30/12/2017

Trump's Call For Some 'Good Old Global Warming' Ridiculed By Climate Experts

The Guardian - 
  • US president again conflates weather with climate to mock climate change
  • Experts call comments ‘scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false’
Climate scientists have long warned against using individual weather events to assess global warming Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images
Donald Trump once dismissed it as a “hoax” created by the Chinese to destroy American jobs, but on a freezing Thursday night in the eastern US the president found himself pining for some of that “good old global warming”.
On holiday in Florida on Thursday, Trump wondered if global warming might not be such a problem after all.
As severe cold and record amounts of snow swept across the US east coast, Trump wrote on Twitter that his people “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against”.
“Bundle up!” he added.
The president was reheating two favourite tropes: the conflation of weather with climate to pour scepticism on global warming, and the supposed cost to the American taxpayer of the Paris climate accord, from which he has confirmed the US will withdraw.
Climate scientists, however, have long warned against using individual weather events to ponder the existence or otherwise of global warming. Weather, they point out, refers to atmospheric conditions during a short period; climate relates to longer-term weather patterns.
On Friday, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s project on climate change communication, said Trump’s tweet was “scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false”.
“There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is,” he said. “What’s going on in one small corner of the world at a given moment does not reflect what’s going on with the planet.”
The extreme cold snap in the eastern US is a rare example of a place experiencing below-average winter temperatures, he said, a point that was neatly illustrated by a map tweeted out by the Weather Channel on Friday.
The Weather Channel 
1) There is a difference between and .
2) Short-term snaps will continue to occur in a warming climate.
3) 2017 will likely be a top three warmest year on record for the globe.
Graphic: Univ. of Maine - Climate Change Institute
Elsewhere, Matthew England, a climate scientist from the University of New South Wales, called Trump’s comment “an ignorant misconception of the way the earth’s climate works”.
“Nobody ever said winter would go away under global warming, but winter has become much milder and the record cold days are being far outnumbered by record warm days and heat extremes,” he said. “Climate change is not overturned by a few unusually cold days in the US.”
David Karoly, a climate scientist from the University of Melbourne, put it even more bluntly: “It’s winter in the US. Cold temperatures are common in winter.”
Climate modelling showed cold snaps like the one in the US were actually becoming less common as a result of global warming, Karoly said, adding that rapid attribution analysis means scientists are now able to look more closely at “classes of events”.
That type of modelling for the north-east of the US, he said, showed that although there was a great deal of year-to-year variability, the average coldest temperature in December in the region has increased in the past 50 years.
In any case, the US is already getting that “good old global warming”. 2017 is set to be the third-warmest on record, prompting among other things a climate-fuelled hurricane season in the country’s south.
Experts also know climate change is linked to a dangerous pattern of major weather events. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US is on track to match or exceed the previous record year for extreme weather and climate events costing more than $1bn, including wildfires, hurricanes and flooding.
There had been 15 such events by the end of September, compared with 15 for the whole of 2016 and 16 in the record year of 2011.
Adam Smith, a climatologist at NOAA, said: “Climate change is playing a role, amplifying the frequency and intensity of some types of extreme weather that lead to billion-dollar disasters.”
With Hurricane Harvey devastating Texas and extraordinary wildfires in California, Smith said 2017 was expected to “shatter” the record for the US’s costliest year in terms of weather events. That was 2005, with losses of $215bn from disasters including Hurricane Katrina.
Trump’s tweet also revisited his claim that the Paris climate accord would have cost the US “trillions” of dollars. At a rally in Pennsylvania in April to mark his 100th day in office, Trump said “full compliance with the agreement could ultimately shrink America’s GDP by $2.5tn over a 10-year period”.
The politically non-aligned website Factcheck.org asked the White House for a source for that remark, and was pointed to a 2016 study by the conservative Heritage Foundation which found the Paris agreement “will result in over $2.5tn in lost GDP by 2035”.
While that is an 18-year period, not 10, Factcheck.org found the accuracy of Heritage’s statements depended on which numbers were used. The Heritage study used a carbon tax rate of $36, increasing 3% each year from 2015 to 2035. Other analyses have found the US would have needed only a carbon tax of $21.22 starting in 2017 to meet its Paris target by 2025.
Leiserowitz, meanwhile, criticised the president’s use of social media. “It’s meant to be red meat for his base,” he said. “They’re the ones most likely to be dismissive of climate change and the most likely to vote in the 2018 Republican primaries – so it’s a warning shot for the GOP members in Congress.”
The global warming tweet, he said, was another attempt by Trump to distract from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
He added that the idea a cold snap disproves global warming is a “zombie argument”, because though “it’s killed over and over by the science” it “keeps coming back for more brains”.
Trump’s tweet was “troll-like”, the scientist said, showing the president “delighting in sparking outrage among [his] opponents”.

