Climate change will be deadlier, more destructive and costlier for California than previously believed, state warns

Heat waves will grow more severe and persistent, shortening the lives of thousands of Californians. Wildfires will burn more of the state’s forests. The ocean will rise higher and faster, exposing California to billions in damage along the coast.

Trees shrouded in smoke from the Ferguson Fire, which
burned more than 96,000 acres near Yosemite National Park.
 A state assessment found climate change will make Sierra
Nevada forests more susceptible to wildfires. 

These are some of the threats California will face from climate change in coming decades, according to a new statewide assessment released Monday by the California Natural Resources Agency.

The projections come as Californians contend with destructive wildfires, brutal heat spells and record ocean temperatures that scientists say have the fingerprints of global warming.

Read the story from The Los Angeles Times - “Climate change will be deadlier, more destructive and costlier for California than previously believed, state warns.”

Heat waves over the ocean have ballooned and are wreaking havoc on marine life

Heat waves over the world’s oceans are becoming longer and more frequent, damaging coral reefs and creating chaos for aquatic species. A study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications found a 54 percent increase in the number of days in which heat waves have cooked the oceans since 1925.

(Institute of Atmospheric Physics)

The rise in these marine heat waves has occurred while ever more heat is stored in the ocean because of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The ocean heat content in 2017 was the highest in recorded history, noted Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Trenberth said in an email that ocean heat waves will necessarily increase given the building stockpile of heat, which has been measured from the surface down to more than a mile deep (2,000 meters).

Read Jason Samenow’s story from The Washington Post - “Heat waves over the ocean have ballooned and are wreaking havoc on marine life.”

Deadly Heat Waves Could Endanger 74% of Mankind by 2100, Study Says

Deadly heat waves—already a risk for 30 percent of the world's population—will spread around the globe, posing a danger for 74 percent of people on Earth by the end of this century if nothing is done to address climate change, according to a new study.

An increasing percentage of the planet faces deadly heat for 20 or
more days per year, with one-third of the world's population currently at risk

Nearly as alarming, the researchers project that even if greenhouse gases are aggressively reduced, at least 48 percent of the population will still face deadly heat waves by 2100 because of the amount of long-lived heat-trapping gases that already have accumulated in the atmosphere.

"We're running out of good options for the future," said lead author Camilo Mora, a biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "For heat waves, our options are now between bad or terrible.”

The new study comes as near-record heat is forecast for this week in California and the U.S. southwest, with the temperature expected to soar to 120 degrees in Phoenix, and as severe heat grips parts of Europe, contributing to forest fires that have killed at least 60 people in Portugal.

Read the Inside Climate News story by Marianne Lavelle - “Deadly Heat Waves Could Endanger 74% of Mankind by 2100, Study Says.”

Global Warming Behind Record-Breaking Climate Events Worldwide: Here's The Evidence

Are extreme weather conditions such as droughts, heat waves, intense storms triggered by human-caused climate change?

Extreme weather conditions and
climate change equate.

This is a question that Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, and his research team always get.

But the answer to this seemingly simple question is never simple. In fact, scientists, in the past, generally avoid linking specific climate or weather events to global warming because of several different factors that cause them. But that was before.

Read the Tech Times story - “Global Warming Behind Record-Breaking Climate Events Worldwide: Here's The Evidence.”

How to Turn Neighborhoods Into Hubs of Resilience

Think of it as a silver lining to the gathering dark clouds. We live in an era of extraordinary disruption, from the serial crises of a changing climate to the wrenching shifts of a globalized economy. But in that disruption lies the potential for positive transformation.

PUSH Buffalo is working to transform a 25-block
area of the city into the beginning of a new
community-driven sustainable economy. 

Addressing climate change requires adapting to the impacts that are already here—heat waves, droughts, superstorms and more—while preventing and mitigating future impacts. Taking these challenges seriously calls for radical changes in the way we live. It calls us to zero out our carbon emissions, and to rethink the systems that shape our lives, including the economy, food and power. It calls us to fundamentally transition from a world of domination and extraction to a world of regeneration, resilience, and interdependence.

It’s a tall order, no doubt, but that transition is already underway. In our work with movement builders on the front lines of the transition, we’ve identified two key guideposts—connectedness and equity—that point us toward the world we want.

Read the Yes! Magazine story - “How to Turn Neighborhoods Into Hubs of Resilience.”

Extreme heat poses a billion-dollar threat to Australia’s economy

Heat is costing the Australian economy
 through productivity losses.

When heat waves hit in summer, do you have trouble sleeping? And the next day, even though you are working in air-conditioning, are you a bit slower, your judgement a bit off, or your patience a bit frayed?

In a paper published today in Nature Climate Change, we and colleagues show that heat stress probably cost the Australian economy nearly A$7 billion in 2013-2014 through productivity losses such as those we’ve mentioned above.

That bodes ill for the future, with heatwaves forecast to get hotter and more common thanks to climate change. While we should continue to attempt to mitigate climate change, we need to take steps to adapt.

One of our most surprising findings is that you don’t have to work outside to feel the heat. Although outdoor workers report greater levels of productivity losses from heat, indoor workers aren’t immune. Poor sleep is one possible explanation.

Read the story on The Conversation from a trio of authors at the Charles Darwin University - “Extreme heat poses a billion-dollar threat to Australia’s economy.”

All extreme weather linked to climate change - Kevin Trenberth

Kevin Trenberth - a 'game changer'.

In the wake of major hurricanes, floods and heat waves, scientists are quick to say that no single weather event can be attributed to climate change until careful analysis draws that conclusion. Now, a new study argues that thinking is backwards, that all extreme weather has a link to climate change.

The default position has been holding science back in connecting weather and climate, concludes the authors of a peer-reviewed paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change.

This "could be a game changer in how these studies are done in [the] future," lead author Kevin Trenberth said in an email.

Trenberth is a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and one of three researchers behind the study.

The paper presents a new research technique that grew out of an idea Trenberth first proposed at a conference in 2010. It also provides scientists examples of how to apply the method, and challenges the conclusions of a 2014 paper that found no climate influence in the massive floods that swept Boulder, Colo., in 2013.

Read the Inside Climate News story - “Most Extreme Weather Has Climate Change Link, Study Says.”

Irregular heatwaves to become an annual occurrence

The scorching, deadly heat waves that today strike only about once every 20 years could become an annual occurrence for more than half the world if nothing is done to curb emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, a new study reported Tuesday.

The work, detailed in the journal Climatic Change, also points to the worst heat waves of the future being much more intense. The results jibe with other research looking at how heat waves might change as the world warms, as well as those that have found that global warming has already juiced the heat waves we see today.

Read the Climate Central story - “Searing Heat Waves Could Become Annual Threat.”

2015 - A wild year for extreme weather across the globe

From heat waves to cyclones, flooding to drought, 2015 proved to be a wild year for extreme weather across the globe.

Millions of acres of forests burned. Thousands of people died from heat, and thousands more lost their homes to flooding and storm surges. In August, fueled by global warming and El Nino, three major hurricanes were spinning in the Pacific at once. To top it off, the world had its hottest year on record, breaking the record set in 2014 and shattering heat records on every continent, including Antarctica.

Read the Inside Climate News story - “2015: The Year the Weather Took a Particularly Wild Ride.”

The worst predicted impacts of climate change are already happening

T

he worst predicted impacts of climate change are starting to happen — and much faster than climate scientists expected, according to Rolling Stone magazine.

The magazine said: “Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington State's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.”

Read the Rolling Stone story by Eric Holthaus - “The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here”.