One last time: We do not have to have statistical certainty to be certain that Sandy was caused by climate change. When climate scientists have been warning us for twenty years that superstorms like this would happen as our planet warms—and it happens—how big of a fool do those deniers and delayers think we are?…
First published on The Rag Blog, November 5, 2012. Climate change plain and simple: Arctic Sea ice melt caused Superstorm Sandy. And things are starting to get crazy with this ongoing string of extreme and unprecedented weather events. Complete Article
Research from last March tells us that Superstorm Sandy was directly caused by climate change. I won’t bore you with more quotes from Governors Cuomo or Christie, or the latest “speculation” in the media about whether or not Superstorm Sandy was or was not “influenced” by climate change. I’ll not repeat the list of stunning…
In the twelve months prior to April 16, high temperature records outnumbered low temperature records 3 to 1. James Hansen told the U.S. Senate in 1988 that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” After all of the recent unprecedented…
It is not because of increased population and it is not because of increased observation. Think that our growing population is enduring increasing impacts from severe weather and you would be correct. But adjusting extreme weather events for what the scientists call “population bias” is nothing new. What is new is the amount of…
How Many Unprecedented Historic Weather Records Have to be Broken for Climate Change to Get Some Respect? The Science of Early Spring So far in 2012 in Austin we have had bout the same amount of rain than we did in the 12-month period that marked the drought that peaked last summer (the deepest 12-month…
March 3, 2012: — How many more people will have to die in these unprecedented outbreaks before the delayers get it? It’s hard to say. By all (media) accounts, these outbreaks are not as bad as in the past. We have inflation and more people to increase the chance of damage and death. The D&D…
(This article is an expansion of and provides technical backup for Bruce Melton’s three-part series, “Welcome to Climate Change in Texas,” published in December 2011 and January 2012 on The Rag Blog.) Read More — Extra: Welcome to Climate Change Texas: The Worst-Case Scenario is Happening (expansion and backup) Part…
The Texas Forest Service tells us that a half billion trees have died. The first of this series of droughts in 2005/6 was just classified as extreme. The last two have been one category worse than extreme — the exceptional category. The last 12 months were drier than the worst 12 months of the great…
AUSTIN — If this is not climate change, then this is exactly what climate change will be in as little as a decade. What has been happening in Texas, with these unprecedented (in time frames that matter) droughts and wildfires, is exactly what the climate scientists have been warning us about for over 20 years….
Widespread one foot totals, even more widespread 2 foot totals, with peaks up to 32 inches fell in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Eleven dead, 3 million without power. Heavy wet snow with leaves still on the trees. NJ Conn and New York – states of Emergency. The storm blanketed states from Virginia to Maine and its…
2011 represents the highest damage cost-to-date in the U.S. for any year since 1980 when we began tracking Billion-dollar disasters. Economic damage costs to date in the US approach $32 Billion. The damage cost-to-date in the U.S. from natural disasters is typically less than $6 Billion, from the usual combination of winter storms, crops losses…
A phone conference and press release about climate change induced extreme weather, by the Union of Concerned Scientists, brings to light what climate scientists have been telling us for decades. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is the leading U.S. science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. Founded in 1969,…
April 30, More and more scientists are finally making the realization that this common excuse for the wicked climate change induced extremes of weather we have been having are actual ALL being caused by climate change. Today in real climate science land, "we can not tell if any one individual weather event is caused…
More than 175 have been killed. Let’s put this into perspective. In 1936, the U.S. population was about 128 million. Today it has almost tripled to 308 million. Supposing that the population density has remained the same (it has not, many more people live in the cities now than they did in the ’30s) we…
Abstract below. The summer of 2010 was exceptionally warm in eastern Europe and large parts of Russia. We provide evidence that the anomalous 2010 warmth that caused adverse impacts exceeded the amplitude and spatial extent of the previous hottest summer of 2003. "Mega-heat waves" such as the 2003 and 2010 events broke the 500-year-long seasonal…
A decrease in Polar sea ice and the extreme winter events of the northeastern U.S. and Europe in 2005 have been recreated in modeling. It appears that warmer temperatures in the Arctic have an impact thousands of miles away as the jet stream makes a huge bend south. The results are snowpocali, or snowpocalypses. Only…
A Duke University-led team of climate scientists has looked at 60 years of U.S. and European weather and climate data and found the Bermuda High has increased in intensity. Their finding have shown that this, in-turn, has led to an increase in the intensity of the weather extremes in the southeastern U.S. The Bermuda High,…
"In Russia, the wildfires are believed caused by a warming climate that made the current summer the hottest on record. The hotter weather increases the incidence of lightning, the major cause of naturally occurring biomass burning. Soja said she hopes the wildfires in Russia prompt the country to support efforts to mitigate climate change….
Freshwater is flowing into Earth’s ocean in greater amounts every year, thanks to more frequent and extreme storms related to global warming, according to a first-of-its-kind study by a team of NASA and university researchers. "In general, more water is good," Famiglietti said. "But here’s the problem: Not everybody is getting more rainfall, and those…
