Category: Climate

‘Roughly 10 feet of sea level rise—well beyond previous estimates—would render coastal cities such as New York, London, and Shanghai uninhabitable.’ NYC image via joiseyshowaa/flickr. Creative Commons 2.0. license. If a new scientific paper is proven accurate, the international target of limiting global temperatures to a 2°C rise this century will not be nearly enough to prevent catastrophic melting of ice sheets that would raise sea levels much higher and much faster than previously thought possible. Parts of [our coastal cities] would still be sticking above the water, but you couldn’t live there." —Dr. James Hansen According to the new study—which has not yet been peer-reviewed, but was written by former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 other prominent climate researchers—current predictions about the catastrophic impacts of global warming, the melting of vast ice sheets, and sea level rise do not take into account the feedback loop implications of […]

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Photo Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday toured a Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority station with Elizabeth Presutti, general manager, and Keith Welch, building superintendent. Credit Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press DES MOINES — Setting ambitious goals for producing energy from the sun, wind and other renewable sources, Hillary Rodham Clinton seized on an issue Monday that increasingly resonates with Democratic voters and sets up a stark contrast with the Republican presidential field. With many Republican candidates saying they do not believe that climate change is a threat or requires government intervention, Mrs. Clinton assailed their logic, saying, “The reality of climate change is unforgiving no matter what the deniers say.” She set a goal to produce 33 percent of the nation’s electricity from renewable sources by 2027, up from 7 percent today — a higher goal than the 20 percent that President Obama has called for by 2030. Mrs. Clinton’s […]

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New York’s odds of being flooded by a one-two punch of extreme rain and surging seas have more than doubled in the past 80 years, a change scientists say may be linked to global warming. The number of so-called compound flooding events — combining heavy precipitation and a high storm surge — have “increased significantly” for much of the coastal U.S., affecting cities from New York and San Francisco to Boston and Galveston, Texas, researchers said in a paper published Monday by the journal Nature Climate Change. Researchers found an increased connection between storm surges and high precipitation, phenomena that forecasters and urban planners often treat as independent events when preparing for storms , said lead author Thomas Wahl. How much of the change is due to global warming or natural variation is unclear, but the data suggest policy makers should reconsider where they build infrastructure and how flood […]

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Arctic sea ice is so sensitive to changing temperatures that a single cool summer briefly reversed the decline in the ice cap around the North Pole, says a new study released Monday. Using new satellite data, researchers at University College London reported in Nature Geoscience on Monday that the total volume of sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere was well above average in the autumn of 2013, traditionally the end of the annual melt season, after an unusually cool summer when temperatures dropped to levels not seen since the 1990s. “We now know it can recover by a significant amount if the melting season is cut short,” said the study’s lead author Rachel Tilling, a researcher who studies satellite observations of the Arctic. “The sea ice might be a little more resilient than we thought.” A steady decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice since the late 1970s […]

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West Coast weather was turned upside down this weekend when Southern California saw more rain in one day than it saw in all of January — one of the region’s wettest months on average. But even with the historic summer rainfall, California’s multi-year drought will likely endure past its next rainy season for much of the state. The anomalous summer rains came to California thanks to Hurricane Dolores, which surged to a powerful category 4 last week. Since then, the remnant storm has tracked north parallel to to the coast, pumping tropical moisture into the Southwest U.S. On Saturday, 1.03 inches of rain fell in San Diego, setting a new record for wettest day in July and pushing the month to the wettest July on record. An additional 0.66 inches fell Sunday, and as of Monday morning, the monthly rainfall total was an incredible 1.7 inches. The previous wettest […]

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Half the world’s population lives within 60 km of the ocean. Limiting climate change to 2°C is not going to protect us from devastating sea level rise, a new report has found. According to the research, freshwater from land-based ice sheets melting into the oceans is inducing feedback that is accelerating the melting of ice shelves — a loop that indicates sea level rise will continue and could be devastating at much lower temperature changes than previously thought. The study, authored by well-known climate scientist James Hansen and 16 other researchers , will be published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics this week. The research explains that there is an “amplifying feedback” as polar ice melts, because as more freshwater enters the ocean, it traps warmer sea water, which melts more ice. The effect is not included in the current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) modeling but “extensive data […]

Click here to view full article at thinkprogress.org