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How carbon dioxide released by the soil affects climate change- Alisa Sriphet

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How carbon dioxide released by the soil affects climate change- Alisa Sriphet

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https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/1201/Carbon-dioxide-released-by-soil-could-undermine-climate-efforts

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Thomas Grothe - Diving Scientists Report 'Big Changes' Beneath Antarctic Ice Shelf

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Thomas Grothe - Diving Scientists Report 'Big Changes' Beneath Antarctic Ice Shelf

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https://www.livescience.com/60980-big-changes-beneath-antarctic-ice.html

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http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24021772

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Could climate change affect peoples personality? -Aku Saarela

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Could climate change affect peoples personality? -Aku Saarela

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https://www.livescience.com/61033-climate-temperature-personality.html

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Climate change: How do we know?- Eido Hananya

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Climate change: How do we know?- Eido Hananya

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https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

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Hanol Yang - Effects of Global WarmingBy Alina Bradford and Stephanie Pappas | August 12, 2017

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Hanol Yang - Effects of Global WarmingBy Alina Bradford and Stephanie Pappas | August 12, 2017

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https://www.livescience.com/37057-global-warming-effects.html

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Lawyer Mamaril - Climate Change: Vital signs of the planet: Causes

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Lawyer Mamaril - Climate Change: Vital signs of the planet: Causes

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https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

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Kolby Sowvlen- Climate Change affecting Polar Bears in Alaskan Towns

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Kolby Sowvlen- Climate Change affecting Polar Bears in Alaskan Towns

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https://www.google.com/amp/abcnews.go.com/amp/US/alaskan-towns-polar-bear-problem-leads-tourism-boom/story%3fid=51123121

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https://newsela.com/read/govt-EPA-climate-hawaii-islands/id/28405

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Eshaan Parlikar - How climate change triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes

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Eshaan Parlikar - How climate change triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/16/climate-change-triggers-earthquakes-tsunamis-volcanoes

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https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2658/nasa-links-port-city-sea-levels-to-regional-ice-melt/

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http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24021772

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Climate Change may lead to polar bear extinction - Sophia Gounder

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Climate Change may lead to polar bear extinction - Sophia Gounder

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https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/polar-bear-population-decline-a-wake-up-call-for-climate-change-action

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https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

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https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ninonina.html

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Polar bears are among the animals most affected by the seasonal and year-to-year decline in Arctic sea ice extent, because they rely on sea ice for essential activities such as hunting, traveling and breeding.

A new study by University of Washington researchers, funded by NASA and using satellite data from NASA and other agencies, found a trend toward earlier sea ice melt in the spring and later ice growth in the fall across all 19 polar bear subpopulations, which can negatively impact the feeding and breeding capabilities of the bears. The paper, published on Sept. 14 in the journal The Cryosphere, is the first to quantify the sea ice changes in each polar bear subpopulation across the entire Arctic region using metrics that are specifically relevant to polar bear biology.

"This study shows declining sea ice for all subpopulations of polar bears," said co-author Harry Stern, a researcher with the University of Washington's Polar Science Center in Seattle.

The analysis shows that the critical timing of the sea ice break-up and sea ice freeze-up is changing in all areas in a direction that is harmful for polar bears.

"Other researchers have used the satellite-derived sea ice data to look at how the sea ice extent in a particular place is changing in a particular month. But for us the important thing was the timing of the retreat of sea ice in the spring and its advance in the fall, for all 19 polar bear subpopulations," Stern said.

Three adult polar bears travel across sea ice in southeast Greenland. Credit: Kristin Laidre/University of Washington.

Nineteen separate polar bear subpopulations live throughout the Arctic, spending their winters and springs roaming on sea ice and hunting. The bears have evolved mainly to eat seals, which provide necessary fats and nutrients in the harsh Arctic environment. Polar bears can't outswim their prey, so instead they perch on the ice as a platform and ambush seals at breathing holes or break through the ice to access their dens.

"Sea ice really is their platform for life," said co-author Kristin Laidre, a researcher at the UW's Polar Science Center. "They are capable of existing on land for part of the year, but the sea ice is where they obtain their main prey."

The new study draws upon 35 years of satellite data showing sea ice concentration each day in the Arctic. NASA scientists process the data, stored at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

The center also reports each fall the yearly minimum low for Arctic sea ice. This August saw the fourth lowest in the satellite record and the September minimum extent is likely headed to its second lowest level in the record.

In 17 of the 19 polar bear subpopulations, the researchers found that the total number of ice-covered days declined at the rate of seven to 19 days per decade between 1979 and 2014. The decline was even greater in the Barents Sea and the Arctic basin. Sea ice concentration during the summer months - an important measure because summertime is when some subpopulations are forced to fast on land - also declined in all regions, by 1 percent to 9 percent per decade.

The most striking result, researchers said, is the consistent trend across all polar bear regions for an earlier spring ice melt and a later fall freeze-up. Arctic sea ice retreats in the springtime as daylight reappears and temperatures warm. In the fall months the ice sheets build again as temperatures drop.

"These spring and fall transitions bound the period when there is good ice habitat available for bears to feed," Laidre said. "Those periods are also tied to the breeding season when bears find mates, and when females come out of their maternity dens with very small cubs and haven't eaten for months."

The researchers found that on average, spring melting was three to nine days earlier per decade, and fall freeze-up was three to nine days later per decade. Over the 35 years of Arctic sea ice satellite data. that corresponds to a roughly 3-and-a-half-week shift at either end - and seven weeks of total loss of good sea ice habitat for polar bears.

"We expect that if the trends continue, compared with today, polar bears will experience another six to seven weeks of ice-free periods by mid-century," Stern said.

The trend appears to be linear and isn't accelerating or leveling off, Stern added.

The study's results currently are used by the Polar Bear Specialist Group, part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission. The Polar Bear Specialist Group used the sea ice metric as a measure of polar bear habitat in the IUCN Red List assessment of polar bears, which assesses the conservation status of polar bears. The researchers plan to update their findings each year as new ice coverage data are available.

"It's nice to see this work being used in high-level conservation goals," Laidre said.

"This NASA-funded work is an excellent example of the use satellite imagery to understand the distribution and abundance of an Arctic keystone species, with the added benefit of providing vital information to those charged with managing polar bear populations globally," said Woody Turner, the Program Scientist for Biological Diversity and Program Manager for Ecological Forecasting in the NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The study was funded by NASA and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.

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Polar bears across the Arctic face shorter sea ice season - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Polar bears are among the animals most affected by the seasonal and year-to-year decline in Arctic sea ice extent, because they rely on sea ice for essential activities such as hunting, traveling and breeding.

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Climate Change- effects on animals birdlife, and plants - Clarabel Skopec

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Climate Change- effects on animals birdlife, and plants - Clarabel Skopec

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Our climate is changing, both naturally and due to human exploitation. There is already undeniable evidence that animals, birds and plants are being affected by climate change and global warming in both their distribution and behavior. Unless greenhouse gas emissions are severely reduced, climate change could cause a quarter of land animals, birdlife and plants to become extinct.

