Crazy Weather to America: Get It Yet?

After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in 10 Americans now believe that "global warming is affecting the weather."

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant's fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont's iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene's rampage through the state in August 2011. It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont's my home, it took the theoretical—the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure—and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I'm not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they're drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that "global warming is affecting the weather." No less striking, 35 percent of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale's Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, "People are starting to connect the dots." More


 

Virginia ruling aids Alaska climate suit

The Virginia Supreme Court has handed down an unprecedented ruling on companies’ liability for global warming-related damages — a first-in-the-nation decision that could portend massive consequences for energy companies and environmental lawyers.

The ruling stems from an ongoing case in federal court, in which the Alaskan island town of Kivalina accused a handful of mostly U.S. energy companies of contributing to global warming, which it says has rendered the town uninhabitable. One of the energy companies named in the lawsuit, Arlington-based AES Corp., was then sued in Virginia by its insurance carrier, which objected to having to defend the company and possibly pay damages associated with global warming as part of a policy covering accidents.

“In this instance, the allegations of negligence do not support a claim of an accident,” Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn wrote in a 16-page opinion issued on April 20.

Some analysts say the opinion, the first of its kind on the subject, could set policy on an emerging issue of litigation for years to come. More

 

World Bank Expert Speaks On New Report on Cities And Flooding

World Bank expert, Abhas K. Jha speaks to UNISDR about the new report "Cities and Flooding: A Guide to Integrated Urban Flood Risk Management for the 21st Century" published by the World Bank and the Global Facility for Disaster Risk and Recovery.

Read more: http://www.unisdr.org/archive/26532

 

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Addresses Philanthropists Forum

18 April 2012: Speaking at the Annual Conference of the Global Philanthropy Forum, Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), called on philanthropists to fuel the existing "momentum for both the sustainability and the energy revolutions.”

Figueres stated that, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), elevated temperatures contribute to extreme weather conditions and projections indicate that such extreme events will become even more severe going forward. She warned that climate change is beginning “to undo many of the development gains” made over the past few decades, while emphasizing that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions “continue to rise.” Stressing the need move away from “business-as-usual,” Figueres underscored that “momentum for the sustainability and the energy revolutions is building.”

She welcomed the adoption of policies on climate change and renewable energy at the country level, adding that “they are there to be built upon.” She also noted a growing investment trend in renewable energy, and that international climate policy “is becoming clearer,” thereby contributing to sustainable development and the clean energy revolution.

She provided an overview of the Durban Climate Change Conference and its outcomes, qualifying it as “the most encompassing and furthest reaching conference in the history of the climate change negotiations.” Underlining that although governments have “clearly set the direction” in Durban, she recognized that they “cannot deliver on their own.” Figueres called for philanthropic and private funding and engagement in implementation, adding that this funding should focus on two areas in order to made a significant stride towards a low-carbon and sustainable future, namely: increasing public awareness, creating a demand for decisive government action and increasing government’s political space; and accelerating action on the ground.

The Conference took place in Washington, DC, US, from 16-18 April 2012. [Christiana Figueres’ Speech] [Global Philanthropy Forum Website]

Evaluating a 1981 temperature projection -James Hansen

Unlocking the secrets to ending an Ice Age

It has long been known that characteristics of the Earth’s orbit (its eccentricity, the degree to which it is tilted, and its “wobble”) are slightly altered on timescales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Such variations, collectively known as Milankovitch cycles, conspire to pace the timing of glacial-to-interglacial variations.

Despite the immense explanatory power that this hypothesis has provided, some big questions still remain. For one, the relative roles of eccentricity, obliquity, and precession in controlling glacial onsets/terminations are still debated. While the local, seasonal climate forcing by the Milankovitch cycles is large (of the order 30 W/m²), the net forcing provided by Milankovitch is close to zero in the global mean, requiring other radiative terms (like albedo or greenhouse gas anomalies) to force global-mean temperature change.

