Free Republic

If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer — from Canada to Europe to Maui — you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change. Here’s the AP: Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal.” And PBS “NewsHour”: Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise — Spain must do more to prepare, experts say. And the New York Times: How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.

The brutal, unrelenting cold that lasted for several days over the Christmas holiday froze off a sizable portion of Appalachia’s ample gas production, cutting off supply to power plants when they needed it most. Gas transmission pipelines said the gas they were promised simply didn’t show up. On the electric grid that connects Pennsylvania to 12 other states, at one point almost 25% of the capacity on the system either didn’t start up or broke while operating, leaving coal and petroleum-fired units to pick up the slack. PJM, a Valley Forge-based grid operator, is still analyzing what happened during the...

Heavy rains fall in Bazhong City, Sichuan Province, causing serious waterlogging in the city and rivers overflowingRecently, due to extreme weather occurring in multiple provinces and cities in mainland China, the China Meteorological Administration declared a level four emergency. Torrential rains caused traffic mayhem and school closures in Beijing, residents in Hebei Province held onto trees to keep from getting flushed away, and floods in Sichuan swept away several ships.Beijing began seeing heavy precipitation from around 11:30 in the evening on July 11, with an average rainfall of more than 2 inches. The rainfall in Fangshan New Village, Fangshan...

Experts at Colorado State University predict storm activity for the remainder of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season will be "below average." Their latest report predicts the Atlantic could produce nine named storms and three hurricanes from now to the end of hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30. Of those three hurricanes, experts predict one will be a major hurricane, which means a Category 3, 4 or 5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. A Category 3 storm has wind speeds between 111 and 129 miles per hour, while the strongest Category 5 storm hits 157 mph or higher. The report, produced...

Weird weather and climate warming are two separate things, but a Stanford team is linking them. Using math, powerful computers and historical records, research led by Noah Diffenbaugh found that climate change has boosted the odds of extreme heat, drought, punishing rainstorms and retreating sea ice. “The odds of hitting record-setting level of extremes have been made greater by climate warming,” caused by human emission of greenhouse gases, said Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. In the past, scientists typically avoided conflating individual weather events and climate change, citing the...

The Trump administration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post. The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs, including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas. NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, which would be hit by an overall 18 percent budget reduction from...

Guest Essay By Larry Kummer. Posted at the Fabius Maximus website. Summary: To boost our fear, activists and journalists report the weather with amnesia about the past. Ten year records become astonishing events; weather catastrophes of 50 or 100 years ago are forgotten. It makes for good clickbait but cripples our ability to prepare for the inevitable. California’s history of floods and droughts gives a fine example — if we listen to the US Geological Survey’s reminder of past megafloods, and their warning of the coming ARkStorm. ” A 43-day storm that began in December 1861 put central and southern...

After last weekend’s East Coast blizzard, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said “we’re in an age of extreme weather.” I’ve been studying and forecasting the weather since I was 12 years old in the mid 1970s and have come to the conclusion that I agree with de Blasio. I’ll add to de Blasio’s comment that not only do I think we’re in an age of extreme weather, but I think that “age” started more than 20 years ago when Hurricane Andrew hit south Florida in 1992, followed by the “storm of the century” in 1993. Perhaps some could...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even for a world getting used to wild weather, May seems stuck on strange. Torrential downpours in Texas that have whiplashed the region from drought to flooding. A heat wave that has killed more than 1,800 people in India. Record 91-degree readings in Alaska, of all places. A pair of top-of-the-scale typhoons in the Northwest Pacific. And a drought taking hold in the East.

h2>President Obama delivered the commencement speech at UC Irvine on Saturday afternoon, telling graduates they "have a right to be optimistic" and urging them to get involved in the fight against climate change. According to NBC Los Angeles, the President said he could not wait to see what this generation of college graduates will do, calling them "super underrated" and crediting his own administration with much of the progress the graduates have seen in the country."Consider this: since the time most of you graduated from high school, fewer Americans are at war," Obama told the 8,000 graduates at Angel Stadium...

The Obama administration is more certain than ever that global warming is changing Americans’ daily lives and will worsen—conclusions that scientists will detail in a massive federal report to be released Tuesday. Once people thought global warming was more in the future and more of an issue in other parts of the world, but the National Climate Assessment will emphasize how the United States is already paying the multibillion-dollar price for man-made climate change, said study co-author Donald Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois. “We’re already seeing extreme weather and it’s happening now,” Wuebbles said Monday. “We’re...

