15 August 2016, Washington Post, What we can say about the Louisiana floods and climate change. Here we are again, with a flood event upending the lives of large numbers of Americans and making everybody wonder about the role of climate change. In this case, it’s the stunning, multiday flooding in southern Louisiana that hit after a low pressure system combined with record amounts of atmospheric water vapor, dumping more than two feet of rainfall over three days in some places. At least 11 people were killed, and thousands have had to leave their homes.On Monday, climate researchers and weather experts were in what’s by now a familiar posture — explaining that, no, this event wasn’t “caused” by climate change, but then again, it’s precisely the sort of event that you’d expect to see more of on a warming planet. “Climate change has already been shown to increase the amounts of rain falling in the most intense events across many parts of the world, and extreme rainfall events like this week’s Louisiana storm are expected [to] grow increasingly common in the coming years,” wrote the Weather Underground’s Bob Henson and Jeff Masters. [‘The worst situation I’ve ever been through.’ Six killed, thousands displaced during historic Louisiana flooding] “Louisiana is always at risk of floods, naturally, but climate change is exacerbating that risk, weighting the dice against us,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate researcher at Texas Tech University, told The Washington Post. “How long will it be until we finally recognize that the dice are loaded?” The easiest link between climate change and extreme weather events involves heat waves, arecent study by the National Academy of Sciences found. This makes sense: A warming planet overall breaks warm-temperature records more frequently than cold-temperature records and sets the stage for lengthier, or stronger, bouts of extreme heat. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
August 2016, The Monthly, The message was clear. Brexit, Trump and the federal election show how the old categories of left and right are crumbling. Pauline Hanson is back in parliament, the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union, Donald Trump wants to build a wall along the United States’ border with Mexico, and the neoliberal agenda is failing badly at ballot boxes around the Western world. The old world order of the Washington Consensus has broken apart more quickly than a new one has been built, but the lack of a clear path forward in no way diminishes the significance of the collapse in public support for free trade, trickle-down economics and the privatisation of essential services. The new “right-wing” populists are hostile to all that the neoliberals held dear. The extent of the shift in public sentiment has been concealed by the chaos of new parties and new paradigms, which are being blamed, or credited, for the tumult. But it is not democracy that is in chaos, but rather the futile attempt to cram rapidly changing political alignments into the centuries-old categories of left and right. Take Brexit, for example. One of the Leave campaign’s most prominent voices, Nigel Farage, best known for his anti-immigrant politics, shamelessly argued that the UK’s financial contribution to the EU should be spent instead on improving publicly funded health care. This “left-wing” priority resonated across the political spectrum, and the political establishment spectacularly underestimated the potency of the issue. It was of symbolic importance, as was Britain’s migration program. The population voted for the promise of a national government that protected its people as well as its borders. Was Brexit a win for the “conservative right” on the issue of sovereignty, or was it a loss for the “libertarian right” on free trade? Read More here
7 August 2016, The Guardian, Scientists warn world will miss key climate target. Grim backdrop to vital global emissions talks as new analysis shows 1.5C limit on warming is close to being broken. Leading climate scientists have warned that the Earth is perilously close to breaking through a 1.5C upper limit for global warming, only eight months after the target was set. The decision to try to limit warming to 1.5C, measured in relation to pre-industrial temperatures, was the headline outcome of the Paris climate negotiations last December. The talks were hailed as a major success by scientists and campaigners, who claimed that, by setting the target, desertification, heatwaves, widespread flooding and other global warming impacts could be avoided. However, figures – based on Met Office data – prepared by meteorologist Ed Hawkins of Reading University show that average global temperatures were already more than 1C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38C in February and March. Keeping within the 1.5C limit will be extremely difficult, say scientists, given these rises. These alarming figures will form the backdrop to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talks in Geneva this month, when scientists will start to outline ways to implement the climate goals set in Paris. Dates for abandoning all coal-burning power stations and halting the use of combustion engines across the globe – possibly within 15 years – are likely to be set. Read More here
2 August 2016, Carbon Brief, Scientists confirm multiple climate records broken in 2015. Last year saw records in the Earth’s climate system continue to tumble, says the latest State of the Climate report from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The 300-page report, now in its 26th year, is an annual assessment of the world’s climate, scrutinising the Earth’s land, oceans, ice and atmosphere. It is compiled by more than 450 scientists from 62 countries. Carbon Brief takes a look at how rising greenhouse gas emissions, with the help of a strong El Niño event, made 2015 into a record-breaker. Greenhouse gases Last year was record-breaking for concentrations of all three of the main long-lived greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). At the Mauna Loa Observatory, where scientists have been monitoring CO2 since the 1950s, the average concentration for the year as a whole surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time. At 400.8ppm, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 3.1ppm greater than 2014 – the largest annual increase of the 58-year record. In addition, March 2015 was the first time average CO2 concentration across the globe has been more than 400ppm for an entire month. Global annual average CO2 levels for 2015 finished just shy of the 400ppm milestone, at 399.4 ppm. You can see this in the chart below, one of several graphics produced alongside the report. Meanwhile, levels of both methane and nitrous oxides reached new record highs in 2015, at 1834.0 parts per billion (ppb) and 328.2ppb, respectively. Read More here