By Joel Achenbach, December 31, 2018<\/p>\n
Just off the top of his head, climate scientist Kevin Trenberth can recount many of the weather disasters that hit the planet in 2018. Record rainfall and flooding in Japan, followed by a heat wave that sent tens of thousands of people to the hospital. Astonishing temperature records set across the planet, including sweltering weather above the Arctic Circle. Historic, lethal wildfires in Greece, Sweden and California<\/a>, terrible flooding in India, a super typhoon with 165-mph winds in the Philippines, and two record-setting hurricanes that slammed the Southeast United States.<\/p>\n \u201cClimate change is adding to what\u2019s going on naturally, and it\u2019s that extra stress that causes things to break,\u201d said Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. \u201cIt takes the experience well outside anything that\u2019s been experienced before. It crosses thresholds. As a result, things break, people die, and things burn.\u201d<\/p>\n There is no single metric for measuring extreme weather globally and comparing 2018 with previous years. The American Meteorological Society puts out an annual report on extreme weather, but it just published the 2017 results<\/a> and won\u2019t issue its report on 2018 until late next year.<\/p>\n But it was definitely a hot and perilous year<\/a>. Perhaps most striking were the temperature extremes. It was not the hottest year on record in terms of overall global temperature \u2014 the three previous years were slightly warmer \u2014 but many places around the planet set high-temperature records.<\/p>\n Africa may have endured the hottest temperature ever reliably measured<\/a>since record-keeping began: 124.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the Sahara Desert city of Ouargla, Algeria, on July 5.<\/p>\n That same day, temperatures may have reached 90 degrees F. on the coast of the Arctic Ocean in northern Siberia. And in the Middle East, the low<\/i> temperature of the day in Quriyat, Oman, on June 28 was 109 degrees F.<\/p>\n Among the many striking events of 2018 was the late intensification of Hurricane Michael<\/a> in early October in the Gulf of Mexico. Normally, when a hurricane moves north in the gulf, it weakens somewhat. But Michael exploded from a tropical depression into a major hurricane with startling speed and then strengthened all the way to landfall, when it was nearly a Category 5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind-speed scale. After shredding Panama City<\/a> and Tyndall Air Force Base<\/a> and destroying the town of Mexico Beach, Fla., with a 16-foot storm surge<\/a>, the storm remained a full-blown hurricane deep into Georgia.<\/p>\n A study from the University of Alaska shows that between 2007 and 2016, roughly 300 football fields worth of land were lost to erosion at Drew Point.<\/span>