7 September 2017, The Guardian, The unprecedented drought that’s crippling Montana and North Dakota. hen Rick Kirn planted his 1,000 acres of spring wheat in May, there were no signs of a weather calamity on the horizon. Three months later, when he should have been harvesting and getting ready to sell his wheat, Kirn was staring out across vast cracked, gray, empty fields dotted with weeds and little patches of stunted wheat. “It’s a total loss for me,” said Kirn, who operates a small family wheat farm on the Fort Peck Reservation, an area of north-eastern Montana that lies right in the heart of the extreme climatic episode. “There’s nothing to harvest.” Kirn’s story is typical across the high plains in Montana and the Dakotas this summer, where one of the country’s most important wheat growing regions is in the grips of a crippling drought that came on with hardly any warning and, experts say, is without precedent. While much of the country’s attention in recent weeks has been on the hurricanes striking southern Texas and the Caribbean, a so-called “flash drought”, an unpredictable, sudden event brought on by sustained high temperatures and little rain, has seized a swathe of the country and left farmers with little remedy. Across Montana’s northern border and east into North Dakota, farms are turning out less wheat than last year, much of it poorer quality than normal. Read More here
Tag Archives: Extreme Events
5 September 2017, Reuters, ANALYSIS-Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath could see pioneering climate lawsuits. After disasters in the United States like Hurricane Harvey, lawyers get busy with lawsuits seeking to apportion blame and claim damages. This time, a new kind of litigation is likely to appear, they say – relating to climate change. That’s because rapid scientific advances are making it possible to precisely measure what portion of a disaster such as Harvey can be attributed to the planet’s changing climate. Such evidence could well feed negligence claims as some victims of the hurricane may seek to fault authorities or companies for failing to plan for such events, according to several lawyers interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “As extreme weather events and related damages and other impacts increase in severity … courts will increasingly be called upon to seek redress for damages suffered,” said Lindene Patton, a risk-management lawyer with the Earth & Water Group, a Washington-based specialty law firm.Hurricane Harvey last week brought unprecedented destruction as incessant rain and winds of up to 130 miles per hour caused catastrophic damage, making large swathes of Texas and Louisiana uninhabitable for weeks or months. Images of soldiers and police in helicopters and special high-water trucks rescuing Texans stranded by floodwater brought back painful memories of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana a decade ago. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rejected a contention by scientists and the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization that the historic rainfall from Harvey was linked to climate change. Still, the dramatic scenes rekindled questions about the extent to which climate change can be blamed for such a monster hurricane, beyond broad predictions that global warming will increase the frequency of freak weather events. This time around, scientists are increasingly confident they can come up with answers.Their tool is a new science, known as event attribution, which determines what proportion of a specific extreme weather event can be blamed on climate change. Read More here
31 August 2017, The Guardian, South Asia floods kill 1,200 and shut 1.8 million children out of school. Heavy monsoon rains have brought Mumbai to a halt for a second day as the worst floods to strike south Asia in years continued to exact a deadly toll. More than 1,200 people have died across India, Bangladesh and Nepal as a result of flooding, with 40 million affected by the devastation. At least six people, including two toddlers, were among the victims in and around India’s financial capital. The devastating floods have also destroyed or damaged 18,000 schools, meaning that about 1.8 million children cannot go to classes, Save the Children warned on Thursday. The charity said that hundreds of thousands of children could fall permanently out of the school system if education was not prioritised in relief efforts. “We haven’t seen flooding on this scale in years and it’s putting the long-term education of an enormous number of children at great risk. From our experience, the importance of education is often under-valued in humanitarian crises and we simply cannot let this happen again. We cannot go backwards,” said Rafay Hussain, Save the Children’s general manager in Bihar state….The rains have led to flooding in a broad arc stretching across the Himalayan foothills in Bangladesh, Nepal and India, causing landslides, damaging roads and electric towers and washing away tens of thousands of homes and vast swaths of farmland. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) says the fourth significant floods this year have affected more than 7.4 million people in Bangladesh, damaging or destroying more than 697,000 houses. They have killed 514 in India’s eastern state of Bihar, where 17.1 million have been affected, disaster management officials have been quoted as saying. In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, about 2.5 million have been affected and the death toll stood at 109 on Tuesday, according to the Straits Times. The IFRC said landslides in Nepal had killed more than 100 people. Read More here
29 August 2017, The Independent, A “wave of legal action” over climate change has already begun and cases will become more likely to succeed as the scientists get better at attributing extreme weather events to global warming, activists have warned. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, lawyers from ClientEarth in London and Earth & Water Law in Washington DC said events previously regarded as “acts of God” could increasingly land humans with a bill for damages. Companies and their directors, government agencies and others with a duty of care, who fail to disclose relevant information or to plan ahead, could all potentially be in legal trouble. Several legal cases are already underway in the US with a group of young people suing the US federal government for allegedly creating and enhancing the dangers of climate change; coastal communities in California suing fossil fuel companiesover sea-level rise; and the New York attorney general’s office investigating ExxonMobil amid claims the company may have misled shareholders about the financial risk posed by climate change. The Nature Geoscience article said: “The question is not whether there will be another wave of climate-related litigation — the wave is already in motion. “The question instead is whether it will be more successful than previous efforts. Read More here