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....

First sparks of climate change seen in Australian infernos

The Philippine Star via Xinhua (China): As Australians face another week of record temperatures and 99 bushfires continue to rage across the state of NSW alone, authorities are starting to grapple with a future where even the first sparks of climate change could turn the arid continent into an inferno.

 With temperatures soared into the forties on Saturday - despite the first signs of an unexpected cool change - a total fire ban across the state was extended for a further 24 hours through Saturday in response to the threat. Australia is now a country under climate siege.

The fires stem from the continent's lingering, seasonal droughts. Cruel, dry and arid conditions now permeate even in its humid climatic regions. While the merest stretch of dry years bring the disaster of fire hazards, the summer of 2012/13 has eclipsed most heatwaves on record and witnessed the outbreak of hundreds of fires in virtually every Australian state.

Now in Australia, drought condition conducive to widespread outbreaks of wildfire extends into the Humid Subtropical and even Marine climates. One of the most damaging fires this week occurred in Tasmania, an island state with a climate more usually equated with the highlands of Scotland.   

Climate experts have begun to identify Australia's ongoing disaster as the first, terrible consequences of the future yet to come for the southern continent, and that the wider world must develop planning strategies to adapt to such disasters stemming from an increasingly hotter and dryer earth....

Tasmanian bushfires, January 4, 2013, shot by ToniFish, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

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

Temperatures to rise by six degrees in Middle East countries

Laurence Caramel in the Guardian (UK): Countries in the Middle East and north Africa will be among those hardest hit by global warming, unless the upward trend for greenhouse gas emissions can be checked, the World Bank warned last month at the Doha climate change conference.

There will be lower rainfall, higher temperatures and continuing desertification, said Rachel Kyte, World Bank vice-president for sustainable development, during her presentation of the report on Adaptation to a Changing Climate in the Arab Countries.

According to the forecasts, average temperatures could rise by 3C between now and 2050. But night temperatures in city centres could increase by double that figure. The report notes that over the last three decades 50 million people have been affected by climate disasters. Severe flooding is now a recurrent event. But the increasing scarcity of water resources is the biggest challenge for countries in the region, which already have some of the lowest per capita reserves in the world.

Kuwait and Qatar depend on desalination plants for almost 40% of their needs. With demand for water forecast to increase by 60% over the next 30 years, due to population growth and changing ways of life, the World Bank fears there is a high risk of shortages and conflict. Measures to adapt to climate change are still limited, even if a regional strategy for reducing the risks of natural disasters has been adopted.

The lack of reliable data is a stumbling block for any preventive measures. The launch of a research centre, announced by Qatar last month, could help remedy this situation. Funded by the Qatar Foundation, in partnership with the Potsdam Institute, the centre will focus on the impact of climate change on countries in the Gulf....

A natural arch in Jebel Kharaz, Jordan, shot by Etan J. Tal, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Climate change threatens French wine

Marie Doezema in CNBC: From rising shorelines to devastating hurricanes, the visible effects scientists say climate change is wreaking on daily life no longer surprise many people around the world. The French have their own take on just how radically life may change.

"In 20 years, the English will be making Grenache from Chateauneuf-du-Pape," says Herve Lethielleux, co-owner of L'Etiquette, a wine boutique in central Paris, about a wine variety from subtropical southeastern France.

That's because the changing climate is affecting the delicate balance of weather, soil and other factors that are central to the production one of their main commodities, something that's already had a visible effect elsewhere around the globe.

"If you look at Tasmania, it was too cool to grow grapes 25 to 40 years ago," says Gregory Jones, a research climatologist at Southern Oregon University, about the wine-producing region of Australia. "Today, it's clearly much more suitable."

For French winemakers already keenly feeling the effects of growing competition from other countries, higher temperatures in recent years have meant grapes with lower acidity and higher sugar content. That makes for higher alcohol and fruitier — some say cloying — wines....

