Cliff Mass Weather Blog: Will the Pacific Northwest be a Climate Refuge Und...

Cliff Mass Weather Blog: Will the Pacific Northwest be a Climate Refuge Und...: As global warming takes hold later in the century, where will be the best place in the lower 48 states to escape its worst effects? A comp...

Flooded Kingdoms Of The Last Ice Age Pt 1 of 5

Six degrees could change the world

Earth Under Water - Worldwide Flooding | Sea Level Rise (SLR)

Las Vegas Is "Screwed"; The Water Situation "Is As Bad As You Can Imagine"

Las Vegas Is "Screwed"; The Water Situation "Is As Bad As You Can Imagine"
Tyler Durden, 06/30/2014 zerohedge.com

"It's just going to be screwed. And relatively quickly," warns Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, telling The Telegraph, the situation in Las Vegas is "as bad as you can imagine". After a devastating, 14-year drought drained the reservoir that supplies 90% of the city’s water, the apparently endless supply of water is an illusion as Las Vegas population has soared. As Barnett ominously concludes, "unless it can find a way to get more water from somewhere, Las Vegas is out of business. Yet they’re still building, which is stupid."

As The Telegraph reports, as with many things in Sin City, the apparently endless supply of water is an illusion.

America’s most decadent destination has been engaged in a potentially catastrophic gamble with nature and now, 14 years into a devastating drought, it is on the verge of losing it all.

“The situation is as bad as you can imagine,” said Tim Barnett, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s just going to be screwed. And relatively quickly. Unless it can find a way to get more water from somewhere Las Vegas is out of business. Yet they’re still building, which is stupid.”

Things are not good...

Las Vegas gets just four inches of rain in a good year, and in the first four months of 2014 there was just 0.31 of an inch.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which has the task of keeping the city from running dry, has described the effects of the drought as “every bit as serious as a Hurricane Katrina or a Superstorm Sandy”.

However, Las Vegas still uses 219 gallons of water per person per day, one of the highest figures in the US. In San Francisco the figure is just 49 gallons.

But they have a plan...

Lake Mead’s water level is currently at 1,087ft above sea level. There are two pipes, known as “straws”, that take water from it to Las Vegas.

The first extracts water at an elevation of 1,050ft and is likely to be sucking at air, rather than water, soon. The second straw is at 1,000ft.

Lake Mead is expected to fall another 20ft towards that critical point by the end of this year.

Beneath the ground a mammoth effort is already under way to complete a new, lower straw which will be able to draw the last of the water from the lake.

But it is a painfully slow process as a giant drill the size of two football pitches advances at a rate of one inch per day.

That rescue project is costing $817 million and is currently expected to be complete by late 2015, but it is not viewed as a long-term solution.

Las Vegas also wants to build a separate $15.5 billion pipeline that would pump 27 billion gallons of groundwater a year from an aquifer 260 miles away in rural Nevada.

But a judge has refused permission after environmentalists sued on the basis that it would adversely affect 5,500 acres of meadows, 33 miles of trout streams, and 130,000 acres of habitat used by sage grouse, mule deer, elk and pronghorn, an antelope-like creature that is endangered in the region. The court heard that 25 species of Great Basin springsnails would be pushed toward extinction.

But in the end, it's a false promise...

“It’s a really dumb-headed proposition. It would provide a false sense of security that there’s plenty of water and it would delay the inevitable decisions that have to be taken about water conservation and restricting growth.

“The drought is like a slow spreading cancer across the desert. It’s not like a tornado or a tsunami, bang. The effects are playing out over decades. And as the water situation becomes more dire we are going to start having to talk about the removal of people (from Las Vegas).”

Mr Mrowka cited Lake Las Vegas, a mega-resort where stars including Celine Dion live, as one of the “most egregious examples” of wasting water.

And then there's this...

One proposal is for landlocked Nevada to pay billions of dollars to build solar-powered desalination plants in the Pacific off Mexico, taking Mexico’s share of Colorado River water in exchange.

But Mr Mrowka said: “The Colorado is essentially a dying river. Ultimately, Las Vegas and our civilisation in the American South West is going to disappear, like the Indians did before us.”

'Fossil fuel industry should pay for climate damage'

'Fossil fuel industry should pay for climate damage'
6/12/14 dw.de

Big fossil fuel companies should compensate poor countries for loss and damage caused by climate change, according to the NGO Climate Justice. Julie-Anne Richards says 90 entities account for 63 percent of emissions.