Climate variability and change affects birdlife and animals in a number of ways; birds lay eggs earlier in the year than usual, plants bloom earlier and mammals are come out of hibernation sooner. Distribution of animals is also affected; with many species moving closer to the poles as a response to the rise in global temperatures. Birds are migrating and arriving at their nesting grounds earlier, and the nesting grounds that they are moving to are not as far away as they used to be and in some countries the birds don't even leave anymore, as the climate is suitable all year round.

A sea level rise of only 50cm could cause sea turtles to lose their nesting beaches - over 30% of Caribbean beaches are used by turtles during the nesting season and would be affected. The already endangered Mediterranean Monk Seals need beaches upon which to raise their pups and a rise in sea level could there could damage shallow coastal areas used annually by whales and dolphins which need shallow, gentle waters in order to rear there small calves.

Humans have already destroyed many of the natural migrations of animals.

The migratory journeys of Wildebeest in several African countries are stopped by fences. Changing rainfall patterns are causing dams to be erected in some areas of our planet, not taking into account the migratory fish and mammals that annually migrate up river to breed and spawn and water birds which rely on wetland sites for migration are at threat from rising sea levels caused by human effects. On the other side of the coin, the atmosphere is sucking moisture from the land at a greater rate than ever before causing severe droughts in many countries which are now facing reduced crop production and major drinking water shortages.

Although it is thought that no species has yet become extinct exclusively because of climate change, many migratory and non-migratory species are expected to become extinct in the near future.

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Our climate is changing, both naturally and due to human exploitation. There is already undeniable evidence that animals, birds and plants are being affected by climate change and global warming in both their distribution and behavior. Unless greenhouse gas emissions are severely reduced, climate change could cause a quarter of land animals, birdlife and plants to become extinct.

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Nana Matsugasako

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Human activities have increased carbon-dioxide emissions, driving up temperatures. Extreme weather and melting polar ice are among the possible effects.

What is climate change?

The Earth's average temperature is about 15C but has been much higher and lower in the past.

There are natural fluctuations in the climate but scientists say temperatures are now rising faster than at many other times.

This is linked to the greenhouse effect, which describes how the Earth's atmosphere traps some of the Sun's energy.

Solar energy radiating back to space from the Earth's surface is absorbed by greenhouse gases and re-emitted in all directions.

This heats both the lower atmosphere and the surface of the planet. Without this effect, the Earth would be about 30C colder and hostile to life.

Scientists believe we are adding to the natural greenhouse effect, with gases released from industry and agriculture trapping more energy and increasing the temperature.

This is known as climate change or global warming.

What are greenhouse gases?

The greenhouse gas with the greatest impact on warming is water vapour. But it remains in the atmosphere for only a few days.

Carbon dioxide (CO2), however, persists for much longer. It would take hundreds of years for a return to pre-industrial levels and only so much can be soaked up by natural reservoirs such as the oceans.

Most man-made emissions of CO2 come from burning fossil fuels. When carbon-absorbing forests are cut down and left to rot, or burned, that stored carbon is released, contributing to global warming.

Climate change: Where we are in seven charts

Five things the 1.5C report taught us

Since the industrial revolution began in about 1750, CO2 levels have risen more than 30%. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.

Other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also released through human activities but they are less abundant than carbon dioxide.

What is the evidence for warming?

The world is about one degree Celsius warmer than before widespread industrialisation, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says.

The 20 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 22 years, with 2015-18 making up the top four.

Across the globe, the average sea level increased by 3.6mm per year between 2005 and 2015.

Most of this change was because water increases in volume as it heats up.

However, melting ice is now thought to be the main reason for rising sea levels. Most glaciers in temperate regions of the world are retreating.

And satellite records show a dramatic decline in Arctic sea-ice since 1979. The Greenland Ice Sheet has experienced record melting in recent years.

Satellite data also shows the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass. A recent study indicated East Antarctica may also have started to lose mass.

The effects of a changing climate can also be seen in vegetation and land animals. These include earlier flowering and fruiting times for plants and changes in the territories of animals.

How much will temperatures rise in future?

The change in the global surface temperature between 1850 and the end of the 21st Century is likely to exceed 1.5C, most simulations suggest.

The WMO says that if the current warming trend continues, temperatures could rise 3-5C by the end of this century.

Temperature rises of 2C had long been regarded as the gateway to dangerous warming. More recently, scientists and policymakers have argued that limiting temperature rises to 1.5C is safer.

An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2018 suggested that keeping to the 1.5C target would require " rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society".

The UN is leading a political effort to stabilise greenhouse-gas emissions. China emits more CO2 than any other country. It is followed by the US and the European Union member states, although emissions per person are much greater there.

But even if we now cut greenhouse-gas emissions dramatically, scientists say the effects will continue. Large bodies of water and ice can take hundreds of years to respond to changes in temperature. And it takes CO2 decades to be removed from the atmosphere.

How will climate change affect us?

There is uncertainty about how great the impact of a changing climate will be.

It could cause freshwater shortages, dramatically alter our ability to produce food, and increase the number of deaths from floods, storms and heatwaves. This is because climate change is expected to increase the frequency of extreme weather events - though linking any single event to global warming is complicated.

As the world warms, more water evaporates, leading to more moisture in the air. This means many areas will experience more intense rainfall - and in some places snowfall. But the risk of drought in inland areas during hot summers will increase. More flooding is expected from storms and rising sea levels. But there are likely to be very strong regional variations in these patterns.

Vietnam's children and the fear of climate change

Would you give up beef to help the planet?

Poorer countries, which are least equipped to deal with rapid change, could suffer the most.

Plant and animal extinctions are predicted as habitats change faster than species can adapt. And the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the health of millions could be threatened by increases in malaria, water-borne disease and malnutrition.

As more CO2 is released into the atmosphere, uptake of the gas by the oceans increases, causing the water to become more acidic. This could pose major problems for coral reefs.

Global warming will cause further changes that are likely to create further heating. This includes the release of large quantities of methane as permafrost - frozen soil found mainly at high latitudes - melts.

Responding to climate change will be one of the biggest challenges we face this century.

Climate-related words and phrases explained

How much warmer is your city?

What is your diet's carbon footprint?

Where we are in seven charts

What questions do you have about changes in our climate?
In some cases your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.

Use this form to ask your question:

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Human activities have increased carbon-dioxide emissions, driving up temperatures. Extreme weather and melting polar ice are among the possible effects. The Earth's average temperature is about 15C but has been much higher and lower in the past. There are natural fluctuations in the climate but scientists say temperatures are now rising faster than at many other times.