Image by PRA, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Climate likely to hit Pakistan and region severely

Oman Daily Observer: As the Bay of Bengal is cooling down and the North Arabian Sea is warming up, the number of tropical cyclones has increased owing to the temperature shifting trend. Data collected from 56 meteorological stations in Pakistan shows a sharp rise in temperature during the first decade of the 21st century, except the year 2005, while a rise of four degrees centigrade is expected to occur within the century in the Indus delta region.

Impacts included loss of vegetation, deforestation and irregular precipitation, says a study, part of the Synthesis Report 2012, which was released on Sunday. The report provides a summary of results of 11 studies carried out over the past two years (2011, 2012) under the Building Capacity on Climate Change Adaptation in the Coastal Areas of Pakistan, a Worldwide Fund for Nature-Pakistan project jointly administered with partners LEAD-Pakistan and WWF-UK with the financial support of European Union.

Conducted by Pakistan’s chief meteorologist Dr Ghulam Rasul, the study titled Climate Data Modeling Analysis presents eye-opening climatic trends that have been observed in the country in a decade….

World Bank Group : Urgent action needed on climate change in Arab world

4-traders: The impact of climate change will be especially acute in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, according to a new World Bank Group report, and immediate action will be needed to avoid the projected consequences of worsening water shortages and rising food insecurity. Adaptation to a Changing Climate in the Arab Countries provides a comprehensive assessment of the threat to the region posed by increasingly severe weather, and offers a set of policy options for the urgent task of managing current effects and building resilience against those yet to come.

"Reducing vulnerability to climate change will require concerted action on multiple levels," said Rachel Kyte, World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development. "Political leadership now, will be critical in establishing climate change as a national and regional priority."

The Arab world has been adapting to climate change for centuries. There is a long history and tradition of coping with the associated challenges, such as changes in temperature and rainfall. New climate change risks are emerging at a much faster rate, including the prospect of a world that is four degrees hotter, and resilience built up over years is being severely tested.

These risks have been identified and assessed in the new climate report which was prepared in partnership with the League of Arab States, involving specialists, researchers, policymakers and civil society organizations from across the region. The report reinforces the warning that decades of poverty reduction efforts could be reversed as contained in the recent World Bank publication, Turn Down The Heat: Why a 4° C Warmer World Must be Avoided....

Climate change serious for India

Newstrack India via IANS: Terming the current global climate change scenario as "serious times", a US environmental law expert Wednesday cautioned that the rise in sea level in the Indian Ocean could make cities like Kolkata and Mumbai vulnerable.

"There might be particular problems due to the sea level rise in the Indian Ocean. Cities like Kolkata and Mumbai are the vulnerable cities," said Rob Verchick, who holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University, New Orleans, US. He is also the faculty director of the Center for Environmental Law and Land Use at the university.

Verchick added: "Surat and Ahmedabad are responding well to adapt to the climate change. Surat has a climate change board and they are monitoring the situation quite well." He was addressing students at the School of Oceanography and Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University...

Verchick, who recently served US president Barack Obama's administration as deputy associate administrator for policy at the Environmental Protection Agency, said: "For adapting to climate change we have to adopt smarter ways. The first thing we must do is that government and other agencies should look in to assess vulnerability of a place to climate change like temperature, sea level rise etc."

"Then we have to ask, how will those changes affect the area and then in a democratic process decide what we can do with the area," he said...

Hope Bridge in Surat, shot by Shishir Desai, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

A call for harder choices on climate change adaptation

University of Southampton news release: Uncertainty about how much the climate is changing is not a reason to delay preparing for the harmful impacts of climate change says Professor Robert Nicholls of the University of Southampton and colleagues at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, writing today in Nature Climate Change.

The costs of adapting to climate change, sea-level and flooding include the upfront expenses of upgrading infrastructure, installing early-warning systems, and effective organisations, as well as the costs of reducing risk, such as not building on flood plains.

Robert Nicholls, Professor of Coastal Engineering at the University of Southampton and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, says: “Some impacts of climate change are now inevitable, so it is widely agreed that we must adapt. But selecting and futnding adaptation remains a challenge.”

