Your chance of being struck by lightning is climbing.
"With warming, thunderstorms become more explosive," says University of California Berkeley climate scientist David Romps.
He and his colleagues studied 11 climate models to arrive at their calculations, which they published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The logic is simple. More
warmth equals more water vapor in the air, which is the fuel for
thunderstorms. That equals more lightning and more of it zapping the
ground. And people standing on it.
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The current odds of
becoming a human lightning rod in one's lifetime come in at around 1 in
12,000, the National Weather Service roughly estimates. If Romps and his
colleague are right, those odds would slim to 1 in 8,000 by the year
2100.
Certainly, many people are satisfied to live with that level of personal risk. But Romps offers for consideration that lightning strikes also spark half of all wildfires. And fires caused by lightning are harder to put out, he says.
While working up the
long-term predictions, Romps and his colleagues came upon a useful way
of predicting the frequency of lightning strikes in the here and now.
They found they could
determine fluctuations in that frequency if they knew the amount of
precipitation falling and the speed and occurrence of "convective
clouds" rising high into the atmosphere.
Then they studied the 11 models
on projected global temperature increases to predict how much these two
factors should surge in the distant future, resulting in more lightning
strikes if carbon dioxide emissions continue on their current path.
cnn.