they might break. In western North Carolina, the French Broad River, which runs through Asheville, crested at an unprecedented level, thanks to dozens of inches of rain in the surrounding mountains draining fast into its tributaries.

Water became a violent force tearing apart buildings, streets and neighborhoods, and drowning humans and animals, while winds toppled trees across the region, the grip of their roots weakened by the rain-saturated soil. Roads, bridges, transmission lines and crucial infrastructure were swept away or smashed. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that “climate change may have caused as much as 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Furthermore, we estimate that the observed rainfall was made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming.” The sheer amount of water Helene dumped across its 500-mile path is staggering: 40tn gallons, one scientist calculated, the equivalent of pouring the entire contents of Lake Tahoe over the region, enough water to cover the entire state of North Carolina in water 3.5ft deep. Floods are not new, but the intensity and frequency of catastrophic flooding is. The climate crisis is a water crisis.....read on   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/04/hurricane-helene-humanitarian-crisis-climate-disaster

Measure urban heat and vulnerability to understand the heat risk Cities need information on which areas of the city, and which groups of the population, are most at risk. An individual’s heat vulnerability depends on their exposure and sensitivity to extreme heat, and their ability to adapt.

How heat kills....... Sustained exposure to extreme heat can overwhelm the body’s ability to regulate its core temperature. This can lead to heat exhaustion, severe dehydration and heat stroke, a form of hyperthermia. Extreme daily maximum temperatures, high overnight temperatures, high humidity and air pollution, and the prolonged duration of a heatwave all lead to higher heat risk. There is a widespread lack of awareness of the symptoms of heat stress, which can include headaches, vomiting, dizziness and low blood pressure, and which are often mistaken for (and misreported as) other health issues. Extreme heat also negatively impacts health conditions such as cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, and diabetes. If the body’s core temperature rises too high, the heart is no longer able to maintain adequate circulation, leading to unconsciousness and, ultimately, organ failureWork with expert partners to conduct a heat vulnerability assessment – particularly, city- and/ or national-level government health and meteorological departments, and universities. Health and mortality data from local NGOs can be a useful supplement if official data is lacking. This assessment may form part of a wider climate risk assessment.

Identify the most vulnerable population groups, and the local temperature threshold at which heat becomes a threat. Identify the most vulnerable population groups, and the local temperature threshold at which heat becomes a threat.The populations that are typically most vulnerable are:

• The elderly, young children, and people with underlying medical conditions, as they are more sensitive to extreme heat. This includes pregnant women and women with babies, as breastfeeding is extremely dehydrating. Buenos Aires’ heat risk plan focuses on the elderly.
• Low-income people and those living in poor quality housing, who may have less access to water, green spaces, information, and air-conditioning.
• People who live alone. New York’s Cool Neighbourhoods strategy includes the Be A Buddy NYC programme, which encourages New Yorkers to check in on at-risk neighbours.
• Outdoor workers, who have high exposure to heat and may have jobs requiring physical exertion. Ahmedabad identified outdoor workers as well as slum communities as high-risk groups.
• Marginalised groups including homeless people, migrants, refugees, women and girls, as they may have less access to and awareness of cooling options. The city of Melbourne’s heatwave response strategy includes a focus on the homeless, based on their analysis of heat risk for homeless people.

Use temperature and health data (such as mortality rates and hospital admissions) alongside qualitative research methods to determine which groups in the city are most vulnerable, why, and the temperature thresholds at which heat becomes a threat.....and much much more......read the full report       https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/How-to-adapt-your-city-to-extreme-heat?language=en_US 

Study Pinpoints Links Between Melting Arctic Ice and Summertime Extreme Weather in Europe. New research shows how last year’s warming melted ice in Greenland that increased flows of fresh, cold water into the North Atlantic, upsetting ocean currents in ways that lead to atmospheric changes. Inside Climate News Bob Berwyn March 1, 2024 The Arctic Ocean is mostly enclosed by the coldest parts of the Northern Hemisphere’s continents, ringed in by Siberia, Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, with only a small opening to the Pacific through the Bering Strait, and some narrow channels through the labyrinth of Canada’s Arctic archipelago. But east of Greenland, there’s a stretch of open water about 1,300 miles across where the Arctic can pour its icy heart out to the North Atlantic. Those flows include increasing surges of cold and fresh water from melted ice, and a new study in the journal Weather and Climate Dynamics shows how those pulses can set off a chain reaction from the ocean to the atmosphere that ends up causing summer heatwaves and droughts in Europe. The large new inflows of fresh water from melting ice are a relatively new ingredient to the North Atlantic weather cauldron, and based on measurements from the new study, a currently emerging “freshwater anomaly” will likely trigger a drought and heatwave this summer in Southern Europe, said the study’s lead author, Marilena Oltmanns, an oceanographer with the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre. She said warmth over Greenland in the summer of 2023 melted a lot of ice, sending more freshwater toward the North Atlantic. Depending on the exact path of the influx, the findings suggest that, in addition to the immediate impacts this year, it will also trigger a heatwave and drought in Northern Europe in a more delayed reaction in the next five years, she said. 

The coming extremes will probably be similar to the European heatwaves of 2018 and 2022, she added, when there were huge temperature spikes in the Scandinavian and Siberian Arctic, as well as unusual wildfires in far northern Sweden. That year, much of the Northern Hemisphere was scorched, with “22 percent of populated and agricultural areas simultaneously experiencing heat extremes between May and July,” according to a 2019 study in Nature. In 2022, persistent heat waves across Europe from May to August killed more than 60,000 people, subsequent research showed. The United Kingdom reported its first-ever 40 degree Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) reading that summer, and the European Union’s second-worst wildfire season on record burned about 3,500 square miles of land.  Meanwhile, 2022 was also Europe’s driest year on record, with 63 percent of its rivers showing below-average discharge and low flows hampering important river shipping channels as well as power production. Oltmanns said the findings will help farmers and industries and communities to plan ahead for specific weather conditions by developing more resilient agricultural methods, predicting fuel demand and preparing for wildfires. Changing effects of freshwater flows into the North Atlantic had previously been observed over decadal timescales, associated with cyclical, linked shifts of ocean currents and winds, but that was “a very low frequency signal,” she said. “We have disentangled the signals.” Now the fluctuations are more frequent and more intense, “switching between different states very rapidly,” she said, adding that the study shows how the ocean changes driven by freshwater inflows have “direct and immediate consequences on the atmospheric circulation,” and thus on subsequent weather patterns in Europe. 

North American Links? Several recent studies already show some of the complex and maybe unexpected ways the North Atlantic and Arctic changes that are documented in the new study affect North American weather and climate patterns. A 2023 paper in Nature Communications, for example, suggests that the rapid decline of spring snowpack across North America promotes the warm and dry weather pattern over Greenland that caused the melting water tracked by Oltmanns......read on    https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01032024/links-between-melting-arctic-ice-and-summertime-extreme-weather-in-europe/

How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods. BBC News 17 June 2024 Mark Poynting and Esme Stallard