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I believe that in the long run the world is still going to get

worse off than it is now and even though me as an individual

can try and do what is right on my part that will not account for the other

people that will make their choices and do what they want with how they

feel the environment should be for them. But no matter what, the environment

will just get worse and it will be hard to make a change just as an individual.

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Between 65% and 80%of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years.

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Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement linked to the

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,

which commits its Parties by setting internationally binding

emission reduction targets.

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Kyoto Protocol The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which commits it...

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Can we adapt to it? Well, we are going to have to adapt to the changes to survive as well. The world is going to be impacted whether we want it to or not because of the careless people that make the world worse. Only us as an individual can try and make a difference for ourselves and the people around us. But we have to adapt to the changes overall and make things better or at least try and put some dint into it.

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To report problems with our website, or to suggest improvements to our website, please use the "Contact Us" link on the page where you see a problem, or where you would like to suggest an improvement. This link is located at the upper right and bottom of each web page.

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Eight degrees Fahrenheit. It may not sound like much-perhaps the difference between wearing a sweater and not wearing one on an early-spring day. But for the world in which we live, which climate experts project will be at least eight degrees warmer by 2100 should global emissions continue on their current path, this small rise will have grave consequences, ones that are already becoming apparent, for every ecosystem and living thing-including us.

According to the National Climate Assessment, human influences are the number one cause of global warming, especially the carbon pollution we cause by burning fossil fuels and the pollution-capturing we prevent by destroying forests. The carbon dioxide, methane, soot, and other pollutants we release into the atmosphere act like a blanket, trapping the sun's heat and causing the planet to warm. Evidence shows that 2000 to 2009 was hotter than any other decade in at least the past 1,300 years. This warming is altering the earth's climate system, including its land, atmosphere, oceans, and ice, in far-reaching ways.

More frequent and severe weather

Higher temperatures are worsening many types of disasters, including storms, heat waves, floods, and droughts. A warmer climate creates an atmosphere that can collect, retain, and drop more water, changing weather patterns in such a way that wet areas become wetter and dry areas drier. "Extreme weather events are costing more and more," says Aliya Haq, deputy director of NRDC's Clean Power Plan initiative. "The number of billion-dollar weather disasters is expected to rise."

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in 2015 there were 10 weather and climate disaster events in the United States-including severe storms, floods, drought, and wildfires-that caused at least $1 billion in losses. For context, each year from 1980 to 2015 averaged $5.2 billion in disasters (adjusted for inflation). If you zero in on the years between 2011 and 2015, you see an annual average cost of $10.8 billion.

The increasing number of droughts, intense storms, and floods we're seeing as our warming atmosphere holds-and then dumps-more moisture poses risks to public health and safety, too. Prolonged dry spells mean more than just scorched lawns. Drought conditions jeopardize access to clean drinking water, fuel out-of-control wildfires, and result in dust storms, extreme heat events, and flash flooding in the States. Elsewhere around the world, lack of water is a leading cause of death and serious disease. At the opposite end of the spectrum, heavier rains cause streams, rivers, and lakes to overflow, which damages life and property, contaminates drinking water, creates hazardous-material spills, and promotes mold infestation and unhealthy air. A warmer, wetter world is also a boon for food-borne and waterborne illnesses and disease-carrying insects such as mosquitoes, fleas, and ticks.

Higher death rates

Today's scientists point to climate change as "the biggest global health threat of the 21st century." It's a threat that impacts all of us-especially children, the elderly, low-income communities, and minorities-and in a variety of direct and indirect ways. As temperatures spike, so does the incidence of illness, emergency room visits, and death.

"There are more hot days in places where people aren't used to it," Haq says. "They don't have air-conditioning or can't afford it. One or two days isn't a big deal. But four days straight where temperatures don't go down, even at night, leads to severe health consequences." In the United States, hundreds of heat-related deaths occur each year due to direct impacts and the indirect effects of heat-exacerbated, life-threatening illnesses, such as heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and cardiovascular and kidney diseases. Indeed, extreme heat kills more Americans each year, on average, than hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and lightning combined.

Dirtier air

Rising temperatures also worsen air pollution by increasing ground level ozone, which is created when pollution from cars, factories, and other sources react to sunlight and heat. Ground-level ozone is the main component of smog, and the hotter things get, the more of it we have. Dirtier air is linked to higher hospital admission rates and higher death rates for asthmatics. It worsens the health of people suffering from cardiac or pulmonary disease. And warmer temperatures also significantly increase airborne pollen, which is bad news for those who suffer from hay fever and other allergies.