Man-made climate change contributed to some of 2012's most extreme weather, including the spring and summer heat waves that baked parts of the United States and Hurricane Sandy, which devastated coastal communities along the eastern coast of the country, according to a new report. The study, which includes research from 18 different teams from around the world, examined 12 extreme weather events from last year and found that human-caused global warming increased the likelihood of half of the incidents, while the others were dictated by natural weather variability. "We've got some new evidence here that human influence has changed the...

Updated 2 May 2013 to correct typo on date of previous low tornado countThe 12-month period from May 2012 to April 2013 was remarkable for the absence of tornado activity and tornado impacts in the United States.We can start by looking at the number of EF1 and stronger tornadoes during that period. A final count is available through January 2013 and we have a pretty good estimate of how many occurred in February through April, although final numbers won’t be available until July. Although the 12 month total may change a little bit with the final data, it’s unlikely to...

In the war of dumb ideas, both liberals and some corporatist conservatives have joined forces for a pincer movement on rational citizens by promoting the spending of large amounts of taxpayer dollars to deal with climate change. Mitigation, of course, is the concept that humans are altering the planet's climate through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and funds should be spent to reduce emissions and minimize anthropogenic climate change. Adaptation is the acceptance that the Earth's climate is changing, either from natural or anthropogenic forces (or both), and that rather than spend money trying to reduce man-made GHG emissions, it is...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Climate change and extreme weather already are causing disruptions in the U.S. energy supply that are likely to worsen as more intense storms, higher temperatures and more frequent droughts occur, the government says in a new report. The report, released Thursday by the Energy Department, says blackouts and other problems caused by Superstorm Sandy and other extreme weather events are likely to be repeated across the country as an aging energy infrastructure struggles to adapt to rising seas, higher storm surges and increased flooding. A range of energy sources are at risk, from coal-fired power plants to...

Pollution during the 20th century appears to have suppressed North Atlantic hurricanes The Clean Air Act, which has benefited breathing in many American cities over the last few decades, may have worsened the weather in some places. New climate simulations suggest that reducing the level of atmospheric aerosol particles produced by human activity might have been the main cause of a recent increase in tropical storm frequency in the North Atlantic. Aerosol levels have increased since the industrial revolution began, but there have been periods when emissions stalled or fell, such as the Great Depression, World War II and after...

Researchers get to grips with effects of heat, drought and storms on carbon release. Climate change has a disconcerting tendency to amplify itself through feedback effects. Melting sea ice exposes dark water, allowing the ocean to soak up more heat. Arctic warming speeds the release of carbon dioxide from permafrost. And, as researchers discussed at a meeting last week in Seefeld, Austria, climate extremes — heatwaves, droughts and storms — can hamper plant growth, weakening a major buffer against the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere. “Heatwaves and droughts will very likely become more frequent in a warmer climate, and...

Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming. As climate change proceeds — which the record summer melt of Arctic sea-ice suggests it is doing at a worrying pace — nations, communities and individual citizens may begin to seek compensation for losses and damage arising from global warming. Climate scientists should be prepared for their skills one day to be probed in court. Whether there is a legal basis for such claims, such as that brought against the energy company ExxonMobil by the remote Alaskan community of Kivalina, which is facing coastal erosion and...

Scientists are increasingly confident that the uptick in heat waves and heavier rainfall is linked to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, posing a heightened risk to the world’s population, according to two reports issued in the past week. On Wednesday, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a 594-page study suggesting that when it comes to weather observations since 1950 there has been a “change in some extremes,” which stem in part from global warming. [text excerpted] But the IPCC team projects that there is a 90 to 100 percent probability that sea level rise “will contribute to upward trends...

The world’s scientists are now more than 90% sure that human-caused global warming will increase the length, frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as heat waves, the most authoritative scientific report yet on the subject says. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report into extreme weather events found with “high confidence” that climate change has already made heat waves more severe in areas including southern Europe and the Mediterranean. By 2100, the financial cost of extreme weather conditions could be some €15 trillion, mostly borne by what is currently the developing world. The worst affected will be...