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29/12/2017

On The Boil: Five Climate Lawsuits To Watch In 2018

Reuters - Sebastien Malo | Sophie Hares

Urgenda / Chantal Bekker
NEW YORK / TEPIC, MEXICO: - Lawyers and advocates stepped up the fight against climate change this year by pursuing a rising number of legal cases around the world that aim to test the limits of national laws.
Climate change cases numbered nearly 900 in 24 nations as of March, according to a survey by UN Environment and Columbia Law School, marking a steady increase in lawsuits filed to hold governments and companies to account over carbon pollution.
They include a handful of milestone suits that charge violations of various states’ constitutions.
Here are five cases whose outcomes, some expected in the coming year, could reshape the roles and responsibilities of governments and businesses in tackling climate change:

- URGENDA FOUNDATION V. KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS (NETHERLANDS)
This landmark case energized the climate movement in 2015 when a district court sided with the nearly 900 Dutch citizens behind it, ordering their government to cut greenhouse has emissions faster.
It was “one of the most important climate change decisions ever issued”, said Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in New York.
But the outcome is now being appealed and a decision could be handed down as early as 2018, said Gerrard.
The Urgenda ruling remains the only one of its kind globally to declare a government’s obligation to control climate change.
It did so by citing the Dutch constitution, prompting a flurry of similar complaints worldwide where plaintiffs are trying to enlist their nations’ founding principles to curb global warming.

- JULIANA V. UNITED STATES (UNITED STATES)
Trial in this federal suit filed by a group of 21 U.S. teenagers could begin in February 2018.
Building on the precedent established by the Urgenda case, the young people from Oregon charge their government’s climate policy is inadequate and flouts their constitutional right to live in a habitable atmosphere.
The case is currently stalled amid efforts by the U.S. government - fearful it will lead to a constitutional crisis - to prevent it going forward.
“It’s clearly a case to watch,” said Sean Hecht, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA in California.
“It would be extraordinary for a judge to take the step of holding the U.S. government responsible for this, but it’s not unthinkable,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

- LLIUYA V. RWE (GERMANY)
A Peruvian farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, is seeking $20,000 in damages from a large German energy utility based half-way around the world.
Lliuya argues that RWE AG holds some responsibility - by emitting planet-warming gases - for the melting of glaciers and rising water level of a lake near his Andean town.
Observers are calling the Lliuya suit, which is due to hear evidence in 2018, a test case of whether a company can be held financially liable for its contribution to the effects of climate change in other parts of the world.

- EXXON MOBIL CORPORATION V. MAURA TRACY HEALEY (UNITED STATES)
Exxon Mobil is battling attorney generals in Massachusetts and New York who are investigating the oil giant, after news reports charged in 2015 that its own scientists had found cutting fossil fuel use was needed to slow down climate change.
Exxon’s case against Massachusetts’ attorney general Maura Healey and a similar one against her New York counterpart seek to derail subpoenas to obtain the company’s internal documents on climate science.
“There’s a lot at stake because these companies are very concerned about potential liability,” said UCLA’s Hecht.

