extreme events
Hot off the Press: The New IPCC Report
The latest science confirms the need for urgent action.
The IPCC issued the massive first volume of its new report on climate change on Monday. This volume focuses on climate science: how much will the world warm, and what will the impacts be? The bottom line is that the evidence is becoming ever firmer that (a) humans are causing an unprecedented rate of climate …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Fatigue
You might be tired of climate change. But climate change isn’t tired of you.
I gather that people are tired of hearing about climate change. I’m tired of hearing about climate change, too. Sadly, Nature just doesn’t care that much about entertaining us. It’s going to be climate change this year, climate change next year, climate change the year after that . . . But don’t worry, it won’t …
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CONTINUE READINGSurviving on a Changing Planet
[youtube=http://youtu.be/O5h02Yc6lfA] As this video explains, the Arctic is entering a new state, quite different from the Arctic regime that we have long known. Over a somewhat longer time frame, much the same is happening with the climate and ecology of the world as a whole. It’s a bit like a science fiction cliché: explorers leave …
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CONTINUE READINGHighly Uncertain But Not in Doubt
It seems paradoxical to say that climate change is uncertain but not in doubt. At this point, we can be highly confident that greenhouse gases are disrupting the climate system and that the disruption will be very serious unless we act. But there’s considerable uncertainty about the magnitude of climate change and its local …
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CONTINUE READINGIs Hurricane Sandy the Face of Climate Change?
It’s a question at the forefront of many of our minds, as we witness the aftermath of Sandy’s fierce destruction. In the days following the superstorm, we’ve seen surreal images — an illuminated carousel appearing to float in high water, drowning taxi cabs in perfect rows — things we believed would not happen for decades, as …
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CONTINUE READINGKatrinas Yet to Come
Climate change is expected to increase hurricane damage by $40 billion per year by the end of the century.
CONTINUE READINGWhen Can We Attribute Extreme Events to Climate Change?
Moscow suffered from a severe heat wave in the summer of 2010, with temperatures reaching 101 degrees and an average temperature 14 degrees higher than normal for July. What are the odds that the heat wave was due to climate change? RealClimate presents the results of an analysis that was just published in the Proceedings …
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CONTINUE READING“Too Darn Hot”:The Summer of 2011 and the New Normal
DotEarth, the NY Times environmental blog, has a nice posting about how the current heat wave fits into climate-change predictions. It seems clear that the “summer of 2011 is emblematic of the new climatological norms that are emerging as conditions neatly echo longstanding projections of the consequences of steadily raising the concentration of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.” …
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