Climate chaos

Japan's summer of crazy weather

“The world’s weather is heading into unknown territory,” frets Shukan Gendai (Oct 13) after a summer in Japan of searing heat and “guerrilla rain.”

Japan Today,

16 October, 2012

Kyushu was hardest hit – 32 dead or missing and 200,000 evacuated in three days of July storms – but tempests once associated mainly with Japan’s south and west are spreading north and east. As just one example of what this is doing to the wildlife, see the magazine’s photo of a brown bear perched on rocks in Hokkaido’s Shiretoko peninsula. It’s so emaciated you have to study it to be sure it’s not a dog. Bears and deer in greater numbers than ever are drifting from forest habitats to outlying farms and not-so-outlying towns, even cities. Food in the forest is in short supply, and development and climate change are the culprits. No one expects things to get better any time soon.

Wind and rain assailed the archipelago this past summer and early fall as never before. Even 1988, the previous record-setter, is said to pale in comparison. Umbrellas are useless against torrential rain that rivals waterfalls and winds that, at worst, blow roofs off houses. The Meteorological Agency’s technical definition of a downpour worthy of the name is 50 mm or more precipitation per hour. In 1988 that was noted happening 173 times nationwide. In 2012 it’s 185 and counting.

“People think global warming means it gets warmer everywhere,” says Agency researcher Yoshinobu Masuda. “It’s not so. As the surface gets warmer the upper air, to compensate, gets cooler. It’s the widening temperature gap that generates atmospheric instability.”

Look for flash storms once associated exclusively with summer to continue into November, he warns.

We’ll have to learn to live with this, but it won’t be easy. In seas off Kushiro in eastern Hokkaido, fishermen find the nets they spread for salmon full of the newly-flourishing (and economically worthless) Echizen jellyfish instead. Closer to where most people live, twisters, typhoons and floods this spring and summer brought an onslaught to residents not used to such incursions. The worst effect of the typhoon that hit Tokyo in June was traffic paralysis and a healthy dose of fear. But 70 km farther north, a twister in Tsukuba, Ibaragi Prefecture, killed a junior high school student in May.

The rains and resulting landslide that derailed a train in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, on Sept 24 kept tensions high, fortunately without fatalities. September’s extraordinary heat is still fresh in the collective memory. Temperatures in Tokyo were three degrees above normal, and the rain that fell on Yokosuka was measured at 100 mm per hour. Cloudbursts on that scale were almost unheard of so far north.

What’s the prognosis? Guerrilla rain, Shukan Gendai hears from weather forecaster Yukiko Katayama, can fall just about anywhere, just about anytime.