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Ellie Hughes - Climate Change and Hurricanes 

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Ellie Hughes - Climate Change and Hurricanes 

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https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-climate-change-global-warming-weather/

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Effects of climate change on the world currently and in the future

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Effects of climate change on the world currently and in the future

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Krishnadev Lakshminarayanan
Source:NASA

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Our Trajectory

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound

The potential future effects of global climate change include more frequent wildfires, longer periods of drought in some regions, and an increase in the wind intensity and rainfall from tropical cyclones. Credit: left - Mike McMillan/USFS, center - Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, right - NASA.

Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth's climate driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are already having widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner.

Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.

" The magnitude and rate of climate change and associated risks depend strongly on near-term mitigation and adaptation actions, and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed. In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the United Nations body established to assess the science related to climate change - modern humans have never before seen the observed changes in our global climate, and some of these changes are irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for many decades, mainly due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

A Degree of Difference

So, the Earth's average temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century. What's the big deal?

Read more

The IPCC's Sixth Assessment report, published in 2021, found that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have already warmed the climate by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since 1850-1900. The global average temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades. These changes will affect all regions of Earth.

What's the difference between climate change and global warming?

"Global warming" refers to the long-term warming of the planet. "Climate change" encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet, including rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times.

detailed answer

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet. However, those future effects depend on the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit. So, if we can reduce emissions, we may avoid some of the worst effects.

" The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss the brief, rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future." ²

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Future Effects in the U.S.

U.S. Regional Effects

U.S. Regional Effects

Climate change is bringing different types of challenges to each region of the country. Some of the current and future impacts are summarized below. These findings are from the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Is it too late to prevent climate change?

Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.

detailed answer

Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise pose increasing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity, which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.

Northwest. Changes in the timing of peak flows in rivers and streams are reducing water supplies and worsening competing demands for water. Sea level rise, erosion, flooding, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire incidence and severity, heat waves, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread forest die-off.

Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region's economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture, and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.

Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also worsen a range of risks to the Great Lakes.

Southwest. Climate change has caused increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks. In turn, these changes have made wildfires more numerous and severe. The warming climate has also caused a decline in water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, and triggered heat-related health impacts in cities. In coastal areas, flooding and erosion are additional concerns.

References
References
Header image shows cracked mud stretches across sections of the Panamint Valley. Credit: NPS/Kurt Moses; A degree of concern thermometer image credit: Pixabay/geralt

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intergovernmental panel on climate change

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Long-term effects of global climate change in the United States.

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Global Warming

Throughout its long history, Earth has warmed and cooled time and again. Climate has changed when the planet received more or less sunlight due to subtle shifts in its orbit, as the atmosphere or surface changed, or when the Sun's energy varied. But in the past century, another force has started to influence Earth's climate: humanity

How does this warming compare to previous changes in Earth's climate? How can we be certain that human-released greenhouse gases are causing the warming? How much more will the Earth warm? How will Earth respond? Answering these questions is perhaps the most significant scientific challenge of our time.

What is Global Warming?

Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth's average surface temperature over the past century primarily due to the greenhouse gases released as people burn fossil fuels. The global average surface temperature rose 0.6 to 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.1 to 1.6° F) between 1906 and 2005, and the rate of temperature increase has nearly doubled in the last 50 years. Temperatures are certain to go up further.

Earth's natural greenhouse effect

Earth's temperature begins with the Sun. Roughly 30 percent of incoming sunlight is reflected back into space by bright surfaces like clouds and ice. Of the remaining 70 percent, most is absorbed by the land and ocean, and the rest is absorbed by the atmosphere. The absorbed solar energy heats our planet.

As the rocks, the air, and the seas warm, they radiate "heat" energy (thermal infrared radiation). From the surface, this energy travels into the atmosphere where much of it is absorbed by water vapor and long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

When they absorb the energy radiating from Earth's surface, microscopic water or greenhouse gas molecules turn into tiny heaters- like the bricks in a fireplace, they radiate heat even after the fire goes out. They radiate in all directions. The energy that radiates back toward Earth heats both the lower atmosphere and the surface, enhancing the heating they get from direct sunlight.

This absorption and radiation of heat by the atmosphere-the natural greenhouse effect-is beneficial for life on Earth. If there were no greenhouse effect, the Earth's average surface temperature would be a very chilly -18°C (0°F) instead of the comfortable 15°C (59°F) that it is today.

See Climate and Earth's Energy Budget to read more about how sunlight fuels Earth's climate.

The enhanced greenhouse effect

What has scientists concerned now is that over the past 250 years, humans have been artificially raising the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate, mostly by burning fossil fuels, but also from cutting down carbon-absorbing forests. Since the Industrial Revolution began in about 1750, carbon dioxide levels have increased nearly 38 percent as of 2009 and methane levels have increased 148 percent.

The atmosphere today contains more greenhouse gas molecules, so more of the infrared energy emitted by the surface ends up being absorbed by the atmosphere. Since some of the extra energy from a warmer atmosphere radiates back down to the surface, Earth's surface temperature rises. By increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases, we are making Earth's atmosphere a more efficient greenhouse.

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Global warming is happening now, and scientists are confident that greenhouse gases are responsible. To understand what this means for humanity, it is necessary to understand what global warming is, how scientists know it's happening, and how they predict future climate.

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Wind, warm water revved up melting Antarctic glaciers

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Wind, warm water revved up melting Antarctic glaciers

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Michael Chen

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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By Carol Rasmussen,
NASA's Earth Science News Team

A NASA study has located the Antarctic glaciers that accelerated the fastest between 2008 and 2014 and finds that the most likely cause of their speedup is an observed influx of warm water into the bay where they're located.

The water was only 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 to 1 degree Celsius) warmer than usual water temperatures in the area, but it increased the glaciers' flow speeds by up to 25 percent and multiplied the rate of glacial ice loss by three to five times - from 7 to 10 feet of thinning per year (2 to 3 meters) up to 33 feet per year (10 meters).

Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, found that the warmer water was driven into the area by winds associated with two global climate patterns: La Niña and the less-known Southern Annular Mode, which involves a change in location of the belt of winds that encircles Antarctica. The glaciers' acceleration lasted from mid-2008 to 2012. After that, they slowed down but have continued to flow faster than they did before the warm water arrived.

Left, location of Marguerite Bay in Antarctica (box) and deep currents around the continent, with darker colors showing faster water. Right, ice velocities, ocean depth and currents in the bay. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The study is published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The four glaciers are in Marguerite Bay on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Before 2008, their flow rates and rates of thinning (a measure of ice loss) had been stable for almost two decades - since the Wordie Ice Shelf in front of the glaciers collapsed in about 1989. The collapse broke off almost all of the floating portions of the glaciers, leaving the parts that are grounded on bedrock.

"Grounded ice is a major concern for sea level rise, because it hasn't contributed to sea level yet," said the new study's lead author, Catherine Walker of JPL. "Floating ice has already made its contribution to the sea level."