- GREENPEACE NORDIC V. GOVERNMENT OF NORWAY (NORWAY)
In another case rooted in a constitutional argument, this lawsuit charges that Norway violated the country’s constitution by letting energy firms explore for oil and gas in the Arctic Barents Sea.
With a judgment expected in January, a win by Greenpeace would “re-energize similar litigations in other countries”, said Columbia Law School’s Gerrard.

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From America's Hurricanes To Portugal's Fires, ABC Weather Looks Back At 2017's Deadly Extremes

ABC News - Kate Doyle | Ben Deacon

A helicopter dumps water on a burning house in the Anaheim Hills during October's California fires. (AP: Jeff Gritchen/The Orange County Register)
Cyclones, bushfires and heatwaves are typically Australian natural disasters, but in 2017 devastating fires, record heat, hurricanes and typhoons — what we call cyclones — struck around the world.
Here are a few of the events that caught our attention this year.

Cyclone Debbie
It was the cyclone that just kept on going.
Debbie made landfall near Airlie Beach as a category 4 system on March 28 with wind gusts of 263 kilometres per hour recorded at Hamilton Island, the highest gust ever recorded in the Queensland digital climate archive, and its initial impact was ferocious.
The 24-hour rainfall total for Queensland. (Supplied: BOM)
But what set Debbie apart from the average cyclone was the trail of drenching rain it left as its remnants made their way down the Queensland coast and across the New South Wales border.
In an historic move, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk closed all schools south of Agnes Water, north of Bundaberg, and east of Nanango in the South Burnett region, including Brisbane and the Gold Coast.


SES workers rescue a man from floodwaters in Lismore (ABC News)

The flooding did not stop at the border as far south in Lismore, NSW, 324.8 millimetres fell in 18 hours, leading to the highest river levels since 1974 and waist-high flooding in the CBD when the town's levee breached.
Media reports attributed nine deaths to Tropical Cyclone Debbie in Australia.
Debbie did not just leave it at that, as New Zealand's North Island was drenched when the tail end of the system made its way across the Tasman a week after it first made landfall in Queensland.
Thousands of homes were evacuated there as well.

Pakistan record heat
In May, there was a major heat event which affected most of the Persian Gulf but seemed to go largely under the radar in western media.
The town of Turbat in south-west Pakistan recorded 54.0 degrees Celsius, equal to the maximum temperature recorded in Mitrabah, Kuwait in July last year.
Be prepared for the heat
Neither of the temperatures have been officially confirmed by the World Meteorological Organisation, but if it turns out to be legitimate it will be a new Asian record.
These record high temperatures stir up debate around the global highest recorded temperature.
The current record of 56.7C taken in Death Valley, USA, in 1913 is viewed with scepticism because of dubious equipment.
Likewise the eastern hemisphere record of 55.0 recorded in Kebili, Tunisia, is also questionable due to inconsistencies in previous temperature recording practices.
So it could well be that the hottest temperature directly recorded on Earth happened this year.
Australia's official hottest temperature was recorded at Oodnadatta in 1960 at 50.7 degrees Celsius.
A man is rescued from floodwaters in Houston. (AP: David J Phillip)
US hurricane cluster
Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia, and Maria — the US was battered by hurricane after hurricane this year.
Of these, Harvey, Irma and Maria did the most damage.
Harvey led the pack as the first major hurricane to hit the mainland US in almost a decade when it stalled over Houston and led to widespread, devastating flooding.
Hurricane Irma, even stronger than Harvey, battered the Caribbean before travelling across Cuba, to make landfall in Florida.


Three hurricanes threatening land simultaneously in the Western Atlantic Basin.

