‘Canary in the coal mine’: Living beyond the levees in Louisiana – ‘Leeville is washing away’ as sea level rises

By Rick Jervis 23 February 2013 LEEVILLE, Louisiana (USA Today) – At the 85th Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, an independent Louisiana-shot film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, will be up for four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, for its fictional account of a desolate band of folks living beyond the levees. Nearly […]

Australia re-rated on international reinsurance markets after another summer of flooding and extreme weather – Costs soar for reinsurers: ‘Insurers must rate to risk. If they don’t, they have a real difficulty in terms of solvency.’

By Peter Hannam, Carbon economy editor18 February 2013 (Sydney Morning Herald) – Australia has been re-rated on international reinsurance markets after another summer of flooding and extreme weather raised the country’s peril profile, said Insurance Council of Australia chief executive Rob Whelan. As a result of the re-rating, Australian insurers have to pay more for […]

Filipino super-typhoon an ominous warning of climate change impact – ‘The devastation was worse than anything I have ever seen’

By Simon Tisdall17 February 2013 (guardian.co.uk) – When super-typhoon Bopha struck without warning before dawn, flattening the walls of their home, Maria Amparo Jenobiagon, her two daughters and her grandchildren ran for their lives. The storm on 4 December was the worst ever to hit the southern Philippines: torrential rain turned New Bataan’s river into […]

Vanishing homeland of Kiribati leaves people with nowhere to go – ‘Climate change is the greatest moral challenge of the 21st century’

By Linda Uan12 February 2013 (WA Today) – On an average day in Kiribati we can look out across our calm and peaceful lagoons and see people fishing and going about their daily business and everything is at it has been for many generations. But this is deceptive. We now know that we are being […]

Krugman: The Ignorance Caucus

By PAUL KRUGMAN10 February 2013 (The New York Times) – Last week Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, gave what his office told us would be a major policy speech. And we should be grateful for the heads-up about the speech’s majorness. Otherwise, a read of the speech might have suggested that he was offering […]

Unable to stop climate change, EPA prepares for it – ‘Too bad we didn’t do more a few decades ago to keep all of this from happening’

By Philip Bump8 February 2013 (Grist) – “We live in a world in which the climate is changing.” This statement from the EPA, the first line in its draft “Climate Change Adaptation Plan” [PDF] released today, is basic. But that the EPA is saying it is important. For two reasons. The first is that the […]

The scary truth about how much climate change is costing you – ‘Climate-change financial implications are the equivalent of the subprime-mortgage meltdown’

By Coral Davenport7 February 2013 NORFOLK, Virginia (National Journal) – Jimmy Strickland can tell you exactly how much money rising sea levels have cost his business. In 1989, he opened his accounting firm in a one-story brick building near Norfolk’s historic cobblestoned Hague district, which surrounds one of this low-lying city’s many tidal rivers. Dressed […]

Kiribati to buy land in Fiji before rising sea levels swallow the island nation – ‘Relocating the whole country is our last option’

By Mereseini Marau4 February 2013 NEW DELHI (Fiji Times) – The government of Kiribati will buy about 6000 acres of land near Savusavu for its food security as the country has started feeling the effects of the rising sea level. And it will ensure that it protects whatever part of Kiribati that can be saved […]

Climate scientists biased toward overly cautious estimates: ‘Erring on the side of least drama’

  By dana198130 January 2013 A paper recently published in Global Environmental Change by Brysse, et al., (2012) examined a number of past predictions made by climate scientists, and found that that they have tended to be too conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change.  The authors thus suggest that climate scientists […]

NOAA, USGS: Climate change impacts to U.S. coasts threaten public health, safety, and economy

28 January 2013 (NOAA) – According to a new technical report, the effects of climate change will continue to threaten the health and vitality of U.S. coastal communities’ social, economic and natural systems. The report, Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities: a technical input to the 2013 National Climate Assessment, authored by leading scientists and experts, […]

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