Global warming is making the water-poor even poorer

By Richard A. Kerr27 April 2012 How bad will global warming get? The question has long been cast in terms of how hot the world will get. But perhaps more important to the planet’s inhabitants will be how much rising greenhouse gases crank up the water cycle. Theory and models predict that a strengthening greenhouse […]

Weather extremes, warming link stronger, study finds

By Nina Chestney25 March 2012 LONDON – Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change [pdf] said on Sunday. Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme […]

Rising sea levels imperil Florida

By Ben Strauss, bstrauss@climatecentral.org  22 March 2012 Florida is in the crosshairs of climate change. Rising seas, a population crowded along the coast, porous bedrock, and the relatively common occurrence of tropical storms put more real estate and people at risk from storm surges aggravated by sea level rise in Florida, than any other state […]

Disasters expose flaws in assumptions about globalization

By Alistair Gray19 March 2012 Just days after a powerful offshore earthquake sent a wall of seawater surging towards Japan’s north-eastern coastline, devastating the region, companies with operations thousands of miles away were left grappling with shortages of critical components. A year ago this week, as rolling blackouts forced parts plants throughout the world’s third-largest […]

North Carolina lifeline built on eroding sands ‘is totally a lost cause’

By CORNELIA DEAN5 March 2012 RODANTHE, N.C. — Last August, when Hurricane Irene sliced across the Outer Banks, it cut Highway 12, Hatteras Island’s lifeline, in two places. Engineers rushed to repair the damage, filling and repaving a washed-out stretch of roadway here and building a bridge over a newly formed inlet a few miles […]

Insurers confirm growing risks of climate change – ‘The trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear’

Stakeholders from the insurance industry met with members of the U.S. Senate to acknowledge the role global warming plays in extreme weather-related losses, and to issue a call for action. By Pat Speer, Insurance Networking News2 March 2012 The politics of global warming have typically involved much debate as to the role climate change plays […]

Rising tide of sea-level warnings drowned out by wave of shoreline development

By Tom Horton January 2012 Sea-level around the Chesapeake Bay is rising. Larger-than-ever storm surges are a certainty. Land is sinking further. The time has come to plan an orderly human retreat from more development along the watershed’s low-lying edges. The science that backs this advice gets drowned out when developers wave big money at […]

As climate changes, ‘100-year floods’ may happen every three to 20 years

By Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office13 February 2012 Last August, Hurricane Irene spun through the Caribbean and parts of the eastern United States, leaving widespread wreckage in its wake. The Category 3 storm whipped up water levels, generating storm surges that swept over seawalls and flooded seaside and inland communities. Many hurricane analysts suggested, based […]

Despite denial, even oil companies are planning for inevitable climate change

By Sami Grover, Business / Corporate Responsibility24 January 2012 This is ironic. Having bank rolled climate denial for years, it seems many oil companies and utilities are planning for the inevitability of man-made climate change. Marc Gunther has a piece on the coming shift to climate preparedness that is well worth reading: Utilities, the oil […]

Graph of the Day: Distribution of Temperature Anomalies for 11-year periods, 1951-2010

Abstract: The “climate dice” describing the chance of an unusually warm or cool season, relative to the climatology of 1951-1980, have progressively become more “loaded” during the past 30 years, coincident with increased global warming. The most dramatic and important change of the climate dice is the appearance of a new category of extreme climate […]

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