After two decades of relative stability, the magnitude of the glaciers' acceleration was unexpected. Walker and coauthor Alex Gardner of JPL discovered the change by examining new maps of glacial velocities for all Antarctic glaciers, created this year by Gardner and colleagues. The maps were developed by analyzing changes in Landsat satellite images from year to year. Previous data sets have either given a one-year "snapshot" of velocities, focused on a different location, or averaged rates of change over much larger areas of Antarctica, obscuring velocity changes over time and the behavior of individual glaciers. "I don't think anyone could have seen this before these new maps were developed," Walker said.

To find out what caused the speedup, Walker and Gardner checked air temperatures over the bay and saw that, though they had generally warmed over past decades, they hadn't spiked markedly in 2008 to 2012.

Water temperatures were a different story. A long-term data set from the nearby U.S. Antarctic Program's Palmer Station showed that warmer water first appeared in the bay in 2008, peaked in 2009, and stayed there almost nonstop through 2011. Using an analysis of winds in the area from the U.S. ECCO (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean) project, Walker and Gardner showed that northwesterly winds allowed this warmer water to well up from the deep ocean onto the continental shelf in front of Marguerite Bay. Currents then carried the warm water into the bay and up to the fronts of the glaciers.

While the warm water was in the bay, there was a moderately strong La Niña event, and the belt of winds circling Antarctica was closer to the continent rather than farther north - a condition known as the positive phase of the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). The combination of these two climate patterns was responsible for the northwesterly winds along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The speed at which the Marguerite Bay glaciers responded to a relatively small increase in ocean temperature was startling, Walker said. "We detected the warmest water first in January 2009, and by November the glaciers were already losing ice at a rate of eight meters [25 feet] per year in thickness."

Walker noted that while these glaciers accelerated during a La Niña event, the nearby Pine Island Glacier, one of West Antarctica's fastest-moving glaciers, melts faster during El Niños - the opposite climate pattern. She said, "This alternating response to global atmospheric patterns underscores the need to improve our understanding of the links between global climate and changes in the polar oceans."

Media contact

Alan Buis
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0474
Alan.Buis@jpl.nasa.gov

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national aeronautics and space administration

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Wind, warm water revved up melting Antarctic glaciers

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By Carol Rasmussen, NASA's Earth Science News Team A NASA study has located the Antarctic glaciers that accelerated the fastest between 2008 and 2014 and finds that the most likely cause of their speedup is an observed influx of warm water into the bay where they're located.

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Zoey Ho

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Polar bears are among the animals most affected by the seasonal and year-to-year decline in Arctic sea ice extent, because they rely on sea ice for essential activities such as hunting, traveling and breeding.

A new study by University of Washington researchers, funded by NASA and using satellite data from NASA and other agencies, found a trend toward earlier sea ice melt in the spring and later ice growth in the fall across all 19 polar bear subpopulations, which can negatively impact the feeding and breeding capabilities of the bears. The paper, published on Sept. 14 in the journal The Cryosphere, is the first to quantify the sea ice changes in each polar bear subpopulation across the entire Arctic region using metrics that are specifically relevant to polar bear biology.

"This study shows declining sea ice for all subpopulations of polar bears," said co-author Harry Stern, a researcher with the University of Washington's Polar Science Center in Seattle.

The analysis shows that the critical timing of the sea ice break-up and sea ice freeze-up is changing in all areas in a direction that is harmful for polar bears.

"Other researchers have used the satellite-derived sea ice data to look at how the sea ice extent in a particular place is changing in a particular month. But for us the important thing was the timing of the retreat of sea ice in the spring and its advance in the fall, for all 19 polar bear subpopulations," Stern said.

Three adult polar bears travel across sea ice in southeast Greenland. Credit: Kristin Laidre/University of Washington.

Nineteen separate polar bear subpopulations live throughout the Arctic, spending their winters and springs roaming on sea ice and hunting. The bears have evolved mainly to eat seals, which provide necessary fats and nutrients in the harsh Arctic environment. Polar bears can't outswim their prey, so instead they perch on the ice as a platform and ambush seals at breathing holes or break through the ice to access their dens.

"Sea ice really is their platform for life," said co-author Kristin Laidre, a researcher at the UW's Polar Science Center. "They are capable of existing on land for part of the year, but the sea ice is where they obtain their main prey."

The new study draws upon 35 years of satellite data showing sea ice concentration each day in the Arctic. NASA scientists process the data, stored at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

The center also reports each fall the yearly minimum low for Arctic sea ice. This August saw the fourth lowest in the satellite record and the September minimum extent is likely headed to its second lowest level in the record.

In 17 of the 19 polar bear subpopulations, the researchers found that the total number of ice-covered days declined at the rate of seven to 19 days per decade between 1979 and 2014. The decline was even greater in the Barents Sea and the Arctic basin. Sea ice concentration during the summer months - an important measure because summertime is when some subpopulations are forced to fast on land - also declined in all regions, by 1 percent to 9 percent per decade.

The most striking result, researchers said, is the consistent trend across all polar bear regions for an earlier spring ice melt and a later fall freeze-up. Arctic sea ice retreats in the springtime as daylight reappears and temperatures warm. In the fall months the ice sheets build again as temperatures drop.

"These spring and fall transitions bound the period when there is good ice habitat available for bears to feed," Laidre said. "Those periods are also tied to the breeding season when bears find mates, and when females come out of their maternity dens with very small cubs and haven't eaten for months."

The researchers found that on average, spring melting was three to nine days earlier per decade, and fall freeze-up was three to nine days later per decade. Over the 35 years of Arctic sea ice satellite data. that corresponds to a roughly 3-and-a-half-week shift at either end - and seven weeks of total loss of good sea ice habitat for polar bears.

"We expect that if the trends continue, compared with today, polar bears will experience another six to seven weeks of ice-free periods by mid-century," Stern said.

The trend appears to be linear and isn't accelerating or leveling off, Stern added.

The study's results currently are used by the Polar Bear Specialist Group, part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission. The Polar Bear Specialist Group used the sea ice metric as a measure of polar bear habitat in the IUCN Red List assessment of polar bears, which assesses the conservation status of polar bears. The researchers plan to update their findings each year as new ice coverage data are available.

"It's nice to see this work being used in high-level conservation goals," Laidre said.

"This NASA-funded work is an excellent example of the use satellite imagery to understand the distribution and abundance of an Arctic keystone species, with the added benefit of providing vital information to those charged with managing polar bear populations globally," said Woody Turner, the Program Scientist for Biological Diversity and Program Manager for Ecological Forecasting in the NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The study was funded by NASA and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.

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Polar bears across the Arctic face shorter sea ice season - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Polar bears are among the animals most affected by the seasonal and year-to-year decline in Arctic sea ice extent, because they rely on sea ice for essential activities such as hunting, traveling and breeding.

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Sarah Alegre - Climate Change and Penguins

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Sarah Alegre - Climate Change and Penguins

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https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2462/climate-change-may-shrink-adelie-penguin-range-by-end-of-century/

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LAELAPS

Climate Change of Eras Past: Arctic Alligators and Shrinking Carnivores

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Trinity Kwon

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Climate change of up to 6 degrees in the winter has significantly disrupted the region's ecosystem.

