Next week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will publish its report on the impacts of global warming. Building on its recent update of the physical science of global warming,1 the IPCC’s new report should leave the world in no doubt about the scale and immediacy of the threat to human survival, health, and wellbeing.
The impacts of global warming are likely to be "severe, pervasive and irreversible", a major report by the UN has warned. Scientists and officials meeting in Japan say the document is the most comprehensive assessment to date of the impacts of climate change on the world. Some impacts of climate change include a higher risk of flooding and changes to crop yields and water availability. Humans may be able to adapt to some of these changes, but only within limits.
It’s common knowledge among the scientific community that climate change will eventually acidify the oceans and turn them sour. What’s less common knowledge is when exactly it will happen. In the tropical Pacific Ocean, however, the answers are getting a little clearer — and they’re not pretty.
There is much to be desired in the mainstream media's coverage of energy politics and climate change, but perhaps the single most important fact that gets consistently overlooked -- that is scarcely apprehended by the general public and yet comes to mind for me every time a new pipeline or oil field gets approved -- is that greenhouse-driven warming operates on an extremely delayed timescale.
Does global warming make extreme weather events worse? Here is the #1 flawed reasoning you will have seen about this question: it is the classic confusion between absence of evidence and evidence for absence of an effect of global warming on extreme weather events. Sounds complicated? It isn’t. I’ll first explain it in simple terms and then give some real-life examples. The two most fundamental properties of extreme events are that they are rare (by definition) and highly random.
Once and for all, prominent U.S. scientists are saying, Americans need to wake up, get a grip, and face the reality that not only will human-caused climate change continue to noticeably impact local weather patterns from time to time but that it could also lead to "abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible" changes that will dramatically alter the lives of billions of people and the life systems supported by Earth.
“Temperatures have been flat for 15 years—nobody can properly explain it,” the Wall Street Journal says. “Global warming ‘pause’ may last for 20 more years, and Arctic sea ice has already started to recover,” the Daily Mail says. Such reassuring claims about climate abound in the popular media, but they are misleading at best. Global warming continues unabated, and it remains an urgent problem.
I’m going to say something that will probably seem completely outrageous. But I want you to think about it, because it’s true. You, where-ever you are now, are living through the first stages of a disaster in which there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and no safe place on Earth for you to go to avoid it.
Citing a peer reviewed scientific paper written over 40 years ago that clearly demonstrated the dangers of human-made carbon pollution and accurately predicted it would create a future of global warming, Dana Nuccitelli at the Guardian points out Thursday that "perhaps it's about time that we start listening" to climate scientists.
