Climate Change Impacts Inventory

Add this one to the year’s lengthening list of natural disasters — a bumper crop of poison ivy. It’s flourishing this summer, which, The Wall Street Journal says, “is shaping up to be one of its most virulent and unpredictable seasons.”

Long term, it seems that poison ivy responds positively to global warming, especially the increase in carbon dioxide, which produces bigger and more irritating plants.

In China, an estimated 200 million people are impacted by natural catastrophes every year. The rising number of severe weather-related natural catastrophes, also due to climate change, is increasing losses and impacting economic development.

“Due to its exposure to all weather-related perils, its large population and the fast growth in economic values, China is especially affected by climate change – and will be even more so in the future,” said Prof. Peter Höppe, Head of Geo Risks Research at Munich Re . “Over the last 30 years, Asia has been the continent with the largest increase in frequency of weather-related disasters. Loss-relevant events have tripled in number, which presents new challenges for all exposed economies.

Over the last century, with a rise of more than 1°C, Asia has been the continent with the largest temperature increase.

In a Congressional briefing on 30 June 2010, hurricane expert Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) said the potential for a disastrous 2010 hurricane season reflects not just natural variability but also climate change.  He explained that record high sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic were one of the principal factors behind the dire forecast, and that rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases may account for roughly half of the anomalous warmth.  He warned that "we’re looking at potentially a doubling of major hurricanes in the next 20 to 30 years" as a result of global warming.  Holland, Director of NCAR's Earth System Laboratory, made his remarks as a member of a panel on Hurricanes and Oil Will Mix: Managing Risk Now. 

A month before the panel's briefing, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued on 27 May its 2010 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook. NOAA said there was a 70% chance that the Atlantic hurricane season would see 14-23 named storms, 8-14 hurricanes, and 3-7 major hurricanes.

Among the factors underlying its outlook, NOAA cited warm Atlantic Ocean surface waters, which in May were for the fourth month in a row at record high temperatures for the month:  "Sea surface temperatures [SSTs] are expected to remain above average where storms often develop and move across the Atlantic. Record warm temperatures – up to four degrees Fahrenheit above average – are now present in this region."

Sumdoh,

Rising seas from global warming, coming after years of coral reef destruction, are forcing thousands of indigenous Panamanians to leave their ancestral homes on low-lying Caribbean islands. Seasonal winds, storms and high tides combine to submerge the tiny islands, crowded with huts of yellow cane and faded palm fronds, leaving them ankle-deep in emerald water for days on end.Pablo Preciado, leader of the island of Carti Sugdub, remembers that in his childhood floods were rare, brief and barely wetted his toes. "Now it's something else. It's serious," he said.

The increase of a few inches in flood depth is consistent with a global sea level rise over Preciado's 64 years of life and has been made worse by coral mining by the islanders that reduced a buffer against the waves.Carti Sugdub is one of a handful of islands in an archipelago off Panama's northeastern coast, where the government says climate change threatens the livelihood of nearly half of the 32,000 semi-autonomous Kuna people.The 2,000 inhabitants of Carti Sugdub plan to move to coastal areas within the Kuna's autonomous territory on the Panama mainland. They are eyeing foothills a half-hour walk from the swampy beach areas."The water level is rising. The move is imminent," said Preciado, who has been leading a group of villagers clearing tropical forest for the new settlement.

"This is no longer about a scientist saying that climate change and the change in sea level will flood (a people) and affect them," said Hector Guzman, a marine biologist and coral specialist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. "This is happening now in the real world."

The current year may become the warmest on record, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist. Temperature trends across the U.S. and around the world have been among the warmest on record, said David Easterling, a climatologist with NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

The combined land and ocean temperatures around the world were 1.22 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average, according to NOAA records. Since 1975, global temperatures have been rising and since 1960 the number of heat waves has been increasing, Easterling said

“The current spate of heat waves could be a harbinger of things to come.”

New daily high temperature records were set in many cities, with June 2010 ranking as the hottest June on record for Delaware, New Jersey, and North Carolina.

The unusual warmth in the highly populated South and Southeast resulted in the second highest June REDTI value in the 116-year record. For the first half of 2010, large footprints of extreme wetness (more than three times the average footprint), warm minimum temperatures ("warm overnight lows"), and areas experiencing heavy 1-day precipitation events resulted in a Climate Extremes Index (CEI) that was about 6 percent higher than the historical average.

The nationally-averaged temperature for June was much warmer than normal. A deep layer of high pressure dominated much of the eastern United States

The eastern U.S. cooked for another day Wednesday as unrelenting heat again sent thermometers past 100 degrees in urban "heat islands," buckled roads, slowed trains and pushed utilities toward the limit of the electrical grid's capacity.

Records fall again in East as heat swelters on

Philadelphia hit 100 degrees for second straight day, breaking a record of 98 degrees set in 1999. Baltimore hit 100 for the third straight day and Newark, N.J., hit triple digits for the fourth straight day. New York's Central Park was at 99 degrees at 2 p.m.