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how does climate change affect hurricanes

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Weeks after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma is ravaging communities across the Southeast. Unfortunately, this is consistent with the impacts expected from climate change and will be the new normal that we must adapt to.

Two weeks ago, Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas with record flooding. Now, storm surge and rains from Hurricane Irma are ravaging communities across the Southeast.

We may not know the full impact for days. But we do know the damage will be severe and lives will be forever changed.

Irma makes 2017 the third year in a row that the lives of people in the Carolinas have been turned upside down by hurricanes. More than 75 dams failed in the Carolinas as a result of the 2015 and 2016 storms, and record flood levels were exceeded at many creeks and rivers.

Weeks after Harvey, Hurricane Irma is ravaging communities across the Southeast with the new normal. Click To Tweet

Unfortunately, this is consistent with the impacts expected from climate change and will be the new normal that we must adapt to. With increasing temperatures we get more evaporation adding more moisture to the atmosphere. Catastrophic weather events result when increases in temperature and moisture seek to reach equilibrium.

After recovery from Irma we need to reassess how we can reduce the threats from flooding to keep people safe from future storms. We need to look for opportunities to give rivers more room to accommodate floodwaters, keeping people out of harm's way. We'll need to improve the safety of high-hazard dams, and reform the National Flood Insurance Program to reduce flood risks.

There is a lot of work to do. But right now, American Rivers encourages our supporters to help with the relief and recovery efforts. Our neighbors need help. We are grateful to all of the volunteers and first responders. Learn how you can help the victims of Hurricane Irma here.

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Hurricane Irma, Flooding, and Climate Change | American Rivers

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Weeks after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma is ravaging communities across the Southeast. Unfortunately, this is consistent with the impacts expected from climate change and will be the new normal that we must adapt to. Two weeks ago, Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas with record flooding.

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https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2651/greenland-melt-speeds-east-coast-sea-level-rise/

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Madi Kloberdanz - Climate Change and Politics

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Madi Kloberdanz - Climate Change and Politics

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Sweetwater, Texas, a town of nearly 11,000 smack in the center of the state, is known for three things: the world's largest rattlesnake round-up and associated Miss Snake Charmer beauty pageant, the town's two historical museums-one dedicated to American pioneers, the other to female World War II service pilots-and wind turbines. Nolan County, which surrounds Sweetwater, is home to nearly 1,400 wind turbines, more than anywhere else in the world. The roughly 900-square-mile county produces enough wind energy to power more than half a million homes and, should Nolan ever secede from the U.S., it would be the 25 th largest wind energy producer in the world, just behind Greece and Belgium.

But while Sweetwater is at the vanguard of the clean energy transition, if you ask most residents, they're not doing it to combat climate change. According to research from Yale University, less than half of Nolan County's population believes that global warming is manmade, and only 40% think that scientists agree that global warming is happening.
Beliefs about the causes, impacts, risks, and cures to climate change vary wildly by political ideology, making it tricky for legislators to reach across the aisle.
That disconnect between action and intent isn't itself an anomaly, says Rebecca Romsdahl, an environmental science and policy professor at the University of North Dakota. Back in 2012, Romsdahl's team surveyed more than 200 local governments across ten predominantly Republican states in the Great Plains and found that more than half were running initiatives that reduce humans' contribution to global warming, ranging from investing in city-operated "green" vehicles to the installation of efficient streetlights. But policies were rarely framed as climate change programs. Instead, in an effort to attract more universal support, policies that mitigated climate change were branded as economic development, sustainability, resource management, or public health initiatives.

"They would focus on these common values that people want to have-clean air, clean water, a healthy community, they want to save money on either their transportation costs or their household energy bills," Romsdahl says. "They recognized within their community that using the term 'climate change' was risking either a backlash or a lack of support that would make that policy either difficult to pass or impossible."

The issue of climate change has become a political football in Washington, D.C., and in statehouses across the U.S. While 70% of Americans agree that global temperatures are rising, once you dive into the specifics, agreement tends to evaporate. Beliefs about the causes, impacts, risks, and cures to climate change vary wildly by political ideology, making it tricky for legislators to reach across the aisle.

But there are glimmers of hope that the era of gridlock could come to an end, at least for climate change. An increasing number of lawmakers, educators, scientists, and activists from across the political spectrum are using research to depoliticize the issue and create bipartisan solutions. And they're finding success in some surprising places.

Identity Politics

Bridging the political gap is challenging, in part because climate change has come to encompass so much more than just science, says Paul Walker, executive director of ConservAmerica, a nonprofit organization that promotes conservative legislation aimed at tackling environmental and energy issues, including a proposal to eliminate taxes on revenues generated from emissions-free energy sources like nuclear and hydropower, as well as pushing against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

"I've been in focus groups where we bring in a room full of self-identified conservative and very conservative voters. We ask them, 'Raise your hand if you think climate change is a real issue.' No hands go up," Walker says. "Then you bring them into one-on-one conversations and 75% say, 'Yeah, I'm totally worried about climate change.' There's an orthodoxy. There's a tribalism that says, 'I can't raise my hand. I can't say I'm worried about this.' "

That's because disagreements on climate science often aren't really about climate; they're about identity. A growing body of research shows that the way in which people interpret scientific results can change depending on whether those results support policies that bolster or undermine an individual's moral and political beliefs. Troy Campbell, a social psychologist at the University of Oregon, has seen this reflected in liberals and conservatives alike. A few years ago, Campbell, along with Duke University psychology and neuroscience professor Aaron Kay, conducted a series of experiments to understand why the two groups interpret scientific information so differently.
"There's a tribalism that says, 'I can't raise my hand. I can't say I'm worried about this.' "
In one experiment, participants were asked if they agreed with a statement from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which said that humans are the cause of global warming and that worldwide temperatures will rise by 3.2˚ F in the 21 st century. Republicans were far more likely to be skeptical of the statement than Democrats, but their degree of skepticism varied according to whether they believe that the solutions would harm the economy. Republicans who saw an economic downside were less likely to buy into the science than those who didn't. A second experiment presented participants with the same statement along with one of two climate interventions, either a policy that restricted emissions or another designed to boost green technologies within the free market. Republicans were far more likely to believe the IPCC statement when it came with a free-market solution.

Campbell and Kay coined this phenomenon "solution aversion"-"downplaying or outright denying a problem based on whether its solution fits in a specific current belief structure"-and they noticed it among liberals in the very same study, this time with gun control. They presented the participants with one of two articles on home invasions, one that was pro-gun rights, the other pro-gun control. People who favored tighter gun control, typically a liberal ideology, believed that home invasion was a worse problem when the solution centered around gun control. When the solution focused on looser gun restrictions, gun control advocates were less likely to believe that home invasions are a serious issue.
Beliefs-whether liberal or conservative-can influence our perception and reasoning capabilities.
Solution aversion builds on decades of previous research showing that when something is central to our identity-whether it's a political belief, moral code, or social group-it's psychologically much easier to ignore facts or ideas that appear to compete. Which is why, Campbell says, that it's probably going to take more than data on climate change to shift opinion among voters who aren't yet on board.