What made Irma special meteorologically was the length of time it maintained extremely high wind speeds, more than 297km/h for 37 hours, far and away the highest ever recorded.
Maria's biggest impact was on Puerto Rico, where US media reports suggest the death toll was at least 48 people.
As of early December, around one million people on the island were still without power, more than two months after the hurricane ripped through on September 20.

East Africa drought
UN data suggests there are more than 15.2 million people who remain severely food insecure on the horn of Africa as of December 8.
Some parts received decent rain in October and November this year but it will take time for those benefits to trickle through, especially when coupled with other conflicts.
For other areas, this will be the fourth consecutive year the rains have failed.
Somaliland's drought has seen some families lose up to 90 per cent of their livestock. (ABC News: Sally Sara)
As with many of the other events on this list, the question of whether climate change is to blame has been raised and, as with many other events, the answers are complicated.
Extreme cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are expected to be less common because of climate change, but could be worse when they do hit because of their increased capacity to dump more rain and rising oceans.
Likewise, extreme fires are expected to be worsened by higher temperatures and longer fire seasons.
With the East African drought though, the role of climate change is not definitive.

Portugal fires
Portugal suffered two major rounds of deadly fires this year, one in June and one in October.
The July fires led to 62 deaths and the October fires killed more than 40 people.
The July fires took place during a heatwave when there were several days in a row above 40C.
The October fires were whipped up by the passing of Hurricane Ophelia.
The unusually placed storm was in the area thanks its formation much further north east than a normal Atlantic hurricane, combined with a run-in with the mid-latitude jet stream. It made a beeline for Ireland rather than taking the typical route and heading for the Americas.


Rare fire devil on camera in Portugal (ABC News)

As with the Californian fires later in the year, there has been speculation that introduced eucalypts contributed to the rapid spread of these fires.

South Asia floods
It was reported that more than 1,300 people died in the flooding that hit India, Bangladesh and Nepal in mid-August this year.
UNICEF estimated that 31 million had been affected by the floods associated with a strong monsoon.
At the height of the storms, Bangladesh received as much rain in two hours as it would in a week of a typical monsoon.
Tens of thousands of schools have been inundated or damaged, making it impossible for children to continue their education. (AP: Rajanish Kakade)
California fires
Wildfires whipped by powerful winds have swept through northern California. (AP: Jeff Gritchen/The Orange County Register)
These fires were not just significant because Ellen DeGeneres and Paris Hilton's homes were evacuated, the fires in early October led to tens of thousands of people being forced to flee their homes and more than 40 people lost their lives.
Entire suburbs were reduced to rubble.
An aerial photo of the devastation left behind from wildfires north of San Francisco. (Reuters: California Highway Patrol)
Firefighters faced the impossible task of fighting 14 fires at once in gusts of up to 120km/h with low relative humidity.
The fires were fanned by what are known as the 'Diablo' winds in Northern California.
Like their more well-known Southern Californian counterpart, the Santa Ana winds, they come from over the continent bringing hot dry conditions.
Diablo winds are traditionally associated with wildfires, especially in autumn.

Victoria storms
Although many in Melbourne were underwhelmed by the much-publicised December storms, there was no denying the rainfall totals in north-east Victoria were record-breaking.
Echuca, Euroa and Eildon all recorded their highest daily rainfall totals on record.

Rainfall Totals
Record breaking rainfall totals recorded in the 24 hours to 9 am December 21 2017
The storm set off debate surrounding natural disaster messaging in Australia and is a timely reminder to be prepared heading into the traditional summer disaster period.
The Sevens and Castle creeks in flood around Euroa. (ABC News: Stephanie Anderson)
Philippines typhoon and landslides
On December 16, Tropical Storm Kia-tak — known locally as Urduja — made landfall in the Philippines.
Severe flooding and landsides were triggered when two months of rain fell in 48 hours.
Less than two weeks later, Typhoon Tembin — also known as Typhoon Vinta — hit the Philippines.
So far, more than 250 people are confirmed dead as a result of the storm.


