Tag: National Climate Assessment

Yal Climate Connections, January 8, 2021

Articles include:  global 2020 wildfire season;  Add risk management to National Climate Assessment;  IPCC’s upcoming major climate assessment;  plight of trees in a warming climate;  Mobile app helps Inuit hunters monitor ice conditions;  Wildfires torch dwindling sage-grouse habitat;  COVID-19 & online meetings;  Wisconsin city, a renewable energy leader;  private charging stations.

NY Times Climate Fwd., November 11, 2020

Articles include: trump’s legacy; Slower, wetter hurricanes; Warming and hurricanes; Energy-efficient homes; Denier placed in charge of the National Climate Assessment report; Things Biden can do on the environment; Cutting GHG’s from food production;  and CA bars insurance companies from dropping wildfire insurance.

Study: Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration

ProPublica discusses how Climate Change will force a new American migration. Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit areas, but if the people there move, where will everyone go?

August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.

The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America’s shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (A detailed analysis of the maps is available here.)

One influential 2018 study, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone.

research from Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of American climate migration in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2017, suggests that the toll will eventually be far more widespread.

Given that a new study projects a 20% increase in extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, such practices suggest a special form of climate negligence.

Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers.

By 2050, researchers at the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, Dust Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as 20%.

The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10%.

The Trump Team Has a Plan to Not Fight Climate Change

Wired discusses Trump’s plan to ignore climate change. It may take decades to see the worst effects of global warming. Yet Jim Reilly, the director of the US Geological Survey, is committed to short-term thinking.

For those in the earth science community, there was a far more pressing question to be answered. Just a few weeks earlier, on the day after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration had released—dumped, really—a landmark, 1,500-page federal review of the risks of global warming, the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Two of Reilly’s top scientists had helped to oversee the project, which drew heavily on research done at USGS and other federal agencies. But the White House had gone out of its way to discredit the report: “It’s not based on facts,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters a few days after its lackadaisical release. “It’s based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate.” As the new director of the agency, Reilly hadn’t made any public statement on the matter, and it wasn’t clear exactly where he stood.

 

Work begins on key climate report under Trump

E&E News discusses efforts by the Trump administration to create the next National Climate Assessment report.

The next National Climate Assessment is beginning to take shape at a time when President Trump warned world leaders to reject “alarmists” and as his conservative allies make plans to intervene in the report’s preparation to question the findings of mainstream scientists.

The Fifth National Climate Assessment is scheduled for release in 2022, about halfway through Trump’s potential second term. Planning for the report is already underway, with requests to researchers to submit their work and a project leader expected to be chosen within a few months, according to Donald Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois who oversaw the last assessment.

The White House stands to have an influential role in the report’s construction through the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is overseen by Trump’s science adviser, Kelvin Droegemeier. Wuebbles said Droegemeier, an extreme-weather expert whom he has known for years, will work to produce an accurate assessment that’s free of Trump’s erroneous assertions about climate change.

Report: EPA head asked to back up claim that climate change is ’50 to 75 years out’

This The Hill article discusses Andrew Wheeler’s ignorance about climate change. The sad part is, he’s the head of EPA.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler is being asked to back up recent claims that climate change consequences are still “50 to 75 years out.”

In a freedom of information request filed by the Sierra Club late Monday, the conservation group requested the EPA turn over any documents that support Wheeler’s assertion.

Wheeler’s comments came in an interview with CBS, when he told the network’s Major Garrett that he would be focused on pressing issues like access to clean water since “most of the threats from climate change are 50 to 75 years out.”

Climate scientists armed with government research, however, are finding that climate change is having a much more immediate impact. The Sierra Club argues the dangers from climate change are fast-approaching and that Wheeler’s remark to Garrett has no basis.

The research reference above is to the 4th National Climate Assessment.

Climate change group scrapped by Trump reassembles to issue warning

This The Guardian article discusses Trump’s attempt to kill a science panel that disagreed with his denialist attitude. Panel was disbanded after a Trump official voiced concerns that it did not have enough members ‘from industry’

The Trump administration disbanded the 15-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment in August 2017. The group, formed under Barack Obama’s presidency, provided guidance to the government based on the National Climate Assessment, a major compendium of climate science released every four years. The advisory group has since been resurrected, however, following an invitation from New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, and has been financially supported by Columbia University and the American Meteorological Society. It now has 20 expert members.The panel is now known as the Science to Climate Action Network (Scan) and has now completed work it would have finished for the federal government, releasing a report on Thursday warning that Americans are being put at risk from the impacts of a warming planet due to a muddled response to climate science.

 

In Florida, Doctors See Climate Change Hurting Their Most Vulnerable Patients

This NPR article discusses the health impact from climate change on poor people in Florida.

And it may only be getting worse. The 2018 National Climate Assessment noted that the southeastern United States is already experiencing “more and longer summer heat waves.” By 2050, experts say, rising global temperatures are expected to mean that nearly half the days in the year in Florida will be dangerously hot, when the combination of heat and humidity will make it feel like it’s 105 degrees or more.

Report: Climate Change Could Spur Financial Crisis

This article discusses research conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco that shows climate change could spark a financial crisis.

Financial risk associated with climate change could undermine the stability of the financial system, according to a research letter by a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The financial and economic risks of climate change are already being considered by central banks in other countries and are increasingly a concern for the Federal Reserve Bank, said Glenn D. Rudebusch, a senior policy advisor and executive vice president in the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. His letter was posted on the bank’s website on Monday.

His research highlighted the economic risks associated with climate change, risks that were detailed in the Fourth National Climate Assessment released by U.S. government agencies last year that argued climate inaction would be far costlier to the national economy than climate mitigation.