2021 was a deadly, extreme weather year for US as carbon emissions soared

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Three different reports released Monday, though not directly connected, paint a picture of a U.S. in 2021 struggling with global warming and its efforts to curb it.

A report from the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm, on Monday said that in 2021 America’s emissions of heat-trapping gas rebounded from the first year of the pandemic at a faster rate than the economy as a whole, making it harder to reach the country’s pledge to the world to cut emissions in half compared to 2005 by 2030.

Scientists have long said human-caused climate change makes extreme weather nastier and more frequent, documenting numerous links to wild and deadly weather events. They say hotter air and oceans and melting sea ice alter the jet stream which brings and stalls storm fronts, makes hurricanes wetter and stronger, while worsening western droughts and wildfires.

Last year, billion dollar weather disasters were more than twice as deadly as in 2020, when those extremes killed 262 people. The last deadlier year was 2011. Hurricane Maria in 2017 killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico, which isn’t part of the contiguous United States. The last five years have cost $742 billion in 86 separate billion-dollar weather disasters, an average of more than 17 a year, a new record. That’s nearly $100 billion more than the combined total of all the billion-dollar disasters from 1980 to 2004, adjusted for inflation and far more the three billion-dollar disasters a year that the nation averaged in the 1980s.

Last month was the hottest December on record for the contiguous United States, averaging 39.3 degrees , which is 6.7 degrees above the 20th century average.Experts expected U.S. greenhouse emissions to increase from the steep 2020 pandemic dive, but how big it jumped worried them. “This is an example of how we’ve been riding on cheap natural gas to drive coal’s decline over the last 15 years,” Larsen said.

 

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