DW: During the ongoing UN climate talks in Bonn (04.-15.06.2014), you put forward a controversal proposal - as laid out in your report " Carbon majors funding loss and damage'".What exactly do you mean by that?

Julie-Anne Richards: Since the Industrial Revolution began, the products of big, largely fossil fuel entities - such as Chevron, Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell - have been responsible for 63 percent of the world's emissions. So more than half of the emissions in the atmosphere right now are there because of these 90 carbon majors.

These emissions have led to the climate change we are feeling, which is affecting the poorest and most vulnerable people most, through loss and damage. We are talking about extreme impacts like Typhoon Haiyan last year, which killed more than 6,000 people in the Philippines, left four million people without houses, caused $2 billion (1.48 billion euros) worth of damage. We propose that these carbon majors - the corporations that have been making profits selling fossil fuels - should pay a levy into the new UN mechanism for Loss and Damage, so that those poor and vulnerable people facing the worst impacts of climate change have funds to deal with those impacts.

What is going to motivate those companies to agree to that?

Our proposal is for an international agreement at government level. There are precedents and examples of this happening in other fields. Take the oil spill regime, for example. Or the scheme to deal with nuclear accidents. We need to apply the best elements of examples happening around the world to climate change and ensure that governments, who already monitor how much coal or gas is extracted so they can charge royalties to these companies, would apply an additional levy that they then pay in to the UN Loss and Damage mechanism.

Is there anything stipulated in international law which would back this up?

Yes, there are a couple of principles in international law we are applying here: the "no harm" and "polluter pays" principle. If you emit pollution that causes harm somewhere else, you should be the one [having] to pay for that.

[But] it doesn't happen in this case. We have the big fossil fuel companies making trillions of dollars in profits, while the harm from their product - climate change - is essentially being paid for by the poorest and most vulnerable. Within international law there are some recommendations as to how to deal with that, which have been applied in these other fields: oil spills, nuclear accidents.

NGOs in Bonn are in favor of renewable energy sources and made sure their voices were heard

How have the carbon majors been responding?

We've only just made the idea public. It is a discussion paper, so we are looking forward to lots of people engaging with it. We think it's very important for the idea to be part of the overall climate agreement to be reached in Paris in 2015, so we have a year and a half to work out how it will be embedded in that. We are looking forward to the carbon majors and the fossil fuel corporations engaging with it, but as of yet we haven't had a lot of response from them.

Who supports the move so far?

A range of parties, including a lot of the vulnerable countries. In fact one reason we have the Loss and Damage Agreement that was agreed in Warsaw last year is because [chief negotiator] Yeb Sano from the Philippines made such an impassioned plea about the impacts Typhoon Haiyan had on his country.

Richards has presented Climate Justice's working paper at the ongoing UN climate talks in Bonn

So the Philippines are championing the idea. We hope to talk to other countries, which will probably have a range of views about whether the idea is good or bad. We want their ideas on how it might work. We don't have answers to all the questions, we are also talking to NGOs that work in the area.

You are based in Australia, a country feeling impacts from climate change, but that has a government that does not take climate change seriously. How does that affect your message?

The proposal is very relevant to the Australian situation. Our present government is trying to repeal good climate legislation because it is too close to the fossil fuel industry. We want to make it very clear that the fossil fuel industry is the reason we are suffering from climate change, and that poor people are facing the worst impacts.

They have a legal and a moral responsibility to pay for the damages their product is causing. Our proposal is a way to make that work. And by identifying them very clearly as the people who are causing climate change, we hope to drive a wedge between the over-influence the fossil fuel industry has on governments around the world, including the Australian government.

Models 'grossly underestimate' costs of global warming,

Models 'grossly underestimate' costs of global warming, Nicholas Stern says

Peter Hannam, June 16, 2014  smh.com.au

Existing economic models “grossly underestimate” the costs of global warming, undermining the urgency for deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new paper by leading UK climate change economist Lord Nicholas Stern.

The risks are in fact likely to be so large that a globally coordinated carbon price of $US32-$US103 ($34-$110) per tonne of emissions is needed as soon as 2015 to prevent the temperature increase from exceeding 2 degrees of pre-industrial age levels, said Lord Stern and co-author Simon Dietz, from the UK’s Grantham Research Institute.

Within two decades, the carbon price will need to almost triple in real terms to $US82-$US260 a tonne, the two researchers say in their paper to be published in The Economic Journal.

