Oceans are absorbing heat equal to 5 Hiroshima bombs every second and that's helping power massive storms
- California's extreme weather has the fingerprints of the climate crisis all over it, scientists say.
- Record-breaking ocean temperatures in 2022 caused the air to hold more moisture, which fuels storms.
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"New ride at the boardwalk."
That was the tweet from Dustin Mulvaney, a resident of Santa Cruz, California. His post included a picture of a whirlpool where a river empties into Monterey Bay.
Mulvaney is an environmental studies professor at San José State University and told Insider that he's never seen the river so high in the 22 years he's lived there.
The photo Mulvaney shared was just one of countless images documenting the damage California has endured over a couple weeks. First came a bomb cyclone with its whipping winds and high swells that destroyed piers jutting into Monterey Bay. Then a series of atmospheric rivers inundated the region with heavy rainfall that poured down the Santa Cruz Mountains and overflowed rivers.
The pattern has the fingerprints of the climate crisis all over it.
Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Tuesday that the crisis is creating more intense, extreme events that often set off "cascading hazards" like intense drought, followed by devastating wildfires, followed by dangerous flooding and mudslides.
In the last two years, Santa Cruz experienced prolonged drought and a major wildfire in 2020 that burned tens of thousands of acres. Now it's among the hardest hit areas in California, where storms brought more water in a week than the state has received in months. At least 17 people have died, including one in Santa Cruz, Gov. Gavin Newsom said while surveying the damage in the county. Nearly 90,000 residents don't have power.
It could be months before the full extent of the damage is tallied up. But these disasters are becoming more expensive. NOAA climate scientists reported there were 18 weather and climate disasters in the US last year totalling $165 billion in damages — the third most costly on record behind 2017 and 2005.
So how exactly does the climate crisis affect the events in California? The world's oceans are getting hotter because they trap more than 90% of the heat from all those greenhouse gas emissions humans create. As a result, the air also gets warmer and holds more moisture. That feeds more water into the atmospheric river flowing in the sky over the West Coast, said John Abraham, a thermal scientist at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
Abraham coauthored a study by two dozen scientists that found ocean temperatures in 2022 were the hottest on record.
"The amount of heat going into the ocean is the equivalent to the energy of five Hiroshima bombs being detonated every second of every day for the entire year," Abraham told Insider. "It's a shit ton of heat."
Mulvaney is aware of these dynamics, yet he doesn't want to flee California, in part because the state's government is investing in climate resiliency. He cited enhanced levee systems to help control flooding and projects that reduce wildfire risks.
"That's the one silver lining," he said.