27 November 2015, Climate News Network, UN counts climate’s human cost. COP 21: New study informs Paris summit delegates that extreme weather in the last two decades has claimed well over half a million lives and cost trillions of dollars. In the 20 years since the first UN conference on climate change, weather-related disasters have claimed 606,000 human lives, damaged or destroyed 87 million homes, and injured, displaced or left helpless a total of 4.1 billion people. A new study from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) demonstrates that 90% of all disasters are now weather-related. And the average of 335 weather-related disasters per year in the last 10 years is twice that recorded between 1985 and 1995. The report, The Human Cost of Weather-Related Disasters 1995-2015, is intended to focus attention during the UN climate change conference – which opens in Paris on Monday − on the damage already inflicted by global warming as a consequence of rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in turn as a consequence of the human combustion of fossil fuels and the destruction of the planet’s forests. Read More here
13 November 2015, Climate News Network, Global warming drains the water of life. Melting snowpack in Turkey’s Lesser Caucasus mountains. New research warns that rising temperatures are reducing the mountain snow on which billions of people in lowland areas depend for their water supply. Up to two billion people who depend on winter snow to deliver their summer water could see shortages by 2060 as upland and mountain snowpacks continue to dwindle. An estimated 300 million people could find, 45 years on, that they simply won’t have enough water for all their needs, according to new research. Climate change driven by rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide – in turn, fed by human combustion of fossil fuels – may already be affecting global precipitation. Researchers have consistently found that much of the world’s drylands will increase as global average temperatures rise. But warmer temperatures increasingly also mean the water that once fell as snow, to be preserved until the summer, now falls as winter rain, and runs off directly. The snow that does fall is settling at ever higher altitudes and melting ever earlier. Reliable flow This is bad news for agricultural communities that depend on a reliable flow of meltwater every summer. California is already in the grip of a sustained drought, made worse by lower falls of snow. Great tracts of Asia depend on summer meltwater from the Himalayan massif and the Tibetan plateau. Justin Mankin, an environmental scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in the US, and colleagues report in Environmental Research Letters journal that they studied 421 drainage basins across the northern hemisphere. Read More here