Climate change to profoundly affect the Midwest, new report says

University of Michigan News Service: Climate change will lead to more frequent and more intense Midwest heat waves while degrading air and water quality and threatening public health. Intense rainstorms and floods will become more common, and existing risks to the Great Lakes will be exacerbated.

Those are some of the conclusions contained in the Midwest chapter of a draft report released last week by the federal government that assesses the key impacts of climate change on every region in the country and analyzes its likely effects on human health, water, energy, transportation, agriculture, forests, ecosystems and biodiversity.

...University of Michigan aquatic ecologist Donald Scavia was a lead convening author of the Midwest chapter. Dan Brown of the School of Natural Resources and Environment was a lead convening author of the chapter on changes in land use and land cover. Rosina Bierbaum of SNRE and the School of Public Health was a lead convening author of the chapter on climate change adaptation. Missy Stults, a research assistant with Bierbaum and a doctoral student at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, was a contributing author on the adaptation chapter.

... The report stresses that climate change is already affecting Americans, that many of its impacts are expected to intensify in coming decades, and that the changes are primarily driven by human activity. "Climate change impacts in the Midwest are expected to be as diverse as the landscape itself. Impacts are already being felt in the forests, in agriculture, in the Great Lakes and in our urban centers," said Scavia, director of the Graham Sustainability Institute and special counsel to the U-M president on sustainability issues.

In the Midwest, extreme rainfall events and floods have become more common over the last century, and those trends are expected to continue, causing erosion, declining water quality and negative impacts on transportation, agriculture, human health and infrastructure, according to the report....

The Boone River in Iowa, shot by Tim Kiser (Malepheasant), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Five most frightening findings of National Climate Assessment Federal Report

Center for Biological Diversity: Climate change is already affecting the United States and will threaten our future by endangering the food supply, increasing the risk of flooding and powerful hurricanes, and warming the country by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 unless we make deep cuts in carbon pollution, according to a new federal report.

The draft National Climate Assessment, released for public comment this week, explains that climate change is already delivering hotter summers, more flooding and periods of extreme heat that “last longer than any living American has ever experienced.” But the report also offers five particularly disturbing predictions about climate change, according to scientists with the Center for Biological Diversity. The Center was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that forced the federal government to release the second national climate assessment in 2008.

“This report gives Americans a disturbing preview of a harsh future ruled by climate chaos,” said Shaye Wolf, the Center's climate science director. “Our country will suffer searing heat, surging seas and terrifying storms unless we act immediately against greenhouse gas pollution. Fighting climate change should be the first thing on President Obama’s mind in the morning and his last thought before bed.”

Here are the five most disturbing findings of the draft National Climate Assessment:

• More extreme heat: America will warm by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 if carbon emissions keep rising, the report says. Greenhouse gas pollution has already roughly doubled the risk of extreme heat events (such as the scorching summer of 2011 in Texas), and major heat waves will become more intense and more common. ...
• Rising seas and more damaging extreme weather: The power of the strongest hurricanes will continue to rise, the report says, and most areas of the United States will see more frequent and more intense downpours, which can lead to harmful flooding. ...
• Endangered food supply: Food insecurity will increase in America and around the world. ...
• Biodiversity threatened: Many plants and animals and their habitats may be overwhelmed by climate change and other stressors....
• Carbon emissions rising rapidly: Carbon pollution is still increasing, with global emissions “on track to be even higher than the high emissions scenario” analyzed in the report. America’s contribution to global emissions is about 20 percent, the report notes, and our efforts to reduce pollution are too slight to comply with international agreements to avoid dangerous climate change....

Impact of climate change hitting US, congressional report finds

The New York Daily News via Reuters: The consequences of climate change are now hitting the United States on several fronts, including health, infrastructure, water supply, agriculture and especially more frequent severe weather, a congressionally mandated study has concluded.

A draft of the U.S. National Climate Assessment, released on Friday, said observable change to the climate in the past half-century "is due primarily to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuel," and that no areas of the United States were immune to change. "Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington State, and maple syrup producers in Vermont have observed changes in their local climate that are outside of their experience," the report said.