The authors modified the main model used by economists since 1991 to assess the likely effects of climate change. Developed by Yale Professor Bill Nordhaus in 1991, the model has served as a basis for damage estimates, including the recent Fifth Assessment Report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The IPCC report in March noted estimates of annual losses from a further rise of 2 degrees would be between 0.2-2 per cent of GDP, although it added the results were “incomplete” and “more likely than not” to exceed that level.

Dr Dietz said the overly simplified formula used by the standard model “implausibly” indicates global GDP would only be halved if average temperatures rose 18 degrees “even though such warming would likely render the Earth uninhabitable for most species, including humans”.

The revised model by Dr Dietz and Professor Stern takes into account the likelihood that the ability to generate new wealth would be affected by extreme weather and other impacts from climate change, such as the destruction of coastal or water infrastructure. By contrast, the current model in use only accounts for effects on output rather than the capital itself.

Professor John Quiggin from the University of Queensland welcomed the report: “I have long been concerned that the (existing) model greatly underestimates the costs of extreme global warming of 4 degrees or more, which remains likely unless stronger global action is taken to reduce CO2 emissions.”

The new report comes after Prime Minister Tony Abbott wrapped up his global trip with a speech in Texas over the weekend in praise of fossil fuels, particularly coal: "Australia should be an affordable energy superpower, using nature's gifts to the benefit of our own people and the wider world."

Australia’s carbon price, now at $24.15 a tonne, is likely to be scrapped when the new Senate sits month, next fulfilling a vow Mr Abbott took to the elections in 2010 and 2013.

Urbanization and Climate Change

Urbanization and Climate Change
Published on May 31, 2014
The 2014 Bahá'í Chair for World Peace Second Spring Symposium:
"Urbanization and climate change: what are the threats and the opportunities to overcome them?"
Speaker: Dr. Patricia Romero-Lankao
May 2, 2014

Military Bases Brace for Slow-Motion War With Climate Change

Military Bases Brace for Slow-Motion War With Climate Change

BY MIGUEL LLANOS 6/9/2014 nbcnews.com

Military bases across the country have a new enemy to brace against: climate change.

Naval Station Norfolk, located in Virginia near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, has long been known as the world’s largest naval complex. But more recently it has become the poster child for a relatively new risk facing the U.S. military: how to protect bases around the country from rising seas, more severe storms, wildfires, droughts and other impacts tied to a shifting climate.

That realization, Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright tells NBC News, came after a still-classified, 2008 National Intelligence Council report found that more than 30 military sites already face elevated risk -- and that’s just from rising sea levels.

“Climate change is an additional risk which we must consider and manage as part of our mission planning process,” he says.

The Norfolk base is a case in point. It sits in a region with a long history of flooding given its geography, but what planners decades ago hadn’t expected was that high tides would get much higher over the last century.

Since World War I, the increase has been about a foot, notes Joe Bouchard, a retired Navy captain who commanded the base in the early 2000s and has since lectured and written about climate impacts on military infrastructure.

“Everything since then was built at the same level as World War I,” he says. “Nothing had been done to compensate for sea level rise because it happened slowly and people weren’t aware of it.”

By the 1990s, utility lines used to hook Navy ships up to power on shore were being impacted. “We had increasing electricity outages at high tides,” Bouchard recalls. “Electrical lines were submerged in sea water and that doesn’t work very well.”

At the time, Bouchard and others thought the base had sunk a bit since it was built on top of landfill material. That might explain part of the problem, but scientists only recently determined the entire coastal region has seen sea level increases three to four times the global average of around eight inches over the last century.

"It’s not like we’re suggesting there’s a trillion dollar bill that’s coming due tomorrow. We should identify risks and have a plan.”

The 1990s solution was to build taller piers that would carry those utility lines higher above the sea. Four piers were eventually built but even those designs are flawed, Bouchard says, because they don’t take into account more recent projections of even higher sea level rise –- anywhere between 1.5 and 7.5 feet over the next century.

Today, Norfolk is one of five bases that are being studied as templates for how to better assess climate impacts across the military. The others are Eglin Air Force Base in Florida; Camp LeJeune in North Carolina; and Coronado Naval Station and the Marines’ Camp Pendleton, both in Southern California, where wildfires and drought are more of an issue than sea level rise.

But figuring out what to do, and at what cost, is still in its infancy.