Professor Nicholls and his co-authors describe two ways of assessing how much adaptation to climate change is enough by balancing the risk of climate change against the cost of adaptation. First they describe cost-benefit analysis where the cost of the adaptation has to be less than the benefit of risk reduction. Alternatively, decision makers can seek the most cost-effective way of maintaining a tolerable level of risk. This approach is easier for policymakers to understand, but thresholds of tolerable risk from climate change are not well defined.

The Thames Estuary Gateway is the only place in the UK where a level of protection against flooding is defined in law – a 1 in 1000 year standard of protection which needs to be maintained with rising sea levels. The authors conclude that adaptation decisions need exploration across a variety of different interpretations of risk, not a single answer.

“Adaptation decisions have further benefits. The tenfold increase in the Netherlands standard of flood protection proposed in 2008 has sent a message to global business that the Netherlands will be open in the future, come what may,” adds Professor Nicholls....

A ramshackle jetty in the foreground, the Thames Barrier in the background, shot by Sarah Charlesworth, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Climate change hits Africa

Sarah Bomkapre Kamara in Deutsche Welle: Africa is reeling from climate change. Floods, drought, famine, food shortages are buffeting the vulnerable continent, which lacks the resources to protect itself. A UN climate conference has just opened in Qatar.

Climate change is already hitting the continent hard. Floods in Nigeria, famine and drought in the Sahel, the shrinking of Lake Turkana are all just a preamble of what is to come if the continent does not act fast. As the two week UN climate conference gets underway in Doha, Qatar, the African UN regional group at these talks is hoping for a "second commitment" and funds that will help their countries adapt to climate change and its effects.

"African countries are looking forward to a commitment period that doesn't carry over excessive emission rise or hot air," Ruth Mhlanga, youth and solutions coordinator, Greenpeace Africa told DW's Africalink show.

This commitment is an extention of the Kyoto protocol of 1997 which binds developed nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by an average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels between the years 2008 and 2012. The African UN regional group at the conference says failure to extend Kyoto would leave only national actions, with no legally binding U.N. framework.

A UN survey warns the world is on target for a rise in temperatures that will cause more floods, drought, heat waves and rising sea levels. Africa should prepare for the worst. "The average increase in temperature in Africa is likely to be higher than the average increase globally," Micheal Kliene, deputy executive director of IUFRO - The World's Network of Forest Science told DW....

On the road to Timbuktu in Mali, shot by Annabel Symington, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Climate change evident across Europe, confirming urgent need for adaptation

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research: Climate change is affecting all regions in Europe, causing a wide range of impacts on society and the environment. Further impacts are expected in the future, potentially causing high damage costs, according to the latest assessment published by the European Environment Agency today.

The report, ‘Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2012’ finds that higher average temperatures have been observed across Europe as well as decreasing precipitation in southern regions and increasing precipitation in northern Europe.

The report, ‘Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2012’ finds that higher average temperatures have been observed across Europe as well as decreasing precipitation in southern regions and increasing precipitation in northern Europe. The Greenland ice sheet, Arctic sea ice and many glaciers across Europe are melting, snow cover has decreased and most permafrost soils have warmed.

Extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods and droughts have caused rising damage costs across Europe in recent years. While more evidence is needed to discern the part played by climate change in this trend, growing human activity in hazard-prone areas has been a key factor. Future climate change is expected to add to this vulnerability, as extreme weather events are expected to become more intense and frequent. If European societies do not adapt, damage costs are expected to continue to rise, according to the report.

Some regions will be less able to adapt to climate change than others, in part due to economic disparities across Europe, the report says. The effects of climate change could deepen these inequalities. Jacqueline McGlade, EEA Executive Director said: “Climate change is a reality around the world, and the extent and speed of change is becoming ever more evident. This means that every part of the economy, including households, needs to adapt as well as reduce emissions.”...

