Can you sit in a snowstorm and imagine a warming world?
The weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you’d expect as the planet warms. Here’s how it works: In most places, winter is clearly growing shorter and less intense. We can tell, because Arctic sea ice is melting, because the glaciers on Greenland are shrinking and because a thousand other signals send the same message. Here in the mountains of the Northeast, for instance, lakes freeze later than they used to, and sometimes not at all: Lake Champlain remained open in winter only three times during the 19th century, but it did so 18 times between 1970 and 2007.
But rising temperature is only one effect of climate change. Probably more crucially, warmer air holds more water vapor than cold air does. The increased evaporation from land and sea leads to more drought but also to more precipitation, since what goes up eventually comes down. The numbers aren’t trivial — global warming has added 4 percent more moisture to the atmosphere since 1970. That means that the number of “extreme events” such as downpours and floods has grown steadily; the most intense storms have increased by 20 percent across the United States in the past century.
Where in the World is the Worst Place for Cold Weather?
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world.
Watch Ross Gelbspan’s “great and profound” new video at Climate Progress
Pulitzer Prize-winning Investigative journalist Ross Gelbspan has a new video out — and is very much interested in your feedback on it. Please click here to get to the ClimateProgress site and post your own comment. There are over 90 comments to read, most of them very useful, some truly inspiring. And Ross is responding personally to many of them. Something important is beginning to happen here, and we may all want to be part of it.
Final Episode of BBC World’s “Hot Cities” Available
Los Angeles is one of the most polluting cities in the world thanks largely to its love affair with the car. It is a city built on consumption. Each person produces around 20 tonnes of emissions per year – twice as much as anyone else. Now they are about to reap what has been sown. In LA there has been a big increase in wildfires, water supplies are under threat, rising sea levels could have a massive impact on LA’s huge port and destroy thousands of homes. “Hot Cities” goes to LA just as the city launches its adaptation strategy.
An Optimistic Take on the Copenhagen Climate Conference by Gwynne Dyer
It is hard to celebrate a process as clumsy, and occasionally as ugly, as the horse-trading and arm-twisting going on at Copenhagen, but that is how human politics works. We may all recognize that there is a global emergency, but every government still has its own interests to protect.
Nevertheless, we have come a long way.
The Physics of Copenhagen: Why Politics-As-Usual May Mean the End of Civilization
In Copenhagen, if the U.S. is willing to treat climate change as politics-as-usual, most of the other major players will simply follow suit. They’ll sign some kind of paper in Denmark — that became all but certain on Friday night when Obama announced he’d jet in for the meeting’s close. European leaders and some environmental groups may then call it a “qualified success,” and on we will go through more years of negotiation. In the meantime, physics will continue to operate, permafrost will continue to thaw, sea ice to melt, drought to spread. It’s like nothing we’ve ever faced before — and we’re facing it as if it’s just like everything else. That’s the problem.
56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages publish the same editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.
State of Climate Science: Videos of US Senate Select Committee Hearing
With the international climate change talks in Copenhagen fast approaching, there is real urgency to reach diplomatic consensus on a planetary solution. In a hearing hosted by Chairman Edward J. Markey on December 2, 2009, the US Senate Select Committee explored with climate scientists from the Obama administration, Dr. John Holdren and Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the urgent, consensus view on our planetary problem: that global warming is real, and the science indicates that it is getting worse.
James Hansen says whole approach at Copenhagen is “so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation”
In an interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, the world’s pre-eminent climate scientist, said any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from scratch.
“I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it’s a disaster track,” said Hansen, who heads the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science
On the eve of the Copenhagen conference, a group of scientists has issued an update on the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their conclusions? Ice at both poles is melting faster than predicted, the claims of recent global cooling are wrong, and world leaders must act fast if steep temperature rises are to be avoided.
