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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/12/global-weirding-climate-whiplash-hitting-worlds-biggest-cities-study-reveals>
"Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing
deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis
intensifies, a report has revealed.
Dozens more cities, including Lucknow, Madrid and Riyadh have suffered a
climate “flip” in the last 20 years, switching from dry to wet extremes, or
vice versa. The report analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected
ones, and found that 95% of them showed a distinct trend towards wetter or
drier weather.
The changing climate of cities can hit citizens with worsened floods and
droughts, destroy access to clean water, sanitation and food, displace
communities and spread disease. Cities where the water infrastructure is
already poor, such as Karachi and Khartoum, suffer the most.
Cities across the world are affected but the data shows some regional trends,
with drying hitting Europe, the already-parched Arabian peninsula and much of
the US, while cities in south and south-east Asia are experiencing bigger
downpours.
The analysis illustrates the climate chaos being brought to urban areas by
human-caused global heating. Too little or too much water is the cause of 90%
of climate disasters. More than 4.4 billion people live in cities and the
climate crisis was already known to be supercharging individual extreme weather
disasters across the planet.
Rising temperatures, driven by fossil fuel pollution, can exacerbate both
floods and droughts because warmer air can take up more water vapour. This
means the air can suck more water from the ground during hot, dry periods but
also release more intense downpours when the rains come.
“Our study shows that climate change is dramatically different around the
world,” said Prof Katerina Michaelides, at the University of Bristol, UK. Her
co-author, Prof Michael Singer at Cardiff University, described the pattern as
“global weirding”.
“Most places we looked at are changing in some way, but in ways that are not
always predictable,” Singer said. “And given that we’re looking at the world’s
largest cities, there are really significant numbers of people involved.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