A 2011 National Research Council report found that 128 U.S. military sites could be impacted by sea-level rise of 3 feet or more. Of those, 56 are Navy facilities valued at $100 billion, the report stated.

At Norfolk, replacing just four piers cost $60 million. At Eglin, it cost $112 million to repair a barrier island protecting the base after it was hit by three hurricanes in 10 years.

The pilot studies emphasize that each base has its unique traits, making any template more of a challenge.

Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Oklahoma State University are working with military researchers to come up with better assessment tools, and in Norfolk there’s even greater collaboration.

Last Tuesday, local military brass, academia, city and state officials as well as industry unveiled their own pilot project to figure out what needs protecting across the region, not just on the Navy base.

Old Dominion University, which is just 10 minutes from the base, is hosting this group effort, but the initiative really got its push from the Pentagon and the National Security Council, says Ray Toll, a retired Navy captain who serves as the university liaison to the Navy.

“We weren’t used to coordinating with the community,” he says of the military. “But the whole region is at risk. Fixing one piece of it and not the other makes no sense.”

The group gave itself two years to come up with adaptation plans that all can support – from the 18 federal agencies in the area, to the seven city governments as well as the state and local industry.

Once the plans are in place, the next step would be to seek funding.

Community leaders have all bought in, Toll says, but “if there are any laggards it’s maybe people who don’t believe in climate change or think it’s too hard to adapt. So it is up to us to show them it’s doable.”

That convincing could reach all the way to the U.S. Congress. Last month, the House passed an amendment to ban the Pentagon from using funds to study climate change impacts.

The Senate has no similar amendment before it, so the measure might not go anywhere. But it is a symbol of how climate still is a hot potato in Congress.

The military “aren’t being encouraged by Congress to look into these things,” says retired Brig. Gen. Gerald Galloway, one of 16 retired generals and admirals who last month issued their own review, concluding that climate efforts within the military “are not being undertaken with a sufficient sense of urgency.”

“It’s a slow start because look at the pushback people have gotten when talking about climate change,” adds Galloway, a former combat engineer who now teaches disaster and water issues at the University of Maryland.

“Typically,” he says, “the last thing people want to do is spend money if there’s any uncertainty” -- and climate projections certainly have that.

“But it’s not like we’re suggesting there’s a trillion dollar bill that’s coming due tomorrow,” he says. “We should identify risks and have a plan.”

Global Sea Level Rise Map

Global Sea Level Rise Map

Use the window in the top left of the map frame to change the amount of sea level rise.

The map can be used to show which areas would be under water if sea level rises a specific amount. You can select a value of sea level rise using the drop down box in the upper left corner of the map. Although this map is not a carefully surveyed and extremely accurate presentation, it does provide a visually striking view of what geographic areas might be flooded if global climate change continues unabated.

Hurricanes May Threaten Cities Like Never Before as Tropics Expand

In this Dec. 5, 2012 file photo, men walk past a house damaged during Superstorm Sandy in the Belle Harbor section of the Queens borough of New York.

Hurricanes May Threaten Cities Like Never Before as Tropics Expand, Study Finds
Andrew Freedman, May 14, 2014 mashable.com

Hurricanes and tropical storms are reaching their peak intensity closer to the poles, migrating at about 30 miles per decade, according to a new study published Wednesday. If this shift continues, it could have major consequences for places like New York City, Tokyo, Japan and Brisbane, Australia, as well as other high latitude areas that don't normally see intense hurricanes.

The study, published in the journal Nature, is the first to detect this trend, and in doing so it reveals a somewhat indirect but tangible link between human activities and Mother Nature's most powerful storms.

In order to reach their conclusions, the researchers overcame a formidable obstacle that has long hindered research on the links between hurricanes and global warming. Changes in how we detect and measure the intensity of tropical cyclones over the years makes finding statistically significant trends difficult to near impossible.


Typhoon Francisco and Super Typhoon Lekima seen from a satellite on October 23, 2013, as they tracked northwestward toward China and Japan.

The new study examines a metric known as a storm's "lifetime-maximum intensity" during the period from 1982 to 2012, which is a timeframe that is not complicated by changes in storm observations. The metric refers to the point where storms max out in strength.

By examining storm data using this metric, the researchers found a strikingly apparent poleward shift in the locations where storms are reaching their peak intensity. Although the changes varied from ocean basin to ocean basin, with the greatest migration seen in the western North Pacific Ocean, which is the most active area for tropical cyclones, the shift was found in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the lifetime-maximum intensity point is moving north at 33 miles per decade, whereas in the Southern Hemisphere, that point is moving south at 39 miles per decade.