Months after Superstorm Sandy hurtled into the U.S. East Coast, causing billions of dollars in damage, the report concluded that severe weather was the new normal. "Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts," the report said, days after scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2012 the hottest year ever in the United States.

Some environmentalists looked for the report to energize climate efforts by the White House or Congress, although many Republican lawmakers are wary of declaring a definitive link between human activity and evidence of a changing climate....

Removing debris from the Joplin, Missouri, tornado, US Army Corps of Engineers photo

Extreme weather more persuasive on climate change than scientists

Suzanne Golderberg in the Guardian (UK): As one of the Marx brothers famously said: who do you believe, me or your own eyes? Climate sceptics, it turns out, are much more likely to believe direct evidence of a changing climate in the form of extreme weather events than they do scientists, when it comes to global warming.

A poll released on Friday by the Associated Press-GfK found rising concern about climate change among Americans in general, with 80% citing it as a serious problem for the US, up from 73% in 2009. Belief and worry about climate change were rising faster still among people who do tend not to trust scientists on the environment.

Some of the doubters said in follow-up interviews that they were persuaded by personal experience: such as record temperatures, flooding of New York City subway tunnels, and news of sea ice melt in the Arctic and extreme drought in the mid-west. About 78% of respondents overall believed in climate change, a slight rise from AP's last poll in 2009. The result was in line with other recent polls.

Among climate doubters, however, 61% now say temperatures have been rising over the past century, a substantial rise from 2009 when only 47% believed in climate change.

The change was not among the hard core of climate deniers, but in the next tier of climate doubters, AP reported. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that category. "Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along," Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University psychologist who studies attitudes to climate change and consulted on the poll, told the news agency....

US Air Force picture of Hurricane Sandy effects on the New Jersey coast

Winter storm brings devastation to Syria and neighbors

Erika Solomon and Oliver Holmes in Reuters: The worst winter storm in two decades has hit the eastern Mediterranean this week, bringing destruction and death to Syria and its neighbors who are already dealing with a refugee crisis from the country's civil war.

Opposition activists in Syria, where war has forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and cut off access to food, fuel and power for cities and towns, say dozens of people have died there in four days of relentless extreme weather.

At least 17 people have also died due to the storm in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Schools in some areas have been shut for days, refugee camps flooded and villages isolated by closed roads. Meteorological agencies in Israel and Lebanon both called it the worst storm in 20 years.

Snowfall in the Syrian capital Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo did not halt the fighting between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, which has killed more than 60,000 people in the past 21 months....

Winter in the village of Deirmama, Masyaf, Hama Governorate, Syria. The old mosque is covered with snow. A 2007 shot by Ammagaro., Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Travel chaos as deadly storm hits northeast US

The Times of India: The US northeast was battered by heavy snow and strong winds on Thursday as a mighty storm carved a violent arc across several states, killing more than a dozen people and snarling holiday travel.

More than 3,000 flights have been cancelled since Christmas Day including 746 on Thursday, as the storm wreaked havoc from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes before heading northeast, according to tracker FlightAware.

In New York City, high winds caused major air traffic delays: 186 flights were cancelled outright at the three major airports -- Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark. "Winter weather has arrived for many parts of the state, so as a precaution we have opened the emergency operation center to coordinate response efforts using all state and local resources," New York governor Andrew Cuomo said.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg used residents still without power two months after deadly superstorm Sandy slammed into the city in October to seek refuge in emergency shelters. Although the storm was winding down late Thursday, a warning for heavy snow remained in effect overnight in New Hampshire and western Maine, the National Weather Service said.

The storm was departing the region, the government forecasters said, "but not before dumping another six to eight inches (15 to 20 centimeters) of snow over portions of Maine."...

Shot by Jeff the quiet, public domain

Typhoon-hit Philippines threatened by new storm

Terra Daily via AFP: A tropical storm set to hit the Philippines on Christmas Day could spark floods and landslides, forecasters warned, even as the country struggles to recover from a typhoon that killed hundreds.

Tropical Storm Wukong is expected to bring strong winds and heavy rain to southern island Dinagat from 10:00 pm (1400 GMT), as well as nearby islands Samar and Leyte, the state weather service said.