Higher wildlife extinction rates

As humans, we face a host of challenges, but we're certainly not the only ones catching heat. As land and sea undergo rapid changes, the animals that inhabit them are doomed to disappear if they don't adapt quickly enough. Some will make it, and some won't. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2014 assessment, many land, freshwater, and ocean species are shifting their geographic ranges to cooler climes or higher altitudes, in an attempt to escape warming. They're changing seasonal behaviors and traditional migration patterns, too. And yet many still face "increased extinction risk due to climate change." Indeed, a 2015 study showed that vertebrate species-animals with backbones, like fish, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles-are disappearing 114 times faster than they should be, a phenomenon that has been linked to climate change, pollution, and deforestation.

More acidic oceans

The earth's marine ecosystems are under pressure as a result of climate change. Oceans are becoming more acidic, due in large part to their absorption of some of our excess emissions. As this acidification accelerates, it poses a serious threat to underwater life, particularly creatures with calcium carbonate shells or skeletons, including mollusks, crabs, and corals. This can have a huge impact on shellfisheries. Indeed, as of 2015, acidification is believed to have cost the Pacific Northwest oyster industry nearly $110 million. Coastal communities in 15 states that depend on the $1 billion nationwide annual harvest of oysters, clams, and other shelled mollusks face similar long-term economic risks.

Higher sea levels

The polar regions are particularly vulnerable to a warming atmosphere. Average temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as they are elsewhere on earth, and the world's ice sheets are melting fast. This not only has grave consequences for the region's people, wildlife, and plants; its most serious impact may be on rising sea levels. By 2100, it's estimated our oceans will be one to four feet higher, threatening coastal systems and low-lying areas, including entire island nations and the world's largest cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Miami as well as Mumbai, Sydney, and Rio de Janeiro.

There's no question: Climate change promises a frightening future, and it's too late to turn back the clock. We've already taken care of that by pumping a century's worth of pollution into the air nearly unchecked. "Even if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow, we'd still see some effects," Haq says. That, of course, is the bad news. But there's also good news. By aggressively reducing our global emissions now, "we can avoid a lot of the severe consequences that climate change would otherwise bring," says Haq.

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Are the Effects of Global Warming Really that Bad?

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Eight degrees Fahrenheit. It may not sound like much-perhaps the difference between wearing a sweater and not wearing one on an early-spring day. But for the world in which we live, which climate experts project will be at least eight degrees warmer by 2100 should global emissions continue on their current path, this small rise will have grave consequences, ones that are already becoming apparent, for every ecosystem and living thing-including us.

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Where the weather patterns have changed the national annual precipitation has increased between 5 and 10 percent and the largely the result of it is heavy downpours. With all the changes, the weather is changing and making things worse.

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This special update is a little different from what I typically post on the California Weather Blog. In the paragraphs below, I discuss results from and context for a study that my colleagues and I recently published in a special issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Swain et al. 2014).

Unlike the majority of content on this blog, this report has undergone scientific peer review-an important distinction to make in the science blogosphere-and claims made on the basis of our peer-reviewed findings are marked with an asterisk (*) throughout this post. A reference list is provided at the end of the post, and the full BAMS report is available here. I would like to thank my co-authors- Michael Tsiang, Matz Haugen, Deepti Singh, Allison Charland, Bala Rajaratnam, and Noah Diffenbaugh -all of whom played critical roles in bringing this paper together.
The really short version In 2013 and 2014, a vast region of persistently high atmospheric pressure over the northeastern Pacific Ocean-known as the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge"-prevented typical winter storms from reaching California, bringing record-low precipitation and record-high temperatures. These extremely dry and warm conditions have culminated in California's worst drought in living memory, and likely the worst in over 100 years. Human-caused climate change has increased the likelihood of extremely high atmospheric pressure over the North Pacific Ocean, which suggests an increased risk of atmospheric patterns conducive to drought in California. What are the effects of the ongoing extreme drought in California?
The impacts of the drought are wide-ranging, and continue to intensify with each passing month. Curtailment of state and federal water project deliveries for agricultural irrigation have already resulted multi-billion dollar losses as thousands of acres of farmland are fallowed. Small communities in some regions have started to run out of water entirely, and increasingly stringent urban conservation measures have been enacted over the summer as reservoir storage drops to critically low levels. Thousands of new water wells have been constructed on an emergency basis over the past year, and skyrocketing rates of groundwater pumping have led to rapid land subsidence in the San Joaquin Valley. Not to be outdone, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains was almost nonexistent for much of 2013-2014, and at least one of California's major rivers is no longer reaching the Pacific Ocean.