Landslides kill 32 in storm-hit Philippine province (ABC News)

Central Australian floods
Technically during the dying days of 2016, but close enough that we thought it warranted a mention, the flooding rains that hit central Australia on Christmas night were described as a once in a half-century storm by the Bureau of Meteorology.


Uluru's temporary waterfall (ABC News)

In Kintore 61.4mm fell between 8:00pm and 9:00pm alone, and 232mm fell in the 24 hours after 9:00am on Christmas Day.
The widespread flooding closed the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and several locations were cut off for weeks.

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2017: The Year In Extreme Weather

The Conversation - 

Trees and power lines in Puerto Rico, damaged by Hurricane Maria in September. REUTERS/Alvin Baez
Overall 2017 will be the warmest non-El Niño year on record globally, and over the past 12 months we have seen plenty of extreme weather, both here in Australia and across the world.
Here I’ll round up some of this year’s wild weather, and look forward to 2018 to see what’s around the corner.

Drought and flooding rains… again
It feels as if Australia has had all manner of extreme weather events in 2017. We had severe heat at both the start and end of the year. Casting our minds back to last summer, both Sydney and Brisbane experienced their hottest summers on record, while parts of inland New South Wales and Queensland endured extended periods of very high temperatures.
Sydney sweltered last summer. Joel Carrett/AAP
More recently Australia had an unusually dry June and its warmest winter daytime temperatures on record. The record winter warmth was made substantially more likely by human-caused climate change.
The end of the year brought more than its fair share of extreme weather, especially in the southeast. Tasmania had by far its warmest November on record, beating the previous statewide record by more than half a degree. Melbourne had a topsy-turvy November with temperatures not hitting the 20℃ mark until the 9th, but a record 12 days above 30℃ after that.
November was rounded off by warnings for very severe weather that was forecast to strike Victoria. Melbourne missed the worst of the rains, although it still had a very wet weekend on December 2-3. Meanwhile, northern parts of the state were deluged, with many places recording two or three times the December average rainfall in just a couple of days.
Euroa in northern Victoria copped a drenching. AAP Image/Brendan McCarthy
Hurricane after hurricane after hurricane…
Elsewhere in the world there was plenty more headline-worthy weather.
The Atlantic Ocean had a particularly active hurricane season, with several intense systems. Hurricane Harvey struck Texas and its slow trajectory resulted in record-breaking rainfall over Houston and neighbouring areas.
Then Hurricanes Irma and Maria, both of which reached the strongest Category 5 status, brought severe weather to the Caribbean and southeastern United States just a couple of weeks apart. Island nations and territories in the region are still recovering from the devastation.
Road to ruin: Houston’s Interstate Highway 45 was submerged by Hurricane Harvey. REUTERS/Richard Carson
Around the same time, the Indian subcontinent experienced a particularly wet monsoon season. Flooding in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal killed more than 1,000 people and affected tens of millions more.
Other parts of the world experienced their own severe weather events. Whether it was summer heat in Europe or wildfires in California, 2017 dished up plenty of extremes.
In many cases, especially for heat extremes, we can rapidly identify a human influence and show that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of such events.
For other weather types, like the very active hurricane season and other extreme rain or drought events, it is harder (but not always impossible) to work out whether it bears the fingerprint of climate change.

What’s in store for 2018?
The main problem when trying to offer an outlook is that extreme weather is hard to predict, even on the scale of days or weeks in advance, let alone months.
For Australia, with a weak La Niña in the Pacific, there are few clear indications of what the rest of the summer’s weather will bring. There is a suggestion that we can expect a slightly wetter than average start to the year in parts of the southeast, along with warmer than average conditions for Victoria and Tasmania. Beyond that it is anyone’s guess.
The La Niña is also likely to mean that 2018 won’t be a record hot year for the globe. But it’s a safe bet that despite the La Niña, 2018 will still end up among the warmest years on record, alongside every other year this century. Rising global average temperatures, along with our understanding of the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, are one of our clearest lines of evidence for human-caused climate change.
So it’s hard to say much about what extreme weather we’ll experience in 2018, other than to say that there’s likely to be plenty more weather news to wrap up in a year’s time.

