Climate Change and Extreme Weather
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12 Months of Record Warming
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), April 2016 was the 12th consecutive month to break previous heat records, breaking the 1901-2000 long-term average by a record amount.
Our Brains Weren’t Meant to Deal with Climate Change
Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantam takes you on vacation with him to Alaska. You’ll hike on top of a glacier, drink from a cool stream, and talk with fellow tourists from around the world. But the trip comes with an upsetting observation: Glaciers in Alaska are retreating. The Mendenhall glacier, visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year, has receded more than a mile and a half in the last half century.
A Climate Exodus In Africa And Middle East
Stocktrek Images Via Getty Images
Stocktrek Images Via Getty Images
“Scorching temperatures brought on by climate change could leave large swaths of the Middle East and North Africa uninhabitable by the middle of this century, a new study predicts.
Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and The Cyprus Institute in Nicosia crunched the numbers and found that this area, a ‘climate change hotspot ‘where days of extreme heat have doubled since 1970, could soon be plagued by weather so brutal that it triggers a ‘climate exodus.'”
These Farmers Are Outsmarting Climate Change
Read the full article online at http://www.takepart.com “Santa Cruz del Quiché, GUATEMALA—For many, the term “climate change” brings to mind the image of a polar bear on a shrinking sheet of ice somewhere far off in the Arctic. Consider another image: A tired farmer looks out fearfully over a craggy field and wonders how he’ll grow […]
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry
Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.
No Industry is Profitable When Including the Environmental Costs
“The truth is that our current system allows pretty much every corporation to externalize both environmental and social costs. In this article, we won’t even be touching on social costs. If you don’t know what cost externalization is, you can imagine it as making someone else pay part or all of your costs. For example, BP externalized the environmental costs of the Deepwater Horizon disaster by consuming all of the profits but making the government pay for anything beyond the most shoddy and superficial attempts at stopping the crisis.
GAME OVER for Climate Change
“Shigeru Miyamoto from Nintendo once said: ‘For those who don’t play video games, video games are irrelevant. They think all video games must be too difficult.’
I say, same goes for fighting climate change. Life as we know it is about to end. Quite literally!
Nowadays, everyone is busy in their own bubbles, whether it is sustaining a living, building a career or raising kids. We don’t often look around to check what is happening around us. Even if we do notice major issues such as poverty, pollution, climate change, natural disasters, we immediately think, ‘this is out of my league, there is no way I could solve such issues, I prefer to stay in my bubble.’
But what if these major issues will start affecting your bubble? What if you can still move on with your same routine, same lifestyle and still help in solving one of these looming and world-crushing dangers?”
March: Another Hottest Month
“NASA’s March temperature data was released Friday, showing that it was the planet’s second-most unusually mild month on record, only somewhat cooler than February 2016.
The NASA data shows the monthly global average temperature was 1.28 degrees Celsius, or 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, above the 20th century average. According to NASA, six straight months from 2015 into 2016 have had a temperature anomaly of at least 1 degree Celsius. That had not happened in any month prior to this record warm stretch.”
Climate Shift Coming Within Decades, Not Centuries
“The nations of the world agreed years ago to try to limit global warming to a level they hoped would prove somewhat tolerable. But leading climate scientists warned on Tuesday that permitting a warming of that magnitude would actually be quite dangerous.
The likely consequences would include killer storms stronger than any in modern times, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise of the sea sufficient to begin drowning the world’s coastal cities before the end of this century, the scientists declared.”
Record annual increase of carbon dioxide
“The annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii jumped by 3.05 parts per million during 2015, the largest year-to-year increase in 56 years of research.
In another first, 2015 was the fourth consecutive year that CO2 grew more than 2 ppm, said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.
‘Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years,’ Tans said. ‘It’s explosive compared to natural processes.'”
