“For the sake of our children we must do more to combat climate change,” Obama declared in his State of the Union Address. It turns out a majority of Americans agree with him, according to post SOTUS poll.
Tags: · Americans, Climate Change, global warming, hurricanes, poll, President Obama, public views
U.S. forecasters say residents of hurricane-prone areas should prepare themselves for an “above-average” hurricane season. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco said the United States was lucky last year that winds steered the storms away from its coasts. But Lubchenco said residents cannot “count on luck” to keep hurricanes away again this season.
Tags: · Extreme weather, greenrightnow.com, hurricanes
It’s World Environment Day, and all I can think about is how the Gulf oil disaster has been book-ended by two environmental commemorations. The BP oil well blew out two days before Earth Day in April, though it was barely covered in the news until a few days later when people realized that oil was leaking into the ocean unabated. (In the back of our minds, we tend to assume that someone has a plan for these contingencies. Surprise! No plan.)
Tags: · BarbaraKesslerBlog, BP oil spill, Climate Change, Drought, Earth Day, global warming, gulf oil disaster, hurricanes, severe weather, Tornadoes, World Environment Day
From Green Right Now
Climate deniers will just have to grit their teeth over the latest report from the EPA showing that climate change is having a measurable effect on the Earth.
The EPA’s Climate Change Indicators report , released Tuesday, tallies up the heat waves, storms, sea level measurements and glacier melts that all point to a planet under duress.
Tags: · EPA, EPA's Climate Change Indicators report, glaciers, glaciers melting, greenhouse gas emissions rising, heatwaves on the rise, hurricanes, temperatures rose in last two decades
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Not convinced that climate change matters? The Union of Concerned Scientists has concluded that if Americans adopt that stance, they’ll be gambling not just with their lungs, but with their pocketbooks.
The UCS surveyed 60 studies to better examine the anticipated financial toll of global warming if we fail to “dramatically curb emissions.” The nonprofit released the findings today in a report called “Climate Change in the United States: The Prohibitive Costs of Inaction”.
It found that rising sea levels, intense hurricanes, flooding, impaired public health and strained energy and water resources would all add up to one monumental price tag.
Tags: · clean energy, Climate Change, costs of global warming, floods, global warming, hurricanes, sea level rises, Union of Concerned Scientists
From Green Right Now reports
The year 2008 is expected to finish as one of the 10th warmest years on record, since record keeping began more than 150 years ago, according to a report this week from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Also in 2008, Arctic sea ice dropped to its second-lowest level since modern satellite monitoring began in 1979.
The WMO estimates 2008′s global combined sea-surface and land-surface air temperature is about half of a degree Fahrenheit above the annual average temperature of of 57.2°F (14°C) from 1961-1990. However, the global average temperature was slightly lower than in very recent years because of strong La Nina pattern that cooled ocean temps.
Tags: · Drought, Extreme weather, Flooding, hurricanes, Ice melt, Temperature extremes, World Meteorological Organization
Hurricane Ike, which knocked Galveston and Houston with a right hook reminiscent of Katrina, again raises the question of whether global warming is fostering monster storms.
It has become almost ipso facto among many climate change scientists and activists that global warming is a key culprit behind worsening hurricanes. They point out that tropical storms feed on warmer water, and warmer sea waters are a given these days, whether you believe that the sea change is caused by Mother Nature, greenhouse gases or little green men in space.
But weather forecasters and meteorologists take a more measured view of hurricanes. Trained to distinguish between causes and consider time lines and probabilities, they do not use “weather” and “climate change” interchangeably. Weather is a sudden occurrence – albeit with a hurricane it can malinger and loom with maddening deliberateness – whereas climate change is a gradual thing, building over many years.
So to the weather experts, the shorthand formula is not as simple as Storms + Warmer Waters = Worse Storms.
Tags: · hurricanes, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Weather experts are predicting that some 17 Atlantic storms — about seven more than average — will pack enough strength they’ll reach tropical storm strength in 2008, earning the right to be named and carrying the potential to reach hurricane status. The best guess for the number of hurricanes, according to weather forecasters at the [...]
Tags: · global warming, hurricanes, tropical storms
Barbara Kessler
Andrew Winston
Danielle Nierenberg
Anthony Swift