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28/12/2017

Climate Change Cases Predicted To Make A Legal Splash In 2018

Reuters - Sophie Hares | Sebastien Malo



 NEW YORK / TEPIC, MEXICO: A clutch of high-profile legal cases over responsibility for the effects of climate change will be fought out in courtrooms next year as claims stack up against both governments and some of the world’s biggest oil and energy companies.
Lawsuits in the United States brought by young activists and several Californian cities are most likely to make waves, but legal action by a Peruvian farmer in Germany and Greenpeace in Norway could also cause ripples, said lawyers and academics.
“There is a trend towards more litigation around climate change, and probably the lack of political action in the United States may increase that trend,” said Sophie Marjanac, a London-based lawyer at non-profit environmental law group ClientEarth. “Where there’s an abdication of leadership on climate action, I think the courts will have a greater role to play," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Lawyers and campaigners are closely watching the looming legal battles they say could set the stage for fresh claims against major oil and industrial companies and pressure governments to ramp up action on climate change.

JULIANA V UNITED STATES
With US President Donald Trump and his cabinet members named as defendants, the Juliana v United States case brought by 21 young activists from Oregon is set to be one of the most closely followed in 2018.
In the federal case, scheduled for trial in February, the plaintiffs hope to establish that the government’s climate change policies have failed to protect their constitutional right to live in a habitable environment. The case remains locked in legal limbo, however, as the government tries to block it from proceeding.
Lawyers and academics say Juliana builds on the groundbreaking Urgenda case brought by hundreds of Dutch citizens in 2015, which saw the government ordered by a district court to accelerate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. However, that outcome is now being appealed, with a decision likely early next year.
Elsewhere, a January judgment is expected in a case brought by Greenpeace Nordic and environmental group Nature and Youth against Norway, which they claim has breached its pledge to combat climate change by granting oil and gas exploration rights.

HISTORY REPEATING?
Some lawyers and researchers say claims seeking specific damages from energy and industrial companies for actions that may have contributed to climate change could have a bigger impact than constitutional cases.
A successful ruling against a heavyweight corporate could potentially unleash a wave of similar claims, say case watchers, who reference long-running fights against tobacco, asbestos and pesticide manufacturers over harm to human health.
At least seven Californian cities and counties have brought lawsuits against major fossil fuel companies. San Francisco and Oakland are seeking billions of dollars to help protect against rising sea levels they blame on climate change. “Why should taxpayers and impacted communities alone bear the growing costs of climate impacts when fossil fuel companies have played an outsized role in making the problem worse?” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, after Santa Cruz city and county both filed lawsuits this month.
Tracy Hester, a lecturer at the University of Houston Law Center, said such claims could “redefine the rules of the game”. “They’re essentially not trying to bring a global claim that’s going to lock up all these issues in one court... they’re different in that they’re seeking damages,” he said.
Trump’s move to pull out of the Paris climate change accord and roll back environmental regulations means campaigners are increasingly resorting to litigation, as they did under former President George W. Bush, said case watchers.

MITIGATION NOT LITIGATION
While climate-related suits are not new, scientific advances could bolster plaintiffs as they try to pin responsibility for climate change on particular polluters.
A German court has agreed to hear evidence in a case brought by Peruvian farmer SaŴl Luciano Lliuya against RWE AG, asking the power giant to pay to reinforce a lake above his village dangerously swollen by glacial melt he says is caused by global warming the company contributed to. Yet, while there has been a steady rise in cases seeking to hold corporations and governments to account, few make it to court and legal action is largely limited to richer countries.
Despite a few exceptions—including a farmer who successfully sued Pakistan’s government in 2015—mitigating rather than litigating against climate change is favoured in poorer countries where legal success is less likely, according to Cosmin Corendea, a legal expert at the United Nations University in Bonn.
But the knock-on effect of rulings on companies and governments could eventually be felt around the world, including in countries already struggling with climate change impacts. “The decision of the court echoes,” said Corendea. “It’s important in climate change litigation to have this kind of momentum.”

