15 August 2016, Washington Post, What we can say about the Louisiana floods and climate change. Here we are again, with a flood event upending the lives of large numbers of Americans and making everybody wonder about the role of climate change. In this case, it’s the stunning, multiday flooding in southern Louisiana that hit after a low pressure system combined with record amounts of atmospheric water vapor, dumping more than two feet of rainfall over three days in some places. At least 11 people were killed, and thousands have had to leave their homes.On Monday, climate researchers and weather experts were in what’s by now a familiar posture — explaining that, no, this event wasn’t “caused” by climate change, but then again, it’s precisely the sort of event that you’d expect to see more of on a warming planet. “Climate change has already been shown to increase the amounts of rain falling in the most intense events across many parts of the world, and extreme rainfall events like this week’s Louisiana storm are expected [to] grow increasingly common in the coming years,” wrote the Weather Underground’s Bob Henson and Jeff Masters. [‘The worst situation I’ve ever been through.’ Six killed, thousands displaced during historic Louisiana flooding] “Louisiana is always at risk of floods, naturally, but climate change is exacerbating that risk, weighting the dice against us,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate researcher at Texas Tech University, told The Washington Post. “How long will it be until we finally recognize that the dice are loaded?” The easiest link between climate change and extreme weather events involves heat waves, arecent study by the National Academy of Sciences found. This makes sense: A warming planet overall breaks warm-temperature records more frequently than cold-temperature records and sets the stage for lengthier, or stronger, bouts of extreme heat. Read More here
Yearly Archives: 2016
August 2016, The Monthly, The message was clear. Brexit, Trump and the federal election show how the old categories of left and right are crumbling. Pauline Hanson is back in parliament, the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union, Donald Trump wants to build a wall along the United States’ border with Mexico, and the neoliberal agenda is failing badly at ballot boxes around the Western world. The old world order of the Washington Consensus has broken apart more quickly than a new one has been built, but the lack of a clear path forward in no way diminishes the significance of the collapse in public support for free trade, trickle-down economics and the privatisation of essential services. The new “right-wing” populists are hostile to all that the neoliberals held dear. The extent of the shift in public sentiment has been concealed by the chaos of new parties and new paradigms, which are being blamed, or credited, for the tumult. But it is not democracy that is in chaos, but rather the futile attempt to cram rapidly changing political alignments into the centuries-old categories of left and right. Take Brexit, for example. One of the Leave campaign’s most prominent voices, Nigel Farage, best known for his anti-immigrant politics, shamelessly argued that the UK’s financial contribution to the EU should be spent instead on improving publicly funded health care. This “left-wing” priority resonated across the political spectrum, and the political establishment spectacularly underestimated the potency of the issue. It was of symbolic importance, as was Britain’s migration program. The population voted for the promise of a national government that protected its people as well as its borders. Was Brexit a win for the “conservative right” on the issue of sovereignty, or was it a loss for the “libertarian right” on free trade? Read More here
13 August 2016, Pacific Standard, America’s Latest 500-Year Rainstorm Is Underway Right Now in Louisiana. Observers are calling the record floods a “classic signal of climate change” — and high-resolution models predict another one to two feet of rain by Saturday evening. By mid-morning on Friday, more than a foot of rain had fallen near Kentwood, Louisiana, in just a 12-hour stretch — a downpour with an estimated likelihood of just once every 500 years, and roughly three months’ worth of rainfall during a typical hurricane season. It’s the latest in a string of exceptionally rare rainstorms that are stretching the definition of “extreme” weather. It’s exactly the sort of rainstorm that’s occurring more frequently as the planet warms. In response to the ongoing heavy rains, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards. declared a statewide state of emergency on Friday, and local governments aredistributing sandbags, conducting water rescues, and facilitating evacuations. The New Orleans Times-Picayune is maintaining a live blog of the latest developments. The Tickfaw River north of New Orleans soared 18 feet in about 12 hours to a new record crest on Friday morning, beating the water level of April 1983, and five feet higher than the high-water mark during Hurricane Isaac in 2012, the last hurricane to make landfall in Louisiana. Read More here
11 August 2016, NationTalk, IPCC meetings in Geneva, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is holding two meetings this month in Geneva to advance work on its forthcoming reports. From 15 to 18 August 2016, around 85 experts joined by members of the IPCC Bureau will take part in the scoping meeting for the Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty (SR1.5). The IPCC was invited to prepare this Special Report by the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris in December 2015. The Conference reached an agreement to limit the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 ºC above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 ºC. The report will be delivered in 2018, in time for a “facilitative dialogue” that will take place that year to take stock of progress under the Paris Agreement. The Special Report is being developed under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups. Read More here