Region's climate future is warm, wet
New report predicts more weather misery
WASHINGTON – The climate is warming both nationwide and in Western New York, and despite recent government actions, there's probably more warmth – and more weather misery – yet to come.
That's the bottom line message for the Buffalo area in the federal government's latest National Climate Assessment, which provides not only an in-depth look at what climate change means nationally, but also all the way down to the county level.
"We're experiencing it: Climate change is here," said Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, at an event unveiling the climate assessment last month. "It's fueling wildfires and floods and drought and extreme heat and storms. It's made its way into our lives, as predicted, which is sobering."
Climate change is also a vast and complicated topic, and the climate assessment – mandated by Congress to be completed every four years or so – is the federal government's most comprehensive eff ort to explain it.
The assessment includes a complex website that breaks down the climate picture by region and by topic, along with an interactive atlas that allows Americans to drill down to the county level to gauge the potential impact.
A review of the assessment along with the atlas draws a picture of a Buffalo area that's grown warmer and wetter, and that's likely to become more so in the future. In fact, the climate assessment predicts that Erie County and other parts of the Northeast and Midwest will likely see temperatures rising above the national increase, though not to the uncomfortable levels expected in the South and West.
Here's an in-depth look, then, at what the National Climate Assessment says has happened in the region, along with what could happen:
The change we've seen
In Buffalo, of course, mammoth lake-effect storms often come roaring off Lake Erie in the winter, dumping huge amounts of snow on the region. Meanwhile, New York City and other parts of the Northeast are more prone to suffering from the still-powerful remnants of tropical storms.
But throughout the Northeast, the assessment found a consistent increase in both precipitation and damaging storms.
"Precipitation in the Northeast has increased in all seasons, and extreme precipitation events (defined as events with the top 1% of daily precipitation accumulations) have increased by about 60% in the region – the largest increase in the U.S.," the report said.
In Buffalo, those extreme precipitation events include the November and December snowstorms last year, which could be part of a long-term trend. Air and water temperatures over the Great Lakes have been warming since 1980, the report said. And those warmer temperatures actually fuel lake-effect snow, since they mean that Lake Erie remains unfrozen – and vulnerable to evaporation – for longer in many winters than it did decades ago.
Throughout the Great Lakes region, "observed changes in hydrology include increases in the variability of lake levels, evaporation and water temperatures, along with more intense precipitation, including lake-effect snow, and shorter duration of snow and ice cover," the climate assessment said.
That's not the only change scientists have noted throughout the Great Lakes. Algal blooms have now appeared in all five lakes, especially in western Lake Erie, where a 2014 event contaminated the water supply in Toledo, Ohio. What's more, the report predicts those algal blooms will increase in frequency through midcentury.
A warmer Buffalo
The climate scientists who wrote the report acknowledge that it's easier to review what's already happened to the climate than it is to predict what happens next.
What they know is this: The average annual temperature in the 48 contiguous states has warmed by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970, compared with a 1.7 degree increase worldwide. But the warming trend started nearly a century earlier as industry and then, in the early 1900s, autos started spewing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That carbon dioxide creates a "greenhouse effect" that's expected to grow only hotter unless carbon emissions are radically trimmed in the coming decades.
What they don't know is how warm the planet will get – which, they say, depends on future carbon emissions.
Given that uncertainty, authors of the climate assessment reviewed what will happen if the planet warms at three different levels – which, this being Buffalo, we'll call mild, medium and hot. The report projects temperatures compared to the preindustrial average and precipitation to the 1991-2020 averages.
And under any of those three scenarios, they said, Erie County will grow warmer faster than the world around it. Under the mild scenario, the world would grow 3.6 degrees warmer by the end of the century than it was before 1900, but Erie County's average annual temperature would rise 4 degrees. Under the medium scenario, the average annual temperature worldwide would jump 5.4 degrees while increasing 7 degrees locally. And under the hot scenario, a worldwide 7.2 degree increase in temperatures would mean an 8 degree rise in Erie County.
But Erie County is no outlier. The climate assessment predicts that the Northeast and Midwest will see larger temperature increases overall than the South and West, even though those already warm areas will face more dangers from their comparatively small heat increases.
Why are the northern states warming faster than their southern counterparts? Scientists attribute it largely to changes in the jet stream and the warming North Atlantic, and stress that the warming isn't consistent across the seasons.
"Winter is warming nearly twice as fast as summer in many northern states," the climate assessment noted.
And if that trend continues, Buffalo's weather could change radically. Depending on whether the mild, medium or hot scenario unfolds, the number of winter days below freezing is expected to decrease by somewhere between 25 and 56 days. Meantime, again depending on the how much the climate is warming worldwide, the number of Erie County summer days with temperatures of more than 95 degrees is expected to increase by either two, seven or 15.
A wetter Buffalo
Climate scientists say that in regions with plentiful surface water – like the Great Lakes – more warmth means more wetness. And that's just what Erie County can expect, too, the report said.
Depending on how warm the planet gets, Erie County can expect an annual increase of between 5% and 7% in precipitation compared to what it saw on average during the 1991-2020 time frame.
More importantly, though, storms are expected to get more intense. Depending again on whether temperature changes are mild, medium or hot, the number of extreme precipitation events in Erie County is expected to increase by somewhere between 21% and 49%.
The report does not break down how many of those storms would occur in winter, in the form of lake-effect snow. But scientists have long predicted increases in lake-effect snow under mild climate change scenarios, with late-effect rain resulting if the climate warms even more.
Defining major precipitation events as days in the top 1% of historic precipitation events, the report also looks at big storms another way, too. Depending on how much the climate warms, the amount of precipitation on Erie County's wettest day of the year is expected to increase between 8% and 15%.
Buffalo won't be alone in getting wet, though.
"Recent increases in the frequency, severity and amount of extreme precipitation are expected to continue across the U.S. even under lower global warming levels," Allison Crimmins, director of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, said in the report.
Crimmins made clear, though, that scientists are by no means certain exactly how the climate will change. While the Biden administration touted its legislative moves that aim to discourage fossil fuel use, climate change is a global phenomenon, and there has been no effective global consensus on how to cut carbon emissions.
Yet the future depends on that, Crimmins said.
"The risk of exceeding a particular global warming level depends on future emissions," she said. "Since future emissions can change, these projections are conditional: when or if the world reaches a particular level of warming is largely dependent on human choices."