Climate Change Means Much More Extreme Temperature

The CBO’s report on the impact of climate change in the United States (PDF) is interesting reading, but nothing all that earth-shattering. It looks like the impact would probably be pretty bad, but possibly much worse than that, and the uncertainty around the projections is not a cause for optimism. This chart, showing how relatively small average shifts can lead to drastically increased odds of “extreme” events was, I thought, interesting:

One thing this brings to mind is that unusual weather is often problematic simply because it’s unusual. For example, an 8-inch snowfall is not a cataclysm. Except its impact actually is catastrophic when it happens in Washington, DC. Boston and other cities in New England experience that kind of snow volume often enough that they’ve laid the groundwork to do a good job of removing 8 inches worth of snow expeditiously. But in the Washington area it’s so rare that DC and other municipalities in the region aren’t prepared and traffic can be paralyzed for days. Similarly, when I was in Italy in the summer of 2003 whether that was unusually hot for Rome but wouldn’t have been all that abnormal in DC led to a lot of deaths. Not nearly as many people had air conditioning over there, and the government didn’t have really good plans in place to help vulnerable citizens deal with extreme heat.