Such a change is enough to alter the risk that a coastal location will be hit by a major storm, said lead author James Kossin of the National Climatic Data Center.

"There’s no doubt that a signal like this introduces the potential for a change in the risk,” Kossin said in an interview with Mashable.
“There’s certainly potential for decreased risk in some areas and increased risk in others at higher latitudes.”“There’s certainly potential for decreased risk in some areas and increased risk in others at higher latitudes.”

The study itself says that if the observed trends continue, there could be "potentially profound consequences for life and property."

In other words, the risk of damage and fatalities from tropical storms and hurricanes could increase in northern latitudes, while declining somewhat at lower latitudes.


Color-enhanced infrared satellite image of Typhoon Usagi as it moved northwestward toward Hong Kong while explosively intensifying to a Category-5 storm.
In addition, parts of the tropics that depend on rainfall from tropical storms and hurricanes (collectively referred to as tropical cyclones) to provide water resources may be at risk for lower water availability as the storms move away from them.

One caveat from the study is that there hasn't been a detectable poleward shift in the maximum intensity point of Atlantic tropical cyclones. However, this may be due to other factors that are masking this movement.

"The Atlantic is fairly unique in the last 30 years in how it’s been behaving,” Kossin says. "We kind of suspect that this global signal that we uncovered is just kind of getting muddled up with strong regional effects.

“The takeaway from that is just because we have not seen a trend there in the last 30 years doesn’t mean this effect is not present there, it’s just being masked by other things and it won’t necessarily be masked forever.”


Tracks of all Tropical cyclones which formed worldwide from 1985 to 2005..

Chris Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida, who was not involved in the study, told Mashable: 

"This is an important, very well researched paper that uncovers something that was unknown previously.""This is an important, very well researched paper that uncovers something that was unknown previously."

He continued, "Such changes in where storms are peaking are somewhat unexpected (at least to me) but are apparently due to global scale changes in the atmosphere, perhaps tied to anthropogenic [man-made] global warming."

Expanding tropics

The study ties the migration of storms' peak intensity points to a gradual expansion of the tropics, which in turn has been linked to manmade factors. The expansion has to do with the widening of what is known as the Hadley Cell, which is a pattern of air circulation that causes air to converge near the equator, sparking thunderstorms with heavy rain throughout the tropics. (This helps explain the typical location of rain forests worldwide.)

As air spills out of the Hadley cell and descends, it dries and warms, which is why the subtropics at the edges of the Hadley Cell are often home to deserts.

Studies of how emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases will affect the tropics have consistently shown that the tropics will expand poleward in both hemispheres, which will push the dry subtropics poleward as well. This is part of the reason why the Southwest U.S. is poised to become drier as the climate warms, since the subtropics are starting to encroach on that area.



Diagram of tropical air circulation, including the Hadley Cell.

According to Kossin, the expansion of the tropics has also been tied to emissions of aerosols, which are small particles in the atmosphere, from factories and natural sources like desert dust, as well as manmade depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. It is not yet clear which factor is the biggest contributor to the expansion of the tropics, however, Kossin said.

If greenhouse gases are driving the expansion of tropical atmospheric circulation, "then we won’t be seeing any stop to this in the near future," Kossin says.

However, if the main driver is the depletion of the ozone layer, the phaseout of ozone-depleting pollution should slow this expansion over time.

In addition to the growing tropics, two other environmental changes have taken place that affect storm intensity. The first concerns vertical wind shear. This refers to the change in wind speed or direction (or both) with height. Vertical wind shear has increased in the tropics, but decreased farther away from the tropics, closer to the poles. Vertical wind shear can make it difficult for tropical storms and hurricanes to form and intensify, since they tear apart the thunderstorms that comprise the inner core of such storms.

The second is that potential intensity, which is how strong a storm can get given sea surface temperatures and the temperature and moisture content of the upper atmosphere, is also changing. “In the tropics the potential intensity is decreasing, and it's increasing outside of the tropics,” Kossin said.

Hugh Willoughby, a hurricane researcher at Florida State University, told Mashable in an email that the study's results match his understanding of how air circulation is changing in and around the tropics. "My take on the situation is that shear attributable to the subtropical jet will increase as the planet warms; whereas the shear attributable to the middle latitude jet will decrease as high latitudes warm more than the tropics," he said. Willoughby was not involved in the new study.

