Articles include: Greens: Divided on ‘clean’ energy? Or closer than they appear?; Check these pieces on the diseases of summer; Tropical Cyclone Tauktae is fifth-strongest cyclone on record in the Arabian Sea; What is a ‘just transition,’ and why do we need one?; California’s volunteer ‘Climate Action Corps’ helps fight climate change; Increases in extreme precipitation cost the U.S. $73 billion over three decades; Bladeless wind turbine generates electricity by vibrating with air movements; The moral imperative behind the ‘Big Bold Jewish Climate Fest’;
Renovations put Seattle hockey arena closer to its goal of zero carbon emissions.
Tag: storms
Study: Climate change: Extreme weather causes huge losses in 2020
BBC discusses Extreme weather causes huge losses in 2020. The world continued to pay a very high price for extreme weather in 2020, according to a report from the charity Christian Aid.
Against a backdrop of climate change, its study lists 10 events that saw thousands of lives lost and major insurance costs.
Six of the events took place in Asia, with floods in China and India causing damages of more than $40bn.
In the US, record hurricanes and wildfires caused some $60bn in losses.
NYT Climate Fwd: December 23, 2020
Articles include: a look at 2020 in review; women and climate activism; how climate change is affecting winter storms; Biden’s cabinet picks; white areas get more wildfire relief.
The Daily Climate, December 18, 2020
The Daily Climate discusses: Native American art; First Native American Interior Secretary; John Kerry; NC environmental chief to lead EPA; Iceberg heading towards island; preventing wildfires; winter storms and climate change; coral versus climate; report on cost of climate change; Biden picks.
Study: Tropical storms can sometimes ‘supercharge’ the storms that follow
National Geographic discusses how Tropical storms can sometimes ‘supercharge’ the storms that follow. In 2018, a tropical storm teamed up with a heat wave to strengthen a hurricane—a storm-fueling scenario that might happen more often as the planet warms.
This hurricane season has already been one for the record books. The season’s 25th named storm, Delta, is closing in on the already-battered Gulf Coast—and there’s still another few weeks of the official season to go. The hot Gulf waters that have super-fueled Hurricane Delta are becoming more common as the planet warms, as is a combination of factors that can make big, fast-growing storms more dangerous.
A new study, published last month in Nature Communications, shows how one storm’s effect on hot, shallow Gulf waters—coupled with hot weather—created the conditions to amplify the next storm that came along into something much more powerful.
Study: Climate change will continue to widen gaps in food security
The Daily Climate discusses a new study that finds that climate change will continue to widen gaps in food security. Countries already struggling with low crop yields will be hurt most by a warming climate.
With storms to the east and wildfires to the west, the climate crisis is currently at the forefront of public consciousness.
But aside from dramatic disasters there is another, pernicious threat that comes with a warming climate: diminishing global crop yields.
In a new study published in Nature Food, researchers assessed global yields for 18 of the most farmed crops—wheat, maize, soybeans, rice, barley, sugar beet, cassava, cotton, groundnuts, millet, oats, potatoes, pulses, rapeseed, rye, sorghum, sunflower and sweet potatoes—crops that, all together, represent 70 percent of global crop area and around 65 percent of global caloric intake.
Report: The Oceans – Very Bad News
Newsweek posts an opinion piece by Michael Mann discussing The Oceans Appear to Be Stabilizing. Here’s Why it’s Very Bad News. As we continue to warm the planet through fossil fuel burning and other activities releasing carbon pollution, the surface and lower atmosphere is warming faster than the air aloft. That favors heavy colder air on top of lighter warmer air, and a less stable atmosphere. It means more turbulence and more energetic storms. And it’s part of the reason we expect more extreme weather events in a warmer world. My colleagues and I have just published an article in the journal Nature Climate Change showing that the oceans are not only becoming more stable, but are doing so faster than was previously thought.
Gizmodo discusses how The Oceans Are Turning Into a Layer Cake. The oceans are facing a host of maladies, from acidification to sea level rise. Turning them into a ginormous liquid layer cake may sound comparatively benign (and delicious). But while Earther is decidedly pro-cake, this is in fact a bad situation. New research published in Nature Climate Change on Monday shows that oceans are stratifying faster than previous research indicated. It’s due largely to rising temperatures, and the layer cake-ification of the oceans imperils carbon storage and could upend ecology around the world.
Study: Hurricanes near U.S. coast forecast to worsen and multiply due to global warming
The Washington Post discusses Hurricanes near U.S. coast forecast to worsen and multiply due to global warming. The 2020 hurricane season may be best remembered as the one that spawned so many storms that forecasters ran out of names and had to resort to Greek letters. But it is notable for another disquieting reason: the number of storms that developed in the mid-latitudes right off the U.S. coast. While this is not unheard of, it is unusual. And it may become more frequent as climate change alters hurricane behavior, according to a new study.
While it’s impossible to predict future trends from a single hurricane season, scientists can take historical and other data and run models to get a glimpse of what the future may bring. That’s what Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did in a new peer-reviewed study in the American Meteorological Society’s “Journal of Climate.”
[No link is provided, but a search at the American Meteorological Society’s site on hurricanes and global warming provides lots of interesting reading here.]
This finding builds on previous studies that drew similar conclusions.
Yale Climate Connections, September 25, 2020
Articles include: climate migration begins; importance of ‘sliding baselines’; human activity is principal cause of global warming; Miami – vulnerable to sea-level rise; transition to renewable energy will strengthen national security; nurturing soil is more climate-friendly; Low-income communities in climate action; Caribbean islands, Renewable Energy and hurricanes;
Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.
The New York Times discusses how Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.
America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.