Since most proposed climate policies lean on liberal principles, when conservatives affirm climate science, it frequently gets interpreted as an aversion to free market ideals. "It becomes a politicized thing where admitting that climate change existing is tantamount to admitting your entire ideology is incorrect," Campbell says. As long as the issue of climate change stays this way, "solution aversion will stay very, very high. It will be almost impossible to overcome."

That's because beliefs can influence our perception and reasoning capabilities as well. A few years ago, researchers from Yale, Cornell, Ohio State, and the University of Oregon demonstrated this by first assessing study participants' numeracy skills-the ability to reason with quantitative information-and then presenting them with a math problem. Participants had to evaluate data to determine whether patients were benefiting from using a hypothetical new skin cream. Unsurprisingly, participants who aced the initial numeracy assessment were also good at solving the skin cream problem.

But when the researchers substituted skin cream for politically charged issues, the results changed dramatically. Numeracy skills mattered far less when participants evaluated whether a hypothetical gun control measure impacted crime rates. Conservative participants were more successful problem solvers than liberals when the data showed that gun control led to higher crime rates. The results were flipped when the data showed that gun control reduced crime. When the data favored the interpretation people wanted, they were substantially better at interpreting it, especially among those with the sharpest numeracy skills.

Dan Kahan, the study's lead author and a professor of law and psychology at Yale Law School, says that he's seen this pattern in other studies that measure scientific literacy and critical reasoning. There's "this kind of perverse dynamic," Kahan says. "As people did better on a critical reasoning test, the more aggressively they were misperceiving information in a way that generated political polarization."

How We Got Here

While few topics today are as polarized as climate change, it wasn't always this way. Conservative leaders led the charge on several landmark environmental reforms: Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; he also signed the Clean Air Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act. George H.W. Bush helped pass the nation's first cap-and-trade legislation in an effort to fight acid rain. And Theodore Roosevelt protected more than 230 million acres of public land, established the United States Forest Service, and was instrumental in expanding the number of national parks.

Twenty years ago, Democrats and Republicans held essentially the same views on climate change. In 1997, about half of each group said that they believed the effects of global warming had already begun, according to research from Gallup. Then the debate over the Kyoto protocol began to ramp up. By that point, opposition to climate science had been steadily building, fueled largely by efforts from oil and gas lobbies, and it sharply intensified as the U.S. considered ratifying the international agreement.

By 2003, the U.S. had withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol and the partisan gap had widened, with 60% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans believing that the effects of global warming had already begun. Three years later, the gap widened to 70%-45%. By 2010, 70% of Democrats still said they thought climate change had begun, but less than a third of Republicans did.
"When it looked like climate legislation would pass in Congress, communication to oppose climate legislation became much more urgent."
Ed Maibach, director of George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication, says the 2010 numbers were partially due to a wave of opposition to the 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act which passed the House of Representatives. The bill proposed a cap-and-trade program that would have restricted the emission of greenhouse gases.

"When it looked like there was a real possibility that climate legislation would pass in Congress, communication to oppose climate legislation became much more urgent and insistent and persistent," Maibach says. "They really did ramp up their game."

The belief gap has also widened as media outlets have become increasingly partisan, but Maibach says that the tide on climate acceptance is beginning to turn. In the last two years, his research has shown a 20% increase in the proportion of conservative voters who report believing in climate science.

"That is a tsunami of a change in public opinion in a very short period of time," he says. "If it continues to move in that direction, it means that what we're witnessing right now is a decoupling between one's identity as a conservative Republican and their views about human-caused climate change."

A Pioneer

But that decoupling is far from complete. Bob Inglis has the political scars to prove it. A lifelong Republican, Inglis represented South Carolina's 4 th District for 12 nonconsecutive years, racking up endorsements from the National Rifle Association, the National Right to Life Committee, and the Christian Coalition of America as well as a 93% approval rating from the American Conservative Union. Inglis resisted accepting climate science-"if Al Gore was for it, I was against it," he says-but he began questioning his position in 2004 after his family urged him to reconsider the evidence. His skepticism was challenged again two years later when the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology traveled to Antarctica and Inglis peered into drilled ice cores, seeing for himself how sharply the frozen historical record revealed an increase in carbon dioxide that coincided with the Industrial Revolution.

Even after seeing the evidence first-hand, Inglis says that he wasn't truly convinced until he met Scott Heron, someone who saw the world the way he did. Heron was an oceanographer and a devout Christian. On a 2008 trip to the Great Barrier Reef, he took members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology snorkeling to show them exactly what was happening beneath the surface. Inglis was struck by Heron's devotion. "I could tell he was worshipping God while he was showing me the wonders of the reef-no words spoken," Inglis says. "I could just see it in his eyes. I could hear it in his voice. I could see it all over his face that he was engaged in worship."

After seeing the reef, Inglis and Heron discussed their world views. Heron said that he saw his own personal steps towards conservation as ways of loving God and those around him. "That got me really inspired," Inglis says. "I wanted to be like Scott, loving God and loving people."

Inglis returned to the U.S. and introduced the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act of 2009, which proposed a carbon tax to reduce federal payroll taxes, but his timing wasn't good. The bill was introduced in the thick of the housing crash, when voters were more concerned with paying their mortgages than reducing their footprint, and the Tea Party movement was gaining steam. The bill failed, and Inglis watched as longtime supporters began distancing themselves the more he spoke about climate science. Inglis lost his 2010 primary bid and fumbled to figure out what to do next.

Today, he considers himself somewhat of a pioneer-a Republican who's weathered the backlash that comes with spearheading a shift in party thinking. In 2012, Inglis launched RepublicEN, a nonprofit education organization dedicated to charting a path for conservative leaders to take the reins on climate issues. When addressing either politicians or the general public, Inglis doesn't talk about believing in climate science, but he does discuss the elimination of fuel subsidies, free enterprise environmental tax reform, and the economic benefits of green technologies. They're all ways that conservatives can become champions of climate issues without sacrificing their identity.

"We're striving mightily to put a different cultural marking on it that says, 'This is the strength of conservatives,' " Inglis says. "Conservatives, you're the smart kid in the class. Raise your hand. You know the answer is to fix economics, and then environmental problems take care of themselves."

Shifting the Conversation

Reframing climate-friendly policies around concepts like job creation and economic development has already led to landmark programs, like the wind farms near Sweetwater, Texas. In fact, 80% of wind farms are located in Republican-held congressional districts, many of which report the lowest acceptance levels of climate science in the U.S.

Daniel Richter, legislative director of Citizens' Climate Lobby, has seen how reframing can work first-hand. CCL, a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy group that pushes for bipartisan climate solutions, trains volunteers to build relationships with their elected officials to bolster support for the organization's initiatives, which currently include a proposal to add a fee to carbon emissions and return the dividends back to U.S. families. Richter says that the group uses two basic communication strategies-kindness first, solutions next. "You can talk to anybody, but if you don't find something that you appreciate about this person's record and you're not willing to express that appreciation, then you can't call yourself CCL," Richter says.