Climate change report warns of dramatically warmer world this century

The World Bank: Like summer’s satellite image of the melting Greenland ice sheet, a new report suggests time may be running out to temper the rising risks of climate change. "Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided," warns we’re on track for a 4°C warmer world marked by extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.

Moreover, adverse effects of a warming climate are “tilted against many of the world's poorest regions” and likely to undermine development efforts and global development goals, says the study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics, on behalf of the World Bank. The report, urges "further mitigation action as the best insurance against an uncertain future."

"A 4°C warmer world can, and must be, avoided – we need to hold warming below 2°C," said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim. "Lack of action on climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today. Climate change is one of the single biggest challenges facing development, and we need to assume the moral responsibility to take action on behalf of future generations, especially the poorest."

The report, reviewed by some of the world’s top scientists, is being released ahead of the next comprehensive studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013/14, and follows the Bank’s own Strategic Framework for Development and Climate Change in 2008 and the World Development Report on climate change in 2010. "Turn Down the Heat" combines a synthesis of recent scientific literature with new analysis of likely impacts and risks, focusing on developing countries. It chronicles already observed climate change and impacts, such as heat waves and other extreme events, and offers projections for the 21st century for droughts, heat waves, sea level rise, food, water, ecosystems and human health....

Climate change: taking a toll on coffee?

Eryn Brown in the Los Angeles Times: .... [R]esearchers demonstrated this week that the beloved cup of joe may be at dire risk from climate change. Writing in the journal PLoS One on Wednesday, research botanist Aaron Davis of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew  in London and colleagues reported that climate warming could drive wild varieties of Coffea arabica to extinction by 2080.

Using a computer model, the group analyzed different warming scenarios, focusing on 20-year time spans around 2020, 2050 and 2080. In the best-case scenario for 2080, the African habitats they studied — in Ethiopia, the Sudan and Kenya — would experience a 65% reduction in suitable localities for planting.  In the worst-case scenario, suitable localities declined nearly 100%.  “Our modeling shows a profoundly negative trend for the future distribution of indigenous Arabica coffee under the influence of accelerated global climate change,” the study authors wrote.

Arabica is the prized plant that produces 70% of the more than $15 billion worth of coffee sold around the world each year.  Mostly it is cultivated on farms, which grow varieties descended from a small number of plants that were carried out of Ethiopia in the 1600s and 1700s, Davis told National Geographic this week. 

The lack of genetic diversity in cultivated Arabica plants is a cause for concern for the industry, Davis said, noting that "Arabica's history is punctuated by problems with diseases, pests, and productivity problems — and growers have always gone back to the wild and used genetic diversity to address them.”  By interbreeding wild plants with resistance to pests or climate extremes with the cultivated varieties, they could maintain healthy crops....

Coffee arabica berries, shot by Mette Nielsen, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

New evidence links Mayan collapse to climate change

Voice of America: The ancient Mayan civilization, which developed a sophisticated culture in the Central American rainforests, vanished mysteriously a thousand years ago.  Now, an international team of anthropologists, archeologists, chemists and climatologists says it has identified the cause of the Mayan collapse: climate change.

To create a weather record for the past 2,000 years, the scientists analyzed a natural mineral formation called a stalagmite from a cave in Belize, using oxygen-isotope dating to determine how much rain fell on the region over the centuries. Stalagmites build up incrementally, like tree rings, as water drips through the cave ceiling, preserving an accurate climate record.

Mayan rulers commissioned stone monuments to record important events such as their rise to power, major battles, civic unrest and strategic alliances.  Pennsylvania State University Anthropology professor Douglas Kennett, the study's co-author, says the team was able to compare changes in the society documented on those monuments with their new climate timeline.

On a podcast for the journal Science, he said the team saw a relationship between rainfall levels and political stability. "The growth of Maya civilization and increases in population and levels of sophistication actually correlate with a very wet interval that spans several hundred years and the decline of the Maya actually appeared to correlate with a downturn generally in climate and climate drying," he said....

A Mayan zodiac circle, shot by theilr, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license