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Alanis Morissette once sang it : life can be ironic sometimes. This was especially the case when a few months ago a study paid by the highly polluting conglomerate of the Koch brothers showed that yes, climate change is real.
Now a poll in the United States is showing that more and more Americans are believing in climate change, and this despite the huge campaigns of disinformation. This must be due to the weirding climate…
Now let’s give the USA a couple of years more and just like every other country, they will start fighting climate change on a federal level… Will it be soon enough ? ( I doubt it since we should act NOW)
I wanted to write about how I am witnessing the weirding and warming climate myself. So far, France has seen an incredibly dry spring with dramatic droughts to the point of endangering many cultures. Then, summer came, with rain, a lot of it.
It was one of the rainiest summers I had seen. You would think that it would be enough ? Nope, we had so far an unusually dry and warm fall [Fr]. Two weeks ago we had up to 20°C, 10°C above the norms.
So to sum up : drought in spring, rain in summer and warm fall, ie. completely messed up seasons. I wonder what our climate will look like in 2030 and beyond if it goes on like this…
To the Independent : ” Climate researchers from Britain, the US (…) have formed a new alliance that aims to investigate exceptional weather events to see whether they can be attributable to global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. ”
” They intend to assess each unusual event in terms of the probability that it has been exacerbated or even caused by the global temperature increase seen over the past century. “ We can wish them luck in this endeavor.
I am no climate scientist, but when I gather the facts about the many extreme weather events of the past two years, I don’t think it’s a coincidence… Our atmosphere is warming, and weirding…
To Climate Progress : ” Is the “Global Weirding” of 2010 and 2011 the new normal? (…) Any one of the extreme weather events of 2010 or 2011 could have occurred naturally sometime during the past 1,000 years. “
” But it is highly improbable that the remarkable extreme weather events of 2010 and 2011 could have all happened in such a short period of time without some powerful climate-altering force at work.”
And as the English version of Al Jazeera notes : ” Severe weather events are wracking the planet, and experts warn of even greater consequences to come. ” (See the full article as it sums up the situation well.)
To the Huffington Post : ” Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a “new normal” of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday.
“It’s a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we’re seeing, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters. ”
Meanwhile, the GOP – the Republicans – is still opposing action on climate change… It’s high time this changes as the country is behind more than a fifth of global greenhouse gases emissions…
Global warming may mean colder winters for the Northern Hemisphere and this albeit we just witnessed the hottest June ever recorded and if desertification spreads faster and faster.
As one of the researchers behind this new report notes : “Recent severe winters like last year’s of the one of 2005-2006 do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it.”
This sure means that global weirding and surely not global cooling is on its way. Who said it was time to cut our emissions ?
You may not remember it, but the Copenhagen climate talks will be followed by a series of conferences in Cancun, Mexico between November 29 and December 10. Contrary to Copenhagen, little is currently said about the preparations.
And the media aren’t encouraging. To AP : ” In two days of talks, major economic powers discussed ways to move ahead in slowing and coping with climate change, but no one sees a grand global deal anywhere on the horizon “
“(…) no one is expecting or anticipating in any way a legal treaty to be done at Cancun this year.” This situation is puzzling as there are many reasons to act fast and big. Continue »
Here is a post on a subject not so unrelated to sustainable development. To the International Labour Organization : “ Global youth unemployment has reached its highest level on record, and is expected to increase through 2010 “
The ILO also warns of the “risk of a crisis legacy of a ‘lost generation’ comprised of young people who have dropped out of the labour market, having lost all hope of being able to work for a decent living”.
Meanwhile the triple crisis is looming. And it will hit us even harder when oil prices will be back at their highest levels. This will bring undoubtedly another increase in youth unemployment. Continue »
I heard that term before as extreme events are unfolding. But two contributors of the Huffington Post believe that what we are witnessing this summer - fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, heat waves in America – is a sign of global weirding.
And they make quite a point as in a few weeks, so many weather extremes took and are taking place. Last week a glacier four times bigger than Manhattan broke off into the sea.
I send you to the complete article as I believe it is quite a must read for any responsible citizen. This shows once again it is high time to act !