Eight of the 12 most expensive disasters in U.S. history have occurred since 2004, Munich Re said. Weather-related catastrophes have increased at a faster rate than geophysical events, he said. “Global warming has already and will in the future contribute to the increase in the probability of these events,” he said.

China issued a fresh heatwave alert Wednesday as soaring temperatures -- some of them record highs -- were again forecast for large swathes of the nation, sparking concerns about power shortages.The National Meteorological Centre warned that large parts of northern and central China would again be hit by "sweltering heat and very little rain", with temperatures set to hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).It set the heat alert at "orange" -- the second-highest rating on a four-colour scale.The extreme heat, which began at the weekend in most areas, has led to hospital wards packed with people suffering from heat-related illnesses, a surge in air-conditioner sales and even a plague of locusts in Inner Mongolia.

Zookeepers

used giant ice blocks to keep animals cool, the Xinhua news agency reported.In several cities including Beijing, where the temperature hit 40.6 degrees Celsius on Monday, authorities reported that overheated vehicles had caught fire, state media said.The heatwave comes after torrential rains in June, mainly in southern parts of the nation, caused massive floods and landslides that killed at least 266 people.The soaring temperatures have led to fears of power shortages in several provinces due to high demand for air conditioning, the state-run Global Times reported.In the southern city of Guangzhou, authorities had opened nearly 500 shelters equipped with air-conditioning units and water for people to escape the heat, the report said.Water demand has also soared along with the high temperatures.In Beijing on Monday, nearly three million cubic metres of water was pumped into the capital, the largest single-day usage since tap water was brought into operation in 1910, the China Daily reported.Authorities in the capital said they would double a "high temperature" subsidy for people working outside in the heat, or whose workplaces were hotter than 33 degrees Celsius.Those who work outside will now get an extra 120 yuan (18 dollars) a month, while people in hot indoor places will be paid 90 yuan, the report said.

CYPRUS will face Sahara-like conditions in 10 to 20 years if climate change continues at the current rate, experts said yesterday as temperatures clocked in at five degrees higher than average for this time of year.

From 1900-1991 the average temperature in Cyprus rose from 18.9C to 19.5C. The average is now 20.2C degrees. In other words, Cyprus warmed more in the last 20 years than it did in the previous 90.

“The increasing temperature and decreasing rainfall are causing major damages, and in Cyprus this means desertification.” Theodosiou was keen to stress that this irreversible desertification is not caused by climate change, but is definitely made worse because of it. “There is a misunderstanding that desertification is caused by climate change, but this is wrong. Desertification is caused by human activity, but roads and large developments etc. However, Climate change enlarges the problem.”

Still recovering from a 10-year drought on the world's driest inhabited continent, Australia is increasingly turning to the oceans that surround it for drinking water. Australia's five largest cities have embarked on a massive $13-billion plan to build desalination plants that can remove the salt from seawater and make it potable. By 2012, when the last plant is scheduled to be up and running, Australia's big cities will get 30% of their water from the oceans, The New York Times reported Sunday. The government says Australia's latest decade-long drought was largely caused by climate change and one official called the $13-billion desalination programme "the cost of adapting to climate change."

"We consider ourselves the canary in the coal mine in for climate change-induced changes to water supply systems,” Ross Young, executive director of the Water Services Association of Australia, told The New York Times.

Unusually high acid readings were measured in the deep waters of southern Hood Canal, according to Richard Feeley, director of the Ocean Acidification Program at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. Increased acidity appears to be caused by increased carbon dioxide working its way from the atmosphere into the ocean, as well as the decomposition of organic matter in local waters. “Our calculations suggest that ocean acidification can account for a significant part of the pH decrease in this region,” said Feeley, whose laboratory is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A research team found that ocean acidification caused by climate change accounts for 24 to 49 percent of the increased acidity in Hood Canal relative to pre-industrial times. The remainder of the pH shift occurs as a result of decomposition of organic material. Ocean effects provide the greatest contribution — 49 percent of the change — in winter when the rate of decomposition slows.

Increasing ocean acidity has been linked to the deaths of free-swimming oyster larvae at oyster hatcheries on the Oregon Coast, Newton said, and something similar may be happening at hatcheries on Hood Canal. Bill Dewey of Taylor Shellfish Farms, which operates an oyster hatchery on Dabob Bay, said oyster larvae production dropped by 60 percent in 2008 and 80 percent last year. It is too early to know how things will turn out this year, he said.

