Last week’s bad weather was no secret.
State and county officials were geared up, emergency plans at the ready as the storms loomed. Still, when the winds, rain and cold weather rode in on a Kona low, Hawaii had to sit up and take notice.
If you were not looking out the window, Oahu Civil Defense was there to help.
“At 9:48 p.m., Oahu Dept. of Emergency Management reported ongoing significant FLASH FLOODING, esp. in the urban areas of Honolulu. Several vehicle rescues, water evacuation requests, inundated homes, road closures,” it was reported.
It was a record-breaking rain. The federal weather folks described last Monday as Honolulu’s “second-wettest day on record, dropping 7.92 inches, the wettest December day on record and second-wettest day observed in any month.”
The big, new note was the addition of “kona low” to our vocabulary as we can now fume over those darn kona lows barging in.
For those really in the know, like Dr. Charles “Chip” Fletcher, associate dean at the University of Hawaii’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, the weather was the latest in a long list of markers warning about what has happened to our global weather systems.
Fletcher dove into social media to pull up the alert, easily making some dense science understandable.
“Hawaii, it may look like rain. But it’s actually a compound event of sea level rise, king tide, and La Niña extreme rain,” Fletcher tweeted last week.
It is another aspect of global warming.
“We know that warmer air triggers a water cycle on steroids — stronger storms, more rain, stronger winds, and lower atmospheric pressure allows the ocean surface to swell above the predicted tide,” he explained in an interview.
Fletcher spelled out the details, saying “over the (last) weekend we had high tide ocean levels 6-8 inches above predicted. The groundwater table responds to the tides by rising as well. Onshore winds from the Kona low pushed water onto the shoreline along with high waves.”
Economics used to be called the “dismal science” because of predictions that population would always grow faster than food, dooming mankind to unending poverty and hardship.
Today climatology studying greenhouse gases and the changing climate make up our new “dismal science.”
Indeed, the weather of last week, leads to this prediction from Fletcher.
“Although this was a ‘compound event’ consisting of several coalescing processes, each on their own, and together, are already growing in intensity and frequency so the chances of seeing these events again is increasing — welcome to the future,” he said.
Earlier, in a piece written for The Hill, a U.S. political website, Fletcher wrote that even with new international pledges to fight global warming, the future is scary.
“Let’s set the record straight. Under current climate policy pledges, children born in 2020 will experience a two- to sevenfold increase in extreme events, particularly heat, compared with people born in 1960.”
Translating into Hawaii terms, Fletcher’s forecast serves as a grim reality for coming generations.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com