"These could bring floods and landslides, particularly in landslide-prone areas like southern Leyte and Samar," the service's Nathaniel Servando said.

Servando said storm surges of up to four metres (13 feet) were also expected on the coasts of the three islands.

However, he said the storm was expected to spare the large southern island of Mindanao, which was devastated by Typhoon Bopha earlier this month.

Wukong would pass northwest across the central islands Wednesday and blow out to the South China Sea on Thursday, he said....

Tropical Storm Wukong on Christmas day

Russia, Ukraine hit with massive snowfall

Terra Daily via AFP: Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday battled through heavy snowfall which created record traffic jams in Moscow and cut power in some 300 Ukrainian towns. Colossal amounts of snow fell overnight, making the morning commute into the Russian capital a nightmare, with stop-and-go traffic on most major streets to the center.

"Today Moscow was one step away from complete transportation paralysis," a presenter said on Channel One's afternoon news. A government plane with several ministers was delayed by the weather flying out of Moscow due to particularly heavy snowfall in Vnukovo airport, Russian agencies reported.

The airport said on its website that it was forced to close down its landing strip for fifteen minutes every hour in order to clean it and treat it with anti-freezing agents.

The emergency ministry in Tver region northwest of Moscow -- where thousands of trucks were stuck in a 190 kilometre-long jam over the weekend -- warned that snowfall is once again slowing down transport.

"There is increased risk of traffic jams and accidents due to snowfall," the ministry said on its website, warning of a decreased speed limit on the highway M10 that links Moscow and St. Petersburg....

First snow on a Ukrainian railway bridge in 2010, shot by Maksim Nakonechny, public domain

Some cities find small steps key to storm protection

Scott Malone in Reuters: In the aftermath of the historic floods caused by Superstorm Sandy, some city leaders have begun to argue for the construction of sea walls capable of shielding the U.S. coastline from ever more intense storms. But in Saco, Maine, storm protection comes in a far less glamorous package. Along what used to be Surf Street, owners of beachfront houses are jacking their homes up to allow storm surges from Saco Bay to flow underneath them.

The northeastern city of 19,000 people has reason to be wary of the water - over the past decade it has washed away six homes and in 2007 took several blocks of Surf Street itself. Today the street is a gravel track along a wall of dishwasher-size chunks of rock built by the city to blunt the force of storm waves.

The road "was damaged several times and we repaired it," said Dick Lambert, Saco code enforcement officer. But after a 2007 nor'easter swept away much of it, "We said, ‘We're spending good money after bad. This time we're going to stop.'"

The Saco City Council in May also adopted a resolution requiring owners of waterfront buildings who rebuild or do substantial renovations to raise them 3 feet above forecast 100-year flood levels - a projection of low-lying areas likely to be flooded once a century on average.

..."People want to look to a big, bold project they can point to that will make people feel safe," such as sea walls, said Adam Freed, a Nature Conservancy director who until August was one of New York City's top officials on sustainability. But those big projects, he added, do not guarantee safety....

The Saco River in Saco, Maine, shot by Decumanus, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Subject to disclaimers.

Big city slowly returns to bright lights after Sandy

Jonathan Allen in Reuters: Few thought it would take quite so long to fully restore the dimmed lights of the famed skyline of New York City's Financial District. At last, however, firms displaced by the flooding and power outages brought on by Superstorm Sandy seem ready to return downtown, if a little warier of the rivers and sea that surrounds them.

Water Street was more water than street when Sandy hit. Nearly three weeks later, many of the flooded office towers that line the street as it skirts the East River toward the harbor at Manhattan's southernmost tip remain closed.

Yellow caution tape still decks the doors to darkened, mucky lobbies. The usual crowds of suited office workers have vanished from the sidewalks, replaced by a handful of clean-up workers and security officers.

"It's definitely a hiccup in our revenue and a disruption of our ongoing business operations," said Lou Colasuonno, a senior managing director of FTI Strategic Communications, a PR firm specializing in crisis management...

New York City and the dangling crane on 57th Street, shot by JordanBalderas, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license