The incidence of cardiovascular, respiratory and water-borne diseases is rising in Uruguay in tandem with climate change, while dengue fever and malaria lurk at the country's borders. Higher temperatures are encouraging the presence of insect vectors carrying diseases that were eradicated decades ago, experts say.Increasingly frequent spells of extreme weather particularly affect the health of the poorest, who live in overcrowded conditions in precarious dwellings lacking sanitation, in the shantytowns that have sprung up at an exponential rate since the 1990s in the Montevideo metropolitan area. Many of them are on low-lying land exposed to flooding. Diarrhoea, hepatitis A and leptospirosis are some of the most common illnesses resulting from flooding and inadequate disposal of human waste, the head of the Health Ministry's Environmental and Occupational Health Division, Carmen Ciganda, told IPS. "These diseases are not exactly caused by climate change, but they are associated with it and become more prevalent when there are floods or droughts," she said. At the Pereira Rossell Hospital, the country's main children's hospital, respiratory diseases climbed from 17.7 percent in 2003 to 23.3 percent in 2007, and leptospirosis cases increased from 64 in 2006 to 106 in 2007. But Ciganda warned of threats that so far have been kept at bay beyond the country's borders. "If our climate becomes more tropical, conditions will be more favourable for the vectors that transmit diseases like dengue, yellow fever and malaria," she said. The average yearly temperature in Uruguay has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last 100 years, and spring and summer average temperatures are now higher than they were in the early 20th century, while rainfall has become heavier and more frequent in the last 50 years.

"Since 2007, the mosquito has been detected in the capital city. Longer summers, and the delayed onset of cold weather (in the southern hemisphere winter) until late May, mean that the mosquitoes do not go into hibernation and continue to reproduce for a longer time," the coordinator of the Departmental Emergency Committee in Montevideo, Daniel Soria, told IPS. He said frequent heavy rainfall, a result of climate variability, hampers the struggle to prevent dengue and other diseases entering the country. "When 50 or 60 millimetres of rainwater falls in less than half an hour, it overwhelms the sewer system in Montevideo, and people in the shanty towns suffer most," he said. "Flooding of the Miguelete, Pantanoso and Carrasco rivers, which flow across the city, causes a lot of erosion, so people are constantly having to be evacuated." In Uruguay, nearly 60,000 people were evacuated between 1997 and 2008, and over half a million were affected in various ways from floods following a 30 percent increase in rainfall. The trend is expected to worsen in future, according to official reports.

the ice has been melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the autumn, so that the bears are now spending on average three more weeks on land per year, without food, than they did three decades ago, the researchers say. As a consequence, their body weight in that time has dropped by 60lb, females have lost 10 per cent of their body length, and the west Hudson Bay population has declined from 1,200 animals to 900.

Over the last few days the temperature in Taiwan has shot up and the media has been awash with articles of how people can avoid the worst of the heat wave. The papers have also been full of stories about the number of heat-related deaths. Questions have been raised as to the potential health risks posed by the scorching heat, when in fact the best way to deal with this problem, and to reduce the health risks posed by climate change, is to establish some form of early warning mechanism.

Over the last century Taiwan’s average temperature has increased by between 1.1 and 1.4 percent, twice the global average. The temperature of the surrounding oceans has risen at a higher rate, having a considerable impact on the fishing ecology.

The Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, one of the largest glaciers in Greenland, swiftly lost a 2.7-square mile chunk of ice between July 6 and 7, NASA announced late last week. The ice loss pushed the point where the glacier meets the ocean, known as the "calving front," nearly one mile farther inland in a single day. According to the space agency, the new calving front location is the farthest inland on record.

The Jakobshavn Isbrae is what is known as an outlet glacier, which the National Snow and Ice Data Center defines as "a valley glacier which drains an inland ice sheet or ice cap and flows through a gap in peripheral mountains." In other words, it serves as a drainage pipe from the land ice into the ocean. According to NASA, the Jakobshavn Isbrae, which is located in western Greenland at about 69 degrees north latitude, is the largest outlet glacier in Greenland, draining 6.5 percent of Greenland's ice sheet area.

NASA reports that "as much as 10 percent of all ice lost from Greenland is coming through Jakobshavn, which is also believed to be the single largest contributor to sea level rise in the northern hemisphere."

Russia is experiencing the worst drought in almost 40 years, the presidential advisor on climate said Monday, RIA Novosti reported."The country has not seen such an overwhelming drought since 1972," Alexander Bedritsky said.

Some 14 regions across the country have been hit by an extended heat wave and crops in nine million hectares of the 48 million hectares of sown land have been destroyed. Farmers fear they will be unable to pay off loans due to the losses. Meanwhile, the heat wave continues in Moscow where the country’s chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko suggests introducing a siesta period like they traditionally have in some Latin American countries.

New research from the May hurricane conference of the American Meteorological Society sheds new light just ahead of the start of the season June first.

Greg Holland of NCAR looked at the distribution of the strongest hurricanes over time by using a mathematical description of the historical hurricane data. His analysis showed that during the period 1995 - 2008, we probably had about a 30% increase in Category 5 storms in the Atlantic, and an 18% increase in Category 4 hurricanes. Using a climate model, he predicted that by the years 2045 - 2055, we should see a 60% increase in Cat 5s, 32% increase in Cat 4s, and 16% increase in Cat 3s in the Atlantic.