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The 10 Most Important U.S. Climate Stories In 2017

Climate Central - 

Following a year of weather extremes, disasters and policy clashes, we asked our readers to help us pick out the most important climate stories from the U.S. in 2017. Here's what you said.

HURRICANES
This was a brutal year for hurricanes in the U.S. A trifecta of storms (Harvey, Irma and Maria) battered Florida, the Gulf Coast and Puerto Rico, causing deaths and widespread destruction, driving many from their homes. Climate change is fueling hurricanes by increasing their rainfall, wind speeds, and storm surges. Our World Weather Attribution team was among the groups of scientists that found climate change increased the amount of flooding rainfall from Harvey.

SEA-LEVEL RISE SCIENCE
Sea-level rise projections got worse for U.S. coastal communities. New research factoring in the projected effects of warming on Antarctic ice outlined new scenarios for Gulf Coast and East Coast cities, where more than 10 feet of sea-level rise is possible in places this century. Sea-level rise could be kept to less than two feet if we aggressively curb our greenhouse gas emissions, reducing risks and impacts.



 U.S. GOVERNMENT
The Trump administration worked to reverse climate protections this year, seeking to replace the Clean Power Plan and eventually withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The administration has been removing the phrase “climate change” from government websites and it greenlighted construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. All the while, hundreds of thousands of people marched for science and the climate, and states and cities and nations abroad vowed to fight harder to slow global warming.

TESLA
2017 was the year of Tesla co-founder Elon Musk. From a battery factory in Nevada, to South Australia where his batteries are helping a wind farm provide reliable power, to a new energy grid in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, Tesla has taken the lead in producing batteries for energy storage and to power electric cars. And it has developed new all-electric semi trucks and solar shingles!

WILDFIRES
California is battling its largest wildfire on record right now, but this wildfire season wasn’t just bad for the Golden State. Wildfires burned more than 9.5 million acres across the U.S., destroying neighborhoods and releasing dangerous smoke pollution. The Western wildfire season is 105 days longer than it was 45 years ago as climate change fuels more and bigger blazes.



THIRD HOTTEST YEAR ON RECORD
2017 is likely to be the third-hottest year on record for the U.S., behind 2016 and 2012. This record heat is particularly astounding considering the absence of an El Niño, which usually boosts global temperatures. If the final data matches expectations, five of the 10 hottest years on record will have come since 2006.

SOCIAL INJUSTICE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
The homes of Americans were destroyed or threatened by extreme weather and rising seas, with the poor hit the hardest. Hundreds of thousands of people had to flee Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, relocating to Florida and other areas. Thousands more in New Jersey and Louisiana are hoping for federal help as they grapple with the ongoing effects of flooding linked to rising seas and climate change-fueled storms.

SOLAR ENERGY SHINES
Production of clean energy climbed as prices continued to come down. In March, 10 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S. came from wind and solar, with help from Texas (America’s number 1 wind provider) and California (the largest solar producer). Bloomberg New Energy Finance concluded in the summer that solar energy can now be as cheap as power from new coal plants in the U.S.

TRANSPORTATION POLLUTION
Your car is contributing to the biggest source of U.S. emissions. Transportation recently overtook electricity generation as the biggest source of greenhouse gases from the U.S., as coal power plants were retired and replaced with renewables and natural gas facilities.