The link between global warming and tropical cyclone behavior has been a source of controversy in the past, but this study appears to present clear, and unexpected, evidence that storms are already responding to the changing climate.

The big question is what it will mean for coastal residents around the world, but early hints are not encouraging for higher latitude cities.

Picture This: U.S. Cities Under 12 feet of Sea Level Rise

Picture This: U.S. Cities Under 12 feet of Sea Level Rise (via Climate Central)

By Climate Central Maps are one way to understand what collapse of West Antarctic glaciers could eventually mean. Photos show it another way. In 2013, Climate Central shared some of its sea level rise mapping data with artist Nickolay Lamm so that…

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Adapting to the Future Effects of Climate Change

Panel Three – Adapting to the Future Effects of Climate Change, 2:00-3:30pm
Climate Science and Policy through the Looking Glass
UC Santa Cruz, February 28-March 1, 2014

Moderator: Erika Zavaleta, Pepper-Giberson Chair, Department of Environmental Studies, UCSC

• Amrith Gunasekara, Science Advisor, California Department of Food and Agriculture

• Mike Mielke, Vice President, Environmental Programs and Policy, Silicon Valley Leadership Group

• Andrew Revkin, New York Times and Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies, Pace University

• Terrie Williams, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCSC

World's coastal megacities sinking 10 times faster than rising water levels

Rapid urbanisation and associated impacts are leading to increased vulnerability to floods. (Getty Images photo)


World's coastal megacities sinking 10 times faster than rising water levels
James Vincent, The Independent Apr 29, 2014

LONDON: Scientists have issued a new warning to the world's coastal megacities that the threat from subsiding land is a more immediate problem than rising sea levels caused by global warming.

A new paper from the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands published earlier this month identified regions of the globe where the ground level is falling 10 times faster than water levels are rising — with human activity often to blame.

In Jakarta, Indonesia's largest city, the population has grown from around half a million in the 1930s to just under 10 million today, with heavily populated areas dropping by as much as six and a half feet as groundwater is pumped up from the Earth to drink.

The same practice led to Tokyo's ground level falling by two metres before new restrictions were introduced, and in Venice, this sort of extraction has only compounded the effects of natural subsidence caused by long-term geological processes.

"Land subsidence and sea level rise are both happening, and they are both contributing to the same problem — larger and longer floods, and bigger inundation depth of floods," Dr Gilles Erkens, who led the research from Deltares, told the BBC.

"The most rigorous solution and the best one is to stop pumping groundwater for drinking water, but then of course you need a new source of drinking water for these cities. But Tokyo did that and subsidence more or less stopped, and in Venice, too, they have done that."

Unfortunately, human-driven subsidence is having a great affect than natural processes, with rapid urbanization and its associated impacts leading to increased vulnerability to floods.

Dr Erkens and his team estimate that the financial cost of structural damage and maintenance amounts to around a billion dollars annually and that parts of many megacities - including Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok and Dhaka - will sink below sea level unless action is taken.

In the case of Jakarta defences such as a 30-kilometre seawall have been erected to protect the city form flooding, but if this were to break, Deltares have predicted that within 48 hours the homes of nearly one million people would be flooded.

For other cities though, even this sort of defence is futile, as rising water levels will overrun them first instead.

The tiny island nation of Maldives (formed from a double chain of 26 atolls) sits just five feet above sea level. Worst-case projections of rising water levels suggest that some 350,000 islanders will have to completely abandon their home before the end of the century, leaving behind a 2,000 year old culture for good.

Climate Change 2014: Science, Risks and Responses

Climate Change 2014: Science, Risks and Responses
Published on Apr 7, 2014
"Climate Change 2014: Science, Risks and Responses," took place on the UWS Campbelltown campus on Friday 7th Moarch as part of our 25th Anniversary Celebrations. Prof Will Steffen from the Climate Council was the speaker.

Storm Surge Could Flood NYC 1 in Every 4 Years

Hurricane Sandy's tremendous storm surge flooded the South Ferry subway station in Manhattan.

Storm Surge Could Flood NYC 1 in Every 4 Years
Andrea Thompson, April 23rd, 2014 climatecentral.org

When a storm, such as Hurricane Sandy, sets waters in New York Harbor rising, those sloshing seas are now 20 times more likely to overtop the Manhattan seawall than 170 years ago, a new study finds.