The last deglaciation occurred as a long process between peak glacial conditions (from ~26-20,000 years ago) to the Holocene (~10,000 years ago). Explaining this evolution is not trivial. Variations in the orbit cause opposite changes in the intensity of solar radiation during the summer between the Northern and Southern hemisphere, yet ice age terminations seem synchronous between hemispheres. This could be explained by the role of the greenhouse gas CO₂, which varies in abundance in the atmosphere in sync with the glacial cycles and thus acts as a “globaliser” of glacial cycles, as it is well-mixed throughout the atmosphere. However, if CO₂ plays this role it is surprising that climatic proxies indicate that Antarctica seems to have warmed prior to the Northern Hemisphere, yet glacial cycles follow in phase with Northern insolation (“INcoming SOLar radiATION”) patterns, raising questions as to what communication mechanism links the hemispheres.

There have been multiple hypotheses to explain this apparent paradox. One is that the length of the austral summer co-varies with boreal summer intensity, such that local insolation forcings could result in synchronous deglaciations in each hemisphere (Huybers and Denton, 2008). A related idea is that austral spring insolation co-varies with summer duration, and could have forced sea ice retreat in the Southern Ocean and greenhouse gas feedbacks (e.g., Stott et al., 2007). More

 

Clean Energy Lags Put World on Pace for 6 Degrees Celsius of Global Warming

New estimates from the International Energy Agency depict a world failing to reduce its reliance on burning fossil fuels, which emits the CO2 causing climate change.

LONDON -- The world is far behind on delivering the low-carbon energy it needs, and unless urgent action is taken, calamitous climate change is certain, the International Energy Agency told a meeting yesterday of energy ministers whose countries account for 80 percent of global energy demand. An executive of the world energy watchdog said that renewable power was on track to stop the planet from tipping into the climatic unknown and that industry and transportation had made some progress but had significant room for improvement. But he asserted that all other sectors, including carbon capture and storage, the drive for clean coal, nuclear energy and biofuels, were falling behind the timelines needed to minimize global warming.

"Under current policies, we estimate that energy use and CO2 emissions would increase by a third by 2020 and almost double by 2050. This would likely send global temperatures at least 6 degrees Celsius [10.8 degrees Fahrenheit] higher. Such an outcome would confront future generations with significant economic, environmental and energy security hardships -- a legacy that I know none of us wants to leave behind," IEA deputy executive director Richard Jones told the opening session of the Clean Energy Ministerial meeting, jointly hosted by the United Kingdom and the United States. More


 

Will Rio+20 make a difference to sustainable development

Will June's climate conference prove to be a vital chance to renew political commitment for sustainable development or just more talk and no action?

Echoing throughout the above video is one striking point. When it comes to climate change, the clock is ticking and the international community needs to listen.

"When I look ahead at Rio and beyond, it seems to me that our scarcest resource is time", says Lester Brown, president at the Earth Policy Institute.

"What we're actually looking at is a race between tipping points, between natural, environmental tipping points on the one hand and political tipping points on the other."

David Suzuki, founder of David Suzuki Foundation, mirrors Brown, calling for urgent action against "the crisis of our time".

"The sense of urgency is absolutely critical. I cannot stand to have just another meeting where people come, do their thing, and then leave as if, oh, back to the same old problems," Suzuki says.

But as Jonathon Porritt, founder of Forum for the Future, argues, the world has been "at a critical point for years" and yet progression in areas such as cutting carbon emissions and scaling up sustainable development is still too slow.

"We know that this critical point is not really a point, it's a sort of period of time that we have available to us to effect these changes and we've been in that available period of time, in my opinion, for at least 20 and I would probably argue 40 years," Porritt says.

Expectations for Rio+20 are generally low but as Bill Ford, executive chairman, Ford Motor Company, believes, the advances in technology and the shift of mindset within some companies, means that the tables have turned since the original Rio conference. More