As world warms, weather will 'get us'

Climate and weather aren’t the same things, but Heidi Cullen sees how they’ll come together as the planet warms … and the vision isn’t encouraging.

“Weather is what gets us,” says Cullen, a senior research scientist and interim CEO at the non-profit Climate Central and author of the new book, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet. “We’re going to see climate change through our weather.”

That means a greater likelihood of more Hurricane Katrinas in the future, along with an increased chance of more Russian-style heatwaves, Pakistan-style flooding and Europe 2003-style killer summers. That’s not to say climate change alone was responsible for all of these incidents, Cullen explains. But climate change ups the odds of such events and, the longer we fail to act, the greater those odds become.

“Climate is like a big orchestra,” Cullen says. “You have all these different instruments playing. But there’s a steady drumbeat of climate change in the background.”

That steady drumbeat will affect future weather patterns which, in turn, will have a significant impact on people. It was concern over that impact that drove Cullen to write her book. She was working at The Weather Channel, where she served as the network’s first on-air climate change expert, when Hurricane Katrina roared into the Gulf Coast and remembers watching the developing storm with dread.

“I felt completely helpless,” she recalls.

While global warming, to many, conjures up images of melting glaciers and ice caps, myriad other effects could have a more direct impact on people’s lives. From changes in rainfall patterns to a rising number of 100 degree F (38 degree C) days, these are the effects that could radically alter our lifestyles. Cullen wrote her book to help people better understand what changes are likely in different parts of the world and these could affect them on a more personal level.

The American Southwest, for example, is already experiencing significant drying and solidly understood climate models show that condition will steadily grow worse.

“Overlay that on population growth,” Cullen says, and “that’s how disasters are born.”

While Cullen says she isn’t aiming to be a climate activist, she adds she believes it’s her responsibility as both a weather expert and a climatologist to help people understand the issue better.

“We’re just trying to fundamentally keep people out of harms way,” she says.

With a certain amount of warming already “built in,” no matter what we do from here, one way in which to do that is to focus on adaptation strategies. That means investing in infrastructure to ensure better protection from the extreme weather events that will become more likely. For example, she says, rebuilding New Orleans’ levees back to pre-Katrina conditions isn’t good enough.

“For every dollar we spend today in infrastructure, we save $4,” Cullen says. “A lot of people point to the Dutch. They protect to the one-in-10,000-year event.”

Carbon capture and storage technologies will also likely have a role to play in our efforts to mitigate climate change, Cullen says: “We need to get rid of carbon dioxide.” But “shoot-junk-into-the-atmosphere”-type geoengineering isn’t a solution.

“If we’re really trying to reduce climate impact, that strategy doesn’t address what we need to do,” she says. “We know it would alter the jet stream. That’s really not the root of what we’re trying to help.”

Nor is denial or inaction the right response anymore.

“Climate change has so many policy implications,” Cullen says. “These are decisions we’d all be so much better off making now.”