The increased risk comes from a combination of sea level rise — which has raised water levels near New York City by nearly 1.5 feet since the mid-1800s — and storm tide, or the amount that local seas rise during a storm. Storm tide is itself a combination of storm surge (the water that a hurricane pushes ahead of it) and the astronomical tide.

The rise in sea level and storm tide combined puts the odds of storm waters overtopping Manhattan’s defenses at one in every 4 to 5 years, compared to only once in every 100 to 400 years in the 19th century, the study found. (Put another way, the annual chance of a storm overtopping the seawall has gone from about 1 percent to 20-25 percent.)

The storm tide at Battery Park, at the tip of Manhattan, during Hurricane Sandy reached a record 14.06 feet according to the National Hurricane Center’s report on Sandy. That high storm tide — more than 4 feet higher than the previous record set in December 1992 and the largest since 1821 — was created by a 9.4-foot storm surge and the evening high tide during a full moon, when tides are higher than normal (though the evening high tide was not as large as the morning one).

The extreme rise in water level sent the Harbor flooding into the streets of the Financial District and other parts of Manhattan, as well as other city boroughs at depths between 2 to 9 feet above ground level. An estimated 305,000 houses in New York were destroyed, mostly by storm surge, according to the NHC. Total damage to the city was estimated at $19 billion, including $5 billion in damage to the city’s subway systems caused by flooding. At least 21 people were killed by the storm surge on Staten Island.

The Portland State University researchers behind the new study, accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, noticed that three of the nine highest recorded water levels in New York Harbor had occurred since 2010 and that eight of the largest 20 had occurred since 1990. While sea level rise plays a large part in this trend, the researchers wanted to see whether increased storm tides might also be contributing, so they looked at hourly and daily tide gauge data going back to 1844, and found that storm tides have increased by 1 foot since that time.

This graphic shows factors that contributed to the top 10 high-water events measured at New York’s Battery Park from 1900 to present. The water height for each event is shown here against the benchmark of mean lower low water averaged between 1983 and 2001. Sea level rise (about a foot since 1900) is depicted as a component of storm surge. Although Sandy’s surge peaked close to high tide, other events had even higher tide levels.

While the rise in sea level is attributable to the expansion of warming ocean waters and ice melt, the cause of the rise in storm tide is not yet clear, nor is the possibility that the rise will continue into the future.

“You can see that trend; it’s there. But the question is, is it related to greenhouse gases or something else?” climate scientist Radley Horton of the Northeast Climate Science Center and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Climate Central.

The researchers suggest that the trend in rising storm tide could be partly due to decades-long changes in a climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation, as well as longer-term trends driven by climate change. More local effects, like the dredging of ship channels, could also play a role.

While other studies have looked at increasing storm tides, this study goes back further in time, study co-author Stefan Talke, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Portland State University in Oregon, said in a statement.

The study makes an important contribution to the understanding of coastal flood hazards in terms of extending the historical record tide gauge data, Horton, who was not involved in the study, said.

He added that the study “highlights the fact that rising sea levels have already stoked an increase in the frequency and intensity of coastal flooding” and that it “also suggests that storms themselves may have grown stronger.”

But Horton cautioned: “The verdict isn’t in yet about how coastal storms are going to change with climate change.”

When Sea Levels Attack! Which Cities will flood when?

A 10 Fold Increase In Power Outages Due To Extreme Weather?

A 10 Fold Increase In Power Outages Due To Extreme Weather?
Published on Apr 17, 2014
Has our reliance on power grids made them more susceptible to extreme weather events? WeatherNationTV Chief Meteorologist Paul Douglas goes over the spike in power outages related to extreme weather events in the past decade.

LA's Climate Future: What's Coming and What Choices We Face

LA's Climate Future: What's Coming and What Choices We Face
Published on Sep 19, 2013
(Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/) Scientists have been warning about the global impacts that climate change will bring over the coming decades, but what do those impacts mean for Los Angeles? Do they spell doom for life as we know it in our California paradise? To answer these questions, UCLA Professor Alex Hall presents the results of his ground-breaking research on the local impacts of global climate change. By downscaling global climate models to very high resolutions, Hall's work predicts the changes that will take place across the Los Angeles landscape, from warmer temperatures and more frequent extreme heat events to reduced snowfall in the region's mountain ranges. Series: "UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability" [9/2013] [Science] [Show ID: 25343]

Car, Truck and Airplane Pollution Set to Drive Climate Change

Demand for personal vehicles and consumer goods in fast-growing economies like China, India and Brazil is fueling the use of motorized transport across all modes.