The severity of California's drought is so great that it is starting to change the physical geography of the state. The Sierra Nevada's mountain peaks have risen measurably since 2012 as the Earth's crust rebounds from the net loss of 63 trillion gallons of water-an amount equivalent to the entire annual ice melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Intense, destructive wildfires are burning throughout the state, and while September and October are the peak of the typical fire season in California, the number of fires exhibiting extreme behavior and "dangerous" rates of spread has been far higher than usual due to the ubiquity of tinder-dry, drought-cured brush and trees. Conditions have been so warm and dry that at least one glacial outburst flood has occurred on the slopes of Mt. Shasta as winter ice accumulation decreases and summer melt accelerates. The overall visibility and severity of these impacts have brought the drought to the forefront of California politics: landmark legislation regarding the regulation of groundwater recently was recently passed by the state legislature and has now been signed by the governor, and a "water bond" will feature prominently as Proposition 1 on the California ballot this November.
Just how severe is the current drought relative to others in California's past?
California is currently experiencing its third consecutive year of unusually dry conditions, but the intensity of California's long-term drought has increased dramatically over the past 18 months. 2013 was the driest calendar year in at least 119 years of record keeping-but even more impressively, the current drought now encompasses the driest consecutive 12-month period since at least 1895.* This means that the maximum 12-month magnitude of the precipitation deficits in California during the current drought have exceeded those during all previous droughts in living memory-including both the 1976-1977 and 1987-1992 events.* As of September 2014, 3-year precipitation deficits now exceed average annual precipitation across most of California, and most these anomalies stem from the exceptional dryness during 2013 and early 2014. For many practical purposes, 2013 was a "year without rain" in California-an extraordinary occurrence in a region with a traditionally very well defined winter rainy season.

In addition to extremely low precipitation, California has also been experiencing exceptional warmth over much of the past year. 2014 is currently California's record warmest year to date by a wide margin-meaning that it has been warmer during the current drought than during any previous drought since at least the 1800s. Warm temperatures increase the rate of evaporation from parched soils and critically dry rivers, lakes, and streams-exacerbating the impacts of existing precipitation deficits. In fact, primary metrics of overall drought severity-including the widely-used Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI)-have now reached their lowest levels since at least the 1800s. All of this evidence points consistently toward an increasingly inescapable reality: that the 2013-2014 drought in California is the worst in living memory, and likely in well over a century.
What's causing these incredibly warm and dry conditions in California?
The atmospheric pattern over much of North America has been exhibiting a remarkable degree of persistence over the past 12-18 months. This very unusual atmospheric configuration-in which the large-scale atmospheric wave pattern appears to be largely "stuck" in place-has been characterized by a seemingly ever-present West Coast ridge and a similarly stubborn trough over central and eastern United States (commonly referred to in media coverage as the "Polar Vortex," though this terminology is arguably problematic). This so-called "North American dipole" (highlighted by Wang et al., 2014) has resulted in persistent warm/dry anomalies along the West Coast and persistent cool/wet anomalies over the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard.

Because of the extraordinary persistence and strength of the western half of this wave pattern and its conspicuous impacts in California, I started referring to this anomaly as the " Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" (or "Triple R") in December 2013. Since that time, the Triple R has waxed and waned-and for a brief period during February and March 2014, faded away almost entirely. But the anomalous Ridge returned during the spring months, and has continued to be a notable feature of the large-scale pattern through summer 2014.

It's important to note that the Triple R is not a feature that has necessarily been present every single day for the entire duration of the California drought. The "resilience" of the Triple R is key to its significance: despite occasional, transient disruptions of the persistent high pressure on daily to weekly timescales, the much-maligned Triple R has been in place more often than not since early January 2013. Averaged over multiple months (and now up to a year or more), the Ridge pops out as a strikingly prominent feature in map plots of the large-scale atmosphere.* In fact, the region of historically unprecedented (since at least 1948) annual-scale geopotential height anomalies associated with the Triple R extend over a truly vast geographic region-from central California westward across the entire North Pacific to the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East.* Extremely high geopotential heights (a vertically aggregated measure of atmospheric temperature) over the northeastern Pacific Ocean are historically linked to very low precipitation in California.* This is consistent with previous work by other researchers, and highlights the fact that such extreme values are usually linked to a northward shift in the storm track, which directs storms away from California.