Like Inglis, Richter's group also doesn't immediately focus on science when talking with skeptical leaders. In their conversations, volunteers present politicians and staffers with policies focused on boosting the economy and creating jobs. They'll often use language those leaders have used themselves in speeches and press events.
Liberals are often hesitant to acknowledge when conservatives take positive steps on climate change. "You should be rewarding someone for being bold and brave on climate, not punishing them."
Richter believes that CCL's strategy is working. In 2014, the group engaged in three productive meetings with conservative leaders for every one "where it's clear that they don't want us in there," he says. Over the past three years, that ratio has shifted to 10 productive meetings for every bad experience. CCL also has been instrumental in establishing the Climate Solutions Caucus-a bipartisan House of Representatives group formed in 2016 to address the impact of climate change-as well as supporting a resolution signed by 17 House Republicans last March that pledges to study the causes and effects of global warming and to seek out "economically viable" solutions.

Of Republicans who have publicly expressed doubt about climate science, "I would say the majority of them personally, privately believe that climate change is happening and do believe that humans have an impact," Richter says. "The problem is that they don't know how they can get from here to there. They don't know how they can politically get from where they are now to supporting that in public."

Richter adds that liberals, even those within the conservation community, oftentimes hurt the cause. Many liberals are hesitant to acknowledge that conservative principles can play a role in efforts to mitigate climate change, too. Failing to do so only makes the polarization of the issue worse. Plus, liberals frequently don't recognize their own scientific biases-though it's worth noting that these same biases don't fall as cleanly along party lines as climate denial.

Liberals are often hesitant to acknowledge when conservatives take positive steps on climate change. When conservative leaders join the Caucus or sign on to a climate change resolution, Richter says, "then they are suddenly a target for environment groups," who are quick to point out that these conservatives aren't doing enough. "It's really penalizing them from the left for taking what is really a bold and brave step to do something on climate," Richter says. "You should be rewarding someone for being bold and brave on climate, not punishing them."

Troy Campbell, the University of Oregon social psychologist, agrees. "People who are the most resistant to [accepting climate science] are the people who have been told that they're terrible at the game. They've been told, 'You are horrible at being environmental. You're bad and will never be as great as us,' " he says. "That feeling is leading these people to sort of deny the game because they're being told that they're the worst player."

Many liberals haven't recognized the importance of getting conservatives on board, says Josiah Neeley, energy policy director for R Street Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that supports research and legislation aimed at promoting free markets and limited government on a wide array of issues.

"Over the last couple years-up until election day eve really-I think there was a kind of attitude on the left that, 'Well, we're going to win anyway. We really don't need conservative buy-in or support for this stuff,' " he says. A lack of bipartisan support leads to short-term initiatives that are enacted by one administration and rescinded when the opposing party comes into power, he adds. Several Obama administration initiatives, including the Clean Power Plan, are currently in jeopardy because they didn't go through Congress and never garnered conservative buy-in. Creating sustainable solutions that can last through both Republican and Democrat-controlled administrations requires a willingness from both sides to work together. "My impression is that there's been more of a realization of that over the last few months," he says.

Where Change is Happening

The environment itself may be helping that along, believes David Titley, retired rear admiral and former chief oceanographer for the U.S. Navy. "In regions of the country where people are starting to understand that they or their families may be personally impacted by climate change, you are seeing a pretty quick change in attitudes," he says.

Titley now serves as director of Pennsylvania State University's Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk. Apart from his academic duties, he talks to voters and policymakers about how climate change is affecting national security and military efforts.

"Mostly, when I would talk in the Pentagon about this, I would talk very little about why the climate's changing," Titley says. Instead, he shows how global temperatures are increasing and focuses on the impacts-how sea level rise will degrade naval bases and military installations worldwide, how extreme weather like droughts in Syria can lead to greater instability in poorer countries, how shifting temperature patterns intensify food and water shortages, which exacerbate tensions between conflicting groups.

He also discusses why delaying mitigation efforts weakens the United States' ability to deal with global issues in the future. "If we just keep doing this and don't change anything, it will bankrupt us," Titley says. Eventually, "we'll spend 100% of the Department of Defense budget on climate adaptation, and I don't think anybody, myself included, wants to do that."
"There is a growing number of Republicans on Capitol Hill who want to move on this issue, and they need political support."
Well-respected military leaders like Titley and U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, who recently called climate change a national security threat, can help prepare the field so conservative officials can become equal players in addressing the issue, says Andrea Strimling Yodsampa, CEO of DEPLOY/US, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that seeks to further pro-growth solutions to climate change and clean energy. Elected officials will also need support from religious leaders, conservative think tanks, and CEOs and investors, who can speak specifically to the economic risks of global warming and the opportunities associated with clean energy innovation.

"On Capitol Hill, there is a growing number of Republican members of Congress in both the House and Senate who want to move on this issue, and they need political support and protection to be able to do so effectively," Yodsampa says.

Some leaders are taking that political risk already. They're bolstered by shifting views among voters, support from groups like DEPLOY/US, ConservAmerica, and RepublicEN, and funding from organizations like the ClearPath Action Fund, a new nonprofit that provided $4.8 million in campaign support last year for Republicans who back conservative clean energy plans. Last February, the Climate Leadership Council, a conservative research and advocacy organization that includes leaders from the Bush and Reagan administrations, proposed replacing many of the Obama administration's carbon emissions regulations with a $40 per ton carbon tax that would send the proceeds directly back to American families. The group estimates that a family of four would receive approximately $2,000 in payments in the first year, with amounts steadily rising as the tax rate increases over time. Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine have spoken about the dangers of climate change for years. And even as leaders within the Trump administration deny that carbon emissions substantially contribute to climate change, others like House representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida's 26 th District are pushing back, calling that position "akin to saying the Earth is flat in 2017."

As more Republicans speak out and introduce legislation that addresses climate issues using conservative approaches and solutions, Paul Walker from ConservAmerica believes that more conservative leaders and voters will follow suit.

"We all have deluded ourselves into believing it's a right-wing issue or it's a left-wing issue. It's really an everyone issue," he says. "If we don't get the Republicans on board, we're not going to really have America on board, and we're not really going to solve this global problem."

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Taking Politics Out of Climate Change - NOVA Next | PBS

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Sweetwater, Texas, a town of nearly 11,000 smack in the center of the state, is known for three things: the world's largest rattlesnake round-up and associated Miss Snake Charmer beauty pageant, the town's two historical museums-one dedicated to American pioneers, the other to female World War II service pilots-and wind turbines.