Car, Truck and Airplane Pollution Set to Drive Climate Change
Greenhouse gases from transportation may become one of the greatest drivers of human-induced climate change, according to a draft of the forthcoming U.N. fifth assessment report on mitigation of climate change

Julia Pyper, Apr 10, 2014  ClimateWire

On the current trajectory, greenhouse gas emissions from cars, trains, ships and airplanes may become one of the greatest drivers of human-induced climate change, according to a draft of the forthcoming U.N. fifth assessment report on mitigation of climate change.

Authors project with high confidence that continued growth in emissions from global passenger and freight activity could "outweigh future mitigation measures," says a preliminary version of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study obtained by ClimateWire.

Lacking improvements in fuel efficiency combined with a comprehensive mitigation policy, the report finds that transport emissions could double by 2050 from 6.7 gigatons of emitted carbon dioxide in 2010, which represents 22 percent of the world's total.

Demand for personal vehicles and consumer goods in fast-growing economies like China, India and Brazil is fueling the use of motorized transport across all modes. The transportation sector's almost complete reliance on energy-dense, high-carbon fuels, like gasoline and diesel makes reducing emissions an even greater challenge.

"[Transportation] could actually become one of the biggest sectors of emissions ... because you can mitigate the other sectors more easily," said an expert familiar with the draft report.

The electricity sector can reduce emissions relatively easily by adopting renewables like solar and wind, while cars and trucks can't harness these zero-emissions energy sources without sophisticated and expensive energy storage technologies.

But the report adds that there are still opportunities for change.

Could cities be part of the solution?

The upcoming report finds that technical improvements and behavioral changes, combined with new infrastructure and urban development investments, could reduce energy demand from the transport sector by up to 40 percent below the base line in 2050, a greater reduction potential than shown in the fourth assessment report.

According to transport exports, urban centers represent both the greatest potential source of transport emissions and the greatest opportunity to mitigate them.

"We're at a really important crossroads," said Manish Bapna, executive vice president of the World Resources Institute, on a recent call with reporters. "Will cities be part of the solution or the problem?"

According to the World Health Organization, the urban population will double from 2.5 billion in 2009 to nearly 5.2 billion in 2050. In China alone, 300 million people are expected to move into cities over the next 15 years.

Building cities in a way that slows vehicle demand while delivering high accessibility could prove to be a low-cost option for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as a solution to pressing problems for policymakers like local air pollution and poor public health.

Addressing transport emissions in a more comprehensive manner through urban design is one of the main themes at the U.N. World Urban Forum being held this week in Medellin, Colombia.

"We are already struggling with the number of cars we have in the streets of our cities; congestion, air pollution, road safety issues, health impacts from people driving all the time," said Luc Nadal, technical director for urban development at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). "This is an absolutely unsustainable development model."

Unsustainable habits and designs
Motorized transport makes up almost a quarter of global man-made emissions, most of which stem from personal vehicles. Nadal said it would be "an absolute disaster" if the 20th century model of car-centric transport development, which has characterized many cities in the United States and Europe, were to continue into the 21st century.

"The way buildings are built, the streets are laid, urban forms that will be with us for a long, long time, decades certainly, centuries probably. We have streets in some places that are several millennia," he said. "Once these patterns are on the ground, it's very difficult to change them."

ITDP today unveiled a new policy guide at the Urban Forum to evaluate real estate developments that integrate sustainable transport and land-use planning to connect people conveniently and safely to jobs, education, shopping and other opportunities.

The TOD (transit-oriented development) Standard is based on eight elements: walkability; bicycle-friendliness; a connected network of streets and paths; a robust transit system; a balanced mix of activities; dense, vertical building; compact development; and a shift away from personal motorized transport.

These principles are understood by urban planners and architects, but policymakers still lack awareness of them, said Nadal. In rapidly urbanizing parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, cities are still being built to accommodate motorists, even where they represent a fraction of the urban population.

The IPCC draft report finds that institutional, legal, financial and cultural barriers may limit the adoption of low-carbon transport technologies and changes in transport demand. A comprehensive analysis on the extent to which these barriers can be overcome is outside the scope of the report.

A final version of the complete IPCC study is set for release Sunday.