Over these many months-and especially during the second half of the 2012-2013 rainy season during January 2013-May 2013 and the first half of the 2013-2014 rainy season during October 2013-January 2014-the Triple R induced persistent shifts in the large-scale wind patterns near and west of California.* During California's rainy season, which typically runs from late October through early May, winter storms approach California from the west and northwest, bringing Pacific moisture to the region in the form of periodic rainfall and mountain snowfall. The latitude of the "storm track" along the West Coast-largely defined by the position of the jet stream-varies from day-to-day, month-to-month, and even year-to-year. During the 2013-2014 California drought, however, the Triple R pushed the jet stream well to the north of California (and, for much of that period, even north of Oregon and Washington).* This northward deflection of the storm track prevented precipitation-bearing low pressure systems from reaching California for large portions of two consecutive rainy seasons, ultimately resulting in the lowest 12-month precipitation on record in California.*

In addition to causing extremely low precipitation in California, the Triple R is also largely responsible for California's record warmth over the past 9 months. During the cool season, the Ridge brought long stretches of cloudless days, which caused daytime temperatures during winter to be well above average (and, at the same time, the position of the ridge also prevented major cold air outbreaks from occurring after December 2013). During the warm season, the Ridge has helped to shut down the typical northwesterly prevailing winds along the coast (and thus the upwelling) that are responsible for northern and central California's legendarily cold ocean surface temperatures. This combination of endless clear skies and far warmer than usual near-shore ocean temperatures have allowed California's air temperatures thus far in 2014 to be the warmest on record since at least 1895-and by a considerable margin.
Why has the North Pacific/West Coast ridge been so "ridiculously resilient?" Has climate change increased the risk of events like the 2013-2014 California drought? Click here to read more on the next page!

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Special update: The Extraordinary California Drought of 2013-2014: Character, Context, and the Role of Climate Change

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A note from the author This special update is a little different from what I typically post on the California Weather Blog.

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The temperatures with earth have increased. We are poisoning this earth and there are a lot of people who care about our environment but then there are some people who could care less or who aren't very educated. Our environment is deminishing.

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Difference between Global Warming and Climate Change

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Difference between Global Warming and Climate Change

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Global warming is a cause of climate change. The earth's average temperature is because of green house build up.

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Answer

Depending on who is talking, there can be an enormous difference between global warming and climate change - or no difference at all.

A lot of people, including many journalists who write about the topic, use the two terms interchangeably. When reporters first began doing stories back in the late 1980s about how humans seemed to be doing things that result in heating up the planet, the term they usually used was global warming. That's because the basic effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide is to do exactly that. They trap more and more of the Sun's energy and drive the average temperature of the planet upward.

But that is only one dimension of the issue. Average temperature is global. Climate is local, and involves not just average temperature, but also other factors that vary, such as humidity, cloudiness, rain (or snow), how this precipitation is spread throughout the year (does it mostly come in one short burst, or over a rainy season, or evenly all year long, or something in between?). If you live by the sea, ocean currents also make a difference. London, England, is farther north than Montreal, Canada, for example but it has much milder winters, because the Gulf Stream carries warm water across the Atlantic to keep it relatively balmy.

Scientists have learned that raising the Earth's temperature is very likely to change many of these factors. So while global warming is what's causing it, what most people are going to notice is not necessarily warming but rather a change in climate.

There is one more factor. Some people want to emphasize the potentially serious consequences of the problem. Others want to convince everyone to think that it is not such a big deal, or that humans are not really causing the problem in the first place. So they choose one term or the other because they think it sounds more or less scary. But since nobody can agree about which term actually is scarier, both groups use both terms at different times.

That sounds pretty confusing. The bottom line is that while global warming is not wrong, climate change more accurately describes what is happening. That is a major reason that many people have settled on the latter term.

But most of the time, whether people use global warming or climate change, they're almost certainly talking about the same thing.

How do we know?

Scientists have identified no fewer than 44 essential climate variables - including not only global temperature but also clouds, precipitation, snow cover, ice cover, sea level, and even biological activity. Many of these are measured from space, with satellites including the US/Japanese Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, which looks at precipitation; NASA's ICESAT Mission, which measures the extent and elevation of ice; and the U.S./French TOPEX and Jason satellites, which keep track of sea level.

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What is the difference between global warming and climate change?

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Answer Depending on who is talking, there can be an enormous difference between global warming and climate change - or no difference at all. A lot of people, including many journalists who write about the topic, use the two terms interchangeably.