Americans have never been known to run away from a battle. Until climate change

Earlier this week Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the UK’s Environment Agency, warned that the UK needs to prepare for catastrophic flooding caused by climate change, and it is likely that entire communities will have to relocate. Because of our ongoing addiction to fossil fuels, coastal residents will be forced to move out of their homes. It is fitting that last week the UK parliament officially declared a “climate emergency”. Ireland has now followed suit (and no, not just because of Donald Trump’s golf course.)

Michael E. Mann.

It’s good to see the UK (and Ireland) confronting head-on the impacts of climate change, because they’re only growing more severe. Recent studies have shown that the Arctic is warming faster than we had previously thought. As a consequence, Arctic sea ice is disappearing more rapidly than predicted (April saw its lowest levels ever measured.) Despite what our Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently asserted, the national security threat associated with defending a new Arctic coastline will almost certainly outweigh any hypothetical shipping route benefits.

Read the Newsweek opinion piece by Michael E. Mann - “Americans have never been known to run away from a battle. Until climate change.”

’Worst yet to come': 14 dead as North Carolina faces Florence flooding

As the death toll from Florence rose and hundreds were rescued from their flooded homes, North Carolina slid into the next stage of the disaster: catastrophic flooding.

Flooding - first responders check flooded cars for trapped
occupants during the flood in North Carolina in the U.S.

On Saturday Mitch Colvin, mayor of Fayetteville, told reporters: “The worst is yet to come.”

On Sunday, the death toll in North and South Carolina rose to 14; the city of Wilmington was cut off by floodwater; 15,000 people were in temporary shelters; and 760,000 North Carolinians remained without power.

“The storm has never been more dangerous than it is now,” Governor Roy Cooper said. “Many rivers are still rising, and are not expected to crest until later today or tomorrow.“

Read the story from The Guardian - “’Worst yet to come': 14 dead as North Carolina faces Florence flooding.”

(“Adaptation” will be centre-stage in understanding how we deal with the vastly different scenarios that arise from climate change, just as we are witnessing in North Carolina in the U.S. People were first forced to deal with the initial onslaught of Hurricane Florence, being the powerful winds and now it is lingering floodwaters of a magnitude never seen before, along with an ongoing loss of power.

Interestingly, Shepparton heard about this phenomenon in 2013 when the former leader of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Anna Rose, told more than 600 people at the Slap Tomorrow forum, “Climate Change: a wake-up call”, that a warming world would see such events; events where massive amounts of water were absorbed from the oceans and then dumped over land, and that is just what is in the U.S. right now - Robert McLean)

Hurricane Florence's winds hit US coast, as 10 million people brace for impact

Hurricane Florence's winds have begun whipping coastal North Carolina, with the slow-moving tempest beginning to unleash fierce rains forecasters warn will cause catastrophic flooding across a wide swath of the US south-east.

A camera on the International Space Station
has captured images of Hurricane Florence.

The centre of Florence is expected to hit North Carolina's southern coast on Friday (local time), then drift south-west before moving inland on Saturday, enough time to drop as much as one metre of rain in places, according to the National Hurricane Centre (NHC).

An estimated 10 million people live in the storm's path, according to the US Weather Prediction Centre, and coastal businesses and homes were boarded up in anticipation.

Read the story from ABC News - “Hurricane Florence's winds hit US coast, as 10 million people brace for impact.”