A group of researchers says the average climate in the 21st century could be what we would consider “extreme” today.
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa assistant earth science professor Sloan Coats was an author for the research group, which modeled the effects of climate change on regions of the world.
The model is known as single model initial-condition large ensembles (SMILE), and predicts the future of climate change on a supercomputer.
The team analyzed a "high-emission scenario." In that scenario, geographic regions experiencing years of drought will continue to be dry. Their work was published in Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.
"Drought" by definition is an abnormal period of dryness, but parts of the world like California have been in a drought for years.
“When we talk about being in a drought, the presumption is that eventually the drought will end, and conditions will return to normal,” said Samantha Stevenson, lead author of the study and assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara.
If humans continue to release large quantities of greenhouse gas, what is currently considered abnormal climate conditions will become the new norm. Some scientists believe certain regions will enter a permanent drought or rainy season due to climate change.
Despite this, Coats says he is hopeful because hydroclimate could change if humans made changes to greenhouse gas emissions.
"So we’ve made some assumptions about what future emission looks like, but that assumption is not guaranteed. It can look very different from that. We do have time as human beings to change our behavior and thus to change the outcome of the climate system," Coats tells HPR.
Predictions for Hawaiʻi’s climate could not be made, as mountain ridges and diversity in weather patterns make local forecasts difficult.
