We have a pretty good idea of what climate change will do to the landscape: melt it, flood it, tear it up in freak superstorms, turn it into desert. But what will climate change do to us—to our bodies and minds?
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.
April was the seventh month in a row that broke global temperature records, Nasa figures show. Last month smashed the previous record for April by the largest margin ever, the data show. That makes it three months in a row that the monthly record was broken by the largest margin ever.
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.
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.'”
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.
Five of the Solomon Islands have submerged underwater and six more have experienced a dramatic reduction in shoreline due to man-made climate change, according to a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”