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https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/polar-bears-and-climate-change#

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http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24021772

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Climate change and extreme weather-Jacob Rozenkrants

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Climate change and extreme weather-Jacob Rozenkrants

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https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2648/increasing-resiliency-to-extreme-weather/

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https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2499/polar-bears-across-the-arctic-face-shorter-sea-ice-season/

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NASA/NOAA GOES Project via Getty Images

Hurricane Harvey was an aberration, a storm that delivered such an unprecedented amount of rain that it left meteorologists without words. It broke records and forced us to make new colors for our precipitation maps. It has killed 70 people so far.

And it is already happening again. Hurricane Irma, which is currently moving through the Caribbean toward Florida, is equally unprecedented and already deadly.

How can two storms cause so much carnage in a span of mere weeks? How do we care for the victims of Harvey while preparing to care for the victims of Irma? How can journalists even cover both catastrophic events without taking attention away from one or the other? And of course, how do we watch these terrible storms happen and not get so angry that we finally say enough?

That exhausted, exasperated, depressed enough would be in reference to climate change, of course. For many, these storms seem to be all the evidence we need to show that climate change is not a faraway problem-it is an immediate threat. It is killing us right now, and taking our homes right now, and if our president wants to swoop in and help people recover, he would do well to also start taking the science seriously so that he becomes able to not just respond but perhaps prevent.

Connecting hurricanes to climate change requires thinking at a certain level of abstraction.

This perspective is both valid and a bit naïve. Climate change is both one of the more politically charged topics of our day and a notoriously tricky story to tell. For one thing, even though laypeople are willing to connect the events to the assumed cause, it is hard to show direct causation between a single hurricane (or two) and climate change. These are, after all, natural events that have been happening forever, and making the connection without the scientific proof leaves you exposed to (unfair and unreasonable, but nevertheless existing) accusations of politicizing a tragedy.

But perhaps the extremeness and proximity of these two devastating storms might help us change the narrative when it comes to connecting the dots between climate change and natural disasters.

First, for the science: While for some it may be enough to know that climate change makes hurricanes more frequent and more intense, the process of attributing individual events to climate change is tough. It will actually be easier to do for Harvey than for Irma. Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate impacts at Climate Central, said that the first scientific estimates assessing climate change's impact on Harvey will likely be available within the next month-which is fast for science. He attributed this to the fact that Harvey was a massive precipitation event, and scientists have a clearer understanding of how climate change affects that sort of storm. Furthermore, Harvey included coastal flooding, which is more clearly influenced by higher sea levels, a known consequence of climate change. Proving causation for Irma, mostly exceptional in strength as opposed to precipitation, will be trickier, and Strauss estimated that would take at least a year.

Strauss stressed that while drawing the connections between a storm and climate change is a useful scientific endeavor, most laypeople don't need to see the exact causation to fit the narrative to their own personal beliefs. If you think climate change is a problem, you know that one of the consequences is increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes, and it doesn't much matter if there was the direct causation here. Harvey and Irma are what climate change looks like, and if we want to minimize that, we had better tackle climate change.

Connecting hurricanes to climate change requires thinking at a certain level of abstraction. (Or as Strauss put it: Thinking about the causation "gets a little bit metaphysical.") Many people have too many other concerns right in front of them-pressing needs that make global systems and our impact on them feel very far away from their daily lives. And so if you don't think climate change is a massive pressing issue, you're likely to see a large hurricane as just a large hurricane.

Republicans may refuse to believe the science on climate change, but they will pay attention to the fiscal cost of these storms.

But that's where having storms back-to-back might actually help change the general public's understanding of how climate change plays into hurricane season, says Arthur Lupia, a political science professor at the University of Michigan who studies how people make decisions. Harvey was a visceral event that brought with it an onslaught of stories of the people affected. All the sudden something that felt abstract was tangible-people started to realize "this could happen to my family" or "this could happen to my home." And now Irma, a second event of catastrophic proportions in a second location, re-emphasizes that conclusion. It makes it much harder to write it off as a fluke, even if it was a fluke, which again, we won't scientifically know for quite a while.

Beyond the tangible terror and fear that comes with witnessing fellow Americans experience such a trauma is the tangible money we will have to pay to clean this up. This is another area where Lupia was hopeful that the one-two punch of Harvey and Irma might help convince people that climate change is worth addressing. Republicans may refuse to believe the science on climate change, but they will pay attention to the fiscal cost of these events. Lupia likened it to the slow reversal we're currently seeing among some parts of the right around criminal justice. In the 1980s and 1990s, the right was ideologically convinced that we had to take stronger measures against criminals, even low-key drug offenders. In recent years, though, they've reassessed that stance-not because their ideology has shifted, but because they've realized that pursuing it is too expensive (Attorney General Jeff Sessions being one notable exception).

Lupia posited that it might be possible for the same kind of reaction to happen in the wake of Harvey and Irma. As of the latest bill passed by the Senate, Congress is already planning to spend $15.3 billion dollars on Harvey relief, and that number is only going to go up. Once the damage and the numbers from both storms are tabulated, Republicans who are ideologically skeptical of climate change might be more willing to think about how much they hate paying for these kinds of relief packages and at least consider coming to the table to talk more about preparation, or even climate change mitigation, than they were before.

This is a big if, and it would require a similarly big shift on the Republican side. Among the reasons not to be optimistic is the fact that the Republican president, Donald Trump, is seemingly incapable of thinking about abstractions. Regardless of what you think of him, it's clear that he's a pretty literal guy. (Just consider his tweets on the hurricanes: "Hurricane looks like largest ever recorded in the Atlantic!" he wrote about Irma. "Going to a Cabinet Meeting (tele-conference) at 11:00 A.M. on #Harvey," he shared on Aug. 27. "Even experts have said they've never seen one like this!")

Trump is not alone in his event-focused thinking. The five living former presidents also got together to create a PSA about Harvey. The message was kept tightly around the individual storm and relief efforts surrounding it-understandable from a strategic standpoint for what is essentially a 30-second advertisement.

We have to live with the fact that our presidents-both past and present-are focusing their efforts on the immediate, rather than the long-term (there's only one president who still has much say over that, anyway). And of course, there are plenty of immediate needs to be met. But I think there is space for both types of thinking. The connection between science-something plodding, slow, impervious to our desires-and the narratives we tell ourselves is determined by how willing we are to think in abstraction. It may be too soon to know whether Irma or Harvey were directly caused by climate change. But regardless, they are demonstrations of how bad it could get. The stories we tell ourselves are driven by our own preconceptions, our need for comfort, our desire to make sense of the world. It is possible to explain Harvey and Irma away as freak accidents. Perhaps, for some, it may even be comforting. But this time, in the face of all this horror, it is also possible to look at all of the bills we will be forced to pay-in lives, in homes, in actual dollars-and decide that it is enough.

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Why Irma and Harvey Could Finally Get Republicans to Care About Climate Change

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Hurricane Harvey was an aberration, a storm that delivered such an unprecedented amount of rain that it left meteorologists without words. It broke records and forced us to make new colors for our precipitation maps. It has killed 70 people so far. And it is already happening again.