Captain Kimo, via Flickr
by Stephanie Hanson Damassa and Noreen Nielsen, CAP
The brutal summer of 2012 is what climate change looks like. It’s only the beginning of August, and yet nearly every corner of the United States has suffered through extreme weather such as oppressive heat waves, damaging storms, and devastating droughts and wildfires. 2011 saw the most billion-dollar disasters on record in the United States, and 2012 may be similarly as costly. Insurance claims from wildfires in Colorado have already reached nearly $500 million, and experts fear costs from the current drought may reach tens of billions of dollars.
Unfortunately, this rise in extreme weather isn’t just a coincidence. Like steroids to a baseball player, climate change fuels extreme weather. Scientific organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and more all point to industrial pollution as the cause of climate change. Some key facts on recent extreme weather and climate change:
- More than 25,000 new record highs have been set this year alone across the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
- The current drought, the worst in a generation, covers more than half of the continental United States.
- January-June 2012 was the warmest first half of any year on record in the contiguous United States.
- Extremely hot summers around the world, like the one we’re experiencing right now in the United States, are now 40 times more frequent than they were 40 years ago.
- Extreme downpours in the United States are now happening 30 percent more often than in the mid-twentieth century.
- In 2011 alone, the United States experienced 14 weather disasters totaling over $50 billion in damage.
- During the last 10 years, the United States has experienced twice as many record highs as record lows. By 2050, scientists project that record highs will outnumber record lows by 20 to 1.
- Each new decade since the 1970s has been hotter than the last, with 2000-2010 the hottest on record so far.
- 4 out of 5 Americans now live in counties where recent natural disasters have occurred, with twice as many people living in a county where an official disaster was declared last year compared to 2001.
Stephanie Hanson Damassa, Climate Nexus and Noreen Nielsen, Center for American Progress
Related Post:
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
OK!!! climate change is real, so now what? Should US cut emisions to 1990 levels like EU did? How did that turn out? Global emisions still went up by 40% during the same period. Now how did EU economy do as a result of being out-competed by those who saw an advantage to going the other way?
We need to wake up and realize that the main reason people are turning their backs on action on this is because of decades of flawed solutions being proposed that only end up hurting the ones who agree to do something on this, while it does not help with the problem at all. As long as these flawed ideas will continue to be proposed, the masses will prefer to listen to the other guys
http://zoltansustainableecon.blogspot.com/2012/07/climate-change-frozen-global-village.html
That link is just about the most confused piece of writing about the subject I have ever read and that is saying something! I am not going to write an essay documenting its problems but substituting a few facts for ignorance and blind prejudice would help it along, ME
“Small Is Beautiful” by E.F. Schumacher might be a beginning.
there isnt a solution, there’s just too many people insisting on burning too much hydrocarbon fuel.
no political or religious dogma is going to alter that.
we all like to be cool in summer and warm in winter and travel anywhere we like on a whim. none of us will accept that the party’s over until nature snatches our collective tablecloth from under the goodies will enjoy consuming
You’ve nailed it. It is our addiction to fossil fuel use from which all other problems flow. The ‘pushers’, the fossil fuel resource owners and providers, exploit our addiction, and even try to convince us there is nothing wrong with our addiction. The politicians pander to our addictions, and amplify the party line of the fossil fuel providers.
That’s why replacing politicians is re-arranging the chairs on the Titanic. Their replacements will pander to our addictions as well, if they want to get re-elected and if they want to get massive campaign donations from the ‘pushers’.
A problem cannot be solved until the cause is recognized. We are willing to point the finger at everyone but ourselves. Since, as you say, we want unlimited use of energy, we will do nothing about climate change until it is too late. Climate change has some analogies to pancreatic cancer; by the time the symptoms appear unmistakeably, it is usually to late for remediation.
Help make capitalism compatible with humanity and Earth’s life support systems. Stop profits from the pollution of the commons. Humanity deserves nothing less. Same for capitalism and long term investors.
Leif,
Love your optimism. But capitalism relies on expansion and is inconsistent with the future of humanity. We can have private property (and should and will), but either capitalism goes or much of humanity does.
It depends on your definition of ‘capitalism’ Ken. The word is regularly hurled around these pages without any attempt to specify what it means or which particular economic theory is fuelling it.
We had ‘capitalism’ when I was young: everybody made a modest little profit, sufficient to allow them to live comfortably. Everybody looked after their neighbours and nobody attempted to rip anybody off, and it was common for a shop keeper to slip a few extra spuds or biccies into the bag for the struggling family down the road.
What most commentators appear to mean by ‘capitalism’ today is that version which springs from the pernicious theory of economic rationalism combined with a top down social structure which pits individual against individual. It has only become dominant since the late 1970s.
It will go, down in the screaming heap of all the pain and suffering that we are facing up to only now, ME
Amen !! You took the words right out of my brain and made them eloquent !
Capitalism and human existence on this planet are completely and utterly irreconcilable. The current fad for arguing that a ‘green capitalism’ can save us is madness. By all means use technology, wisely, and human labour and ingenuity, but the absolute capitalist imperative to pursue growth and profit is innately destructive. Only co-operation, collaboration and not, definitely not, competition (which, in capitalism, only exists to divide humanity into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’)will save us.
How about the extreme fire weather in Siberia? Haven’t seen many news pieces, but satellites show dramatic fire behavior (see upper right of arctic mosaic, click on fire area to zoom in).
http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?mosaic=Arctic.2012214.terra.4km