Tag: Global warming

Global warming blamed for record-breaking weather worldwide, scientists say

Record-breaking weather events, especially heat waves but also downpours and droughts, can be linked to man-made global warming, a new study says.

“Our results suggest that the world isn’t quite at the point where every record hot event has a detectable human fingerprint, but we are getting close,” said study lead author Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University.

It’s the first research to look specifically at the link between record weather events of the past several decades and climate change. Diffenbaugh and his team found that in over 80% of the heat records — which included both record hot days and months — there was a clear-cut signal of global warming.

Global warming blamed for record-breaking weather worldwide, scientists say

How You (Yes You, By Yourself) Can Start Mitigating Climate Change – Digg

Perhaps you’ve heard about this climate change? A buildup of greenhouse gases — largely produced by us — in our atmosphere over the past century is warming the atmosphere. This warming will result in all kinds of fun consequences such as increased precipitation, regular heat waves and drought, stronger hurricanes and sea level rise on the order of at least a foot.

It is, by no exaggeration, a problem of global proportions. Just months ago 136 nations ratified the Paris Climate Agreement — the international diplomatic equivalent of your group project members finally agreeing to meet the night before your group presentation is due. It’s also a problem that is slightly out of the control of the average person. Between 1970 and 2011, 78 percent of all greenhouse gasses emitted were the work of industrial processes and transportation.

The more cynical among us might see that stat and throw their hands up. No one person can halt the complex systems that keep the engines of our planet going. But maybe you aren’t a cynical person. Perhaps you watched Leonardo DiCaprio’s Before The Flood, and now feel like you should try and do something. Maybe you’d like to, at least, no longer contribute to the problem.

Fantastic. The good news is that just about everything you do emits some kind of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere — if you really want to understand the exact extent of which, go ahead and use a carbon calculator — so there’s plenty you can do to reduce that.

How You (Yes You, By Yourself) Can Start Mitigating Climate Change – Digg

How climate change will threaten mental health – CNN.com

“One of the major health effects of flooding seems to be the mental health aspects,” said James Rubin, a psychologist at Kings College London whose recent research looked into the psychological impact of people both directly and indirectly effected by floods. “There are a whole host of stressors around it,” he said.
These types of natural disasters are expected to rise in frequency due to climate change, and Rubin feels that the mental health aspect deserves more attention.
“Preventing (climate change) from happening, from worsening and intervening is really important,” he said.
Climate change is predicted to bring more than just floods: There could be heat waves, sea level rises causing loss of land, and forced migration and droughts affecting agriculture and the farmers producing it. And with these concerns comes a plethora of issues plaguing the human mind, such as depression, worry, anxiety, substance abuse, aggression and even suicide among those who cannot cope.
“If you don’t resolve them, these conditions don’t necessarily go away,” Rubin said.
To find out the extent of this psychological burden, he focused in on flooding and sent surveys to more than 8,000 people living in areas affected by floods in 2013-14, looking for signs of conditions such as depression and anxiety.
How climate change will threaten mental health – CNN.com

The geography of climate confusion: a visual guide – CNN.com

Climate change may seem like a complicated issue, but it’s actually simple if you understand five key facts, according to Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. 

They are: 1. It’s real. 2. It’s us. 3. Scientists agree. 4. It’s bad. And: 5. There’s hope.
Yet, far too few Americans get it.
That became more painfully apparent to me this week when Yale University researchers released data and maps that detail American attitudes on climate change. The data, which are based on surveys and modeling by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, do show there is broad agreement in the American public on the solutions needed to fight climate change and usher in the clean-energy era. The most striking example: majorities of people in every single congressional district support setting strict limits on carbon dioxide pollution from existing coal-fired power plants, according to the research. And this despite the fact that many Republicans and US President Donald Trump say they want to ax an Obama-era regulation — the Clean Power Plan — that aims to do just that. 
Still, there remain big pockets of climate confusion — perhaps denial — across the country, especially when it comes to climate science. Narrowing this info gap is particularly critical now since President Trump has denied the science of climate change and has promised to enact policies that can be expected to dirty the air and intensify warming. 
To that end, here is a geographic look at five key climate facts.

 

The geography of climate confusion: a visual guide – CNN.com: “”

(Via.)

When Scientists Hate Science

With Donald Trump’s recent picks to head the Environmental Protection Agency (Scott Pruitt) and the Energy Department (Rick Perry), it appears that science denialism has now been institutionalized. Pruitt, Perry, and Trump deny the fact that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the environment have trapped heat, causing an increase in the Earth’s surface temperature (“the greenhouse effect”), and consequent climate disruption. Although climate change is undeniable, the current administration has managed to deny it. 

Climate change denialists couldn’t take their anti-science stance without the support of certain scientists. Although the overwhelming consensus among environmental scientists is that global warming is a real and present threat, a few disagree. Sadly, throughout history, science-denying scientists haven’t been hard to find.

Daily Beast

375 top scientists warn of ‘real, serious, immediate’ climate threat

Yesterday, 375 of the world’s top scientists, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, published an open letter regarding climate change. In the letter, the scientists report that the evidence is clear: humans are causing climate change. We are now observing climate change and its affect across the globe. The seas are rising, the oceans are warming, the lower atmosphere is warming, the land is warming, ice is melting, rainfall patterns are changing and the ocean is becoming more acidic.

These facts are incontrovertible. No reputable scientist disputes them. It is the truth.

Despite these facts, the letter reports that the US presidential campaign has seen claims that the earth isn’t warming, or it is only a natural warming, or that climate change is a hoax. These claims are false. The claims are made by politicians or real estate developers with no scientific experience. These people who deny the reality of climate change are not scientists.

The Guardian

Six Snowballs Thrown in the Gun-Control Debate

People will recall that, not so long ago, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, in order to conclusively demonstrate that claims of man-made climate change were false, made a snowball after a February storm and threw it on the Senate floor. I demonstrate it thus! If I see frozen water, how can the planet be warming? What was so beautiful about this demonstration was that it did not even depend on a snowball made out of season, one packed and tossed, say, in September or April—this was a mid-winter snowball, and it still refuted global warming, for once and all.

Anyone who follows the debate on any public issue discovers that the snowball-in-the-Senate style of argumentation persists, with the same note of smugness—that’ll show them! It most often comes from the same political direction, or party, and with the same disconnection from all familiar standards of evidence and argument. In the debate about the necessity of bringing America into agreement with the rest of the civilized world on the issue of guns and gun killings, there are some persistent snowballs-in-the-Senate that keep getting thrown, which need to be mopped up as they melt.

The New Yorker

InsideClimate News

InsideClimate News is a Pulitzer prize-winning, non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science—plus the territory in between where law, policy and public opinion are shaped. Our mission is to produce clear, objective stories that give the public and decision-makers the information they need to navigate the heat and emotion of climate and energy debates.

We have grown from a founding staff of two to a mature virtual newsroom of ten full time professional journalists and a growing network of contributors. We’re aiming to double in size and come to full scale in the next two years.

Climate and energy are defining issues of our time, yet most media outlets are now hard-pressed to devote sufficient resources to environmental and investigative reporting. Our goal is to fill this growing national deficiency and contribute to the accurate public understanding so crucial to the proper functioning of democracy.

InsideClimate News

How Exxon went from leader to skeptic on climate change research

Throughout much of the 1980s, Exxon earned a public reputation as a pioneer in climate change research. It sponsored workshops, funded academic research and conducted its own high-tech experiments exploring the science behind global warming.

But by 1990, the company, in public, took a different posture.

While still funding select research, it poured millions into a campaign that questioned climate change. Over the next 15 years, it took out prominent ads in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, contending climate change science was murky and uncertain. And it argued regulations aimed at curbing global warming were ill-considered and premature.

How did one of the world’s largest oil companies, a leader in climate research, become one of its biggest public skeptics?

The answer, gleaned from a trove of archived company documents and the recollections of former employees, is that Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil, feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies.

LA Times