Maybe governments will actually listen if we stop saying "extreme weather" & "climate change" & just say the atmosphere is being radicalized
Climate change’s impacts on extreme weather and society are becoming increasingly clear and undeniable. While we are making progress in solving the problem, we’re still moving too slowly, and one of the two political parties governing the world’s strongest superpower continues to deny the science. This led astrophysicist Katie Mack to make the following suggestion, related to a common refrain from Donald Trump and Republican Party leaders:
Maybe governments will actually listen if we stop saying "extreme weather" & "climate change" & just say the atmosphere is being radicalized
Hurricane Matthew set a number of records. Its record-breaking rainfall and storm surge caused historic flooding and destructive winds along the coasts of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Hillary Clinton touched upon the science linking global warming and hurricane impacts in a recent speech in Florida:
At Climate Progress, Joe Romm summarized the various ways in which global warming makes hurricanes like Matthew more intense:
In short, global warming made Hurricane Matthew and its impacts more severe, and will lead to more such devastating hurricanes in the future.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, 2016 tied for the second-lowest annual Arctic sea ice minimum extent. However, that only accounts for the amount of ice on the surface of the ocean. The ice has also become thinner due to the warming oceans. As a result, we’ve lost about three-quarters of the volume of sea ice in the Arctic ocean in less than four decades, as this video created by Andy Lee Robinson illustrates:
That decline is well outside the range of natural variability over the past 1,500 years, and several studies have found that human-caused global warming is the primary driver of the disappearing Arctic sea ice.
2014 was the hottest year since our measurements began, breaking the record set in 2010, which had broken the record set in 2005. A year later we saw the temperature record shattered once again in 2015, by more than a tenth of a degree Celsius. This year we’ll see the record broken once again, likely by an even larger margin. Every month in 2016 except June has been the hottest ever recorded. That has never happened before, nor have we ever seen three consecutive record-breaking hot years. It’s simply unprecedented.
California is in the midst of a 5-year drought; its worst in over a millennium. 100% of the state is currently experiencing drought conditions, with over 20% of the state in “exceptional” drought – the most severe category.
The drought has created conditions ripe for severe wildfire seasons.
Posted by dana1981 on Monday, 24 October, 2016
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