HEAT WAVES
It may be winter right now, but don’t forget about extreme heat, which is the number one weather-related killer. Climate change made a February heat wave across much of the eastern U.S. three times more likely. In June, another heat wave in the Southwest prevented planes in Arizona from taking off. Danger days are surging from Power, Montana to New York City, and a dramatic rise in dangerous heat and humidity will continue in the summertime.

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Climate Change Is Going To Drive Thousands Of Refugees To Cooler Countries

Futurism - Lou Del Bello

By the end of the century, climate change may drive 660,000 additional asylum seekers per year toward Europe. Growing mass migration is only one of the social and environmental consequences of increasing temperatures.
Creative Commons
Climate Threat Multiplier
Climate change doesn’t just warm the air and melt glaciers. It acts as a “threat multiplier,” playing on the vulnerabilities of ecosystems and communities in ways that we are yet to fully understand.
Migration is a case in point: the way it’s changing, and is projected to change in the future, highlights how the impacts of climate change on one place spill over to other parts of the world. A new study in Science finds that as crops fail in agricultural regions of the world, more people will seek asylum in Europe in the coming decades. If the current warming trends were to continue, the research predicts that by 2100 Europe will receive around 660,000 extra applicants each year.
The authors analyzed the relation between localized changes in weather and the number of asylum applications by that country’s migrants between 2000 and 2014, discovering that when temperatures in the source country changed from a moderate average of 20° C (68° F), applications increased.
They modeled future migration patterns by comparing present trends against the global warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They found that under a pathway where the concentration of greenhouse gases does not significantly decrease, and global temperatures increase by 4.8° C (8.6° F), asylum applications are likely to rise by 188 percent by the end of the century.



Speaking with the BBC, lead author Wolfram Schlenker, of Columbia University, acknowledged the uncertainty that comes with such models: “We basically have to assume that the relationship we uncovered between 2000 and 2014 is going to remain unchanged for the next 80 years,” he said.
He explained that “there are many reasons for why it could go either way. We could start adapting to warmer temperatures, so the impacts would be less, but if you shock people every year with the same thing, it could be much worse. We could be under or overestimating the effects.”

Breaking Point
While our resilience as a species means we can adapt to a great deal of change — by upgrading our infrastructure or breeding heat-resistant crops, among other actions — we too eventually reach a breaking point. New research in Environmental Research Letters finds that by 2100, rising temperatures combined with increased humidity will make some areas of the world uninhabitable for humans.
Humans cool their bodies by sweating. As sweat evaporates off the skin, it disperses the excess heat; but in an air thick with moisture, this process is slowed down or halted altogether. Under these conditions, organs start to fail, eventually leading to death. Previous papers have identified this upper limit as a sustained temperature of 35° C (95° F).
The new study maps the areas of the planet most at risk to experience not only greater heat but also higher density of vapor in the air. Among the regions likely to be affected are the Amazon, western and central Africa, northern India, eastern China and the southeastern part of the United States.
“It’s not just about the heat, or the number of people. It’s about how many people are poor, how many are old, who has to go outside to work, who has air conditioning,” said study coauthor Alex de Sherbinin, of Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, in a statement. He said that even if the weather does not lead to a sudden collapse of the affected human systems, working in farms or in non air conditioned environments may lead to chronic health problems such as kidney disease — another case of climate change as a threat multiplier. It is likely that over time, many will eventually seek a new home elsewhere.
Although the science is not conclusive, there is evidence that climate change-induced drought might have exacerbated the social unrest that led to some of the most brutal conflicts of this century, including the Syrian war. The science of extreme weather attribution is developing fast, but there is still a long way to go before we can identify with certainty the role played by climate change in any extreme event.
What scientists now know is that what happens in one particular part of the planet will most likely trigger a cascade of consequences that will be felt far away. These are not only environmental consequences, but also social, and will increasingly involve the movement of large numbers of people. As mass migration is already causing tensions all over the world, leaders will have to find new strategies to manage the growing nomad communities of the future.

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative