Scientists baulk, but 'fingerprints' give the game away

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cientists have long baulked at attributing natural disasters directly to climate change.

Katherine Bagley -
fingerprints of climate change.

However, as Katherine Bagley writes on InsideClimate News, extreme heat in India, flooding in Houston, wildfires in Alberta suggest a new normal, made more chaotic by global warming.

“Communities across the globe got a sobering snapshot this week of what the future is likely to hold more of: extreme weather getting even more extreme thanks to climate change,” she writes.

“Historic rainfall and flooding in Texas and Oklahoma left thousands homeless and dozens of people dead. India is in the midst of a prolonged heat wave that has already claimed more than 1,800 lives.  Wildfires in Alberta consumed hundreds of square miles of forest while creeping closer to Canada's tar sands, shutting down production of the carbon-intense fossil fuel.

“More natural disasters may be on the way. Firefighters across the American West are bracing for a record-breaking wildfire season due to sustained drought. Federal scientists predicted  Wednesday that once the U.S. hurricane season begins June 1, the East Coast could see as many as 11 named storms out of the Atlantic Ocean, including two hurricanes rated in the major categories, 3-5. Sea levels, rising as the globe warms, could increase the amount of damage from even smaller storms.”

Bagley’s story - “Weather Extremes Wear Climate Change's Fingerprints” – provides a roundup of what the latest science says about climate change and extreme weather.

Democracy is a fragile thing

Democracy is a fragile thing.

Dr Kevin Taft.

It can falter in the face of many threats, among them violence, despotic personalities and today, as is evident in many places, the assault of money.

Democracy of the modern era frequently falls at the feet of the rich and subsequently polluted and derailed from being attendant to the wider need of the public interest.

Radio National this morning talked with a member of the Legislative Assembly in Alberta, Canada, and a former leader of that country’s Liberal Opposition Party for four years from 2004, Dr Kevin Taft, who lamented the current state of democracy in his country.

In an interview entitled “Democracy ‘captured’ by carbon industry in Canada: Taft”, he discusses the echoes of what he has seen happen in Canada, reverberating in Australia.