Climate Change Worsens Many of These Disasters

Figure 1. County-level map of federally-declared weather-related disasters between 2006 – 2011. Tornadoes and severe thunderstorms in the Midwest, and heavy rains and snows from Nor’easters, hurricanes, and other storms in the Northeast gave those two regions the most disaster declarations. An interactive version of this map that allows one to click and see the individual disasters by county is on the Environment America website.

by Jeff Masters, reposted from the WunderBlog

Since 2006 , federally declared weather-related disasters in the United States have affected counties housing 242 million people–or roughly four out of five Americans. That’s the remarkable finding of Environment America, who last week released a detailed report on extreme weather events in the U.S.

The report analyzed FEMA data to study the number of federally declared weather-related disasters. More than 15 million Americans live in counties that have averaged one or more weather-related disasters per year since the beginning of 2006. Ten U.S. counties–six in Oklahoma, two in Nebraska, and one each in Missouri and South Dakota–have each experienced ten or more declared weather-related disasters since 2006. South Carolina was the only state without a weather-related disaster since 2006.

The report did a nice job explaining the linkages between extreme weather events and climate change, and concluded, “The increasing evidence linking global warming to certain types of extreme weather events–underscored by the degree to which those events are already both a common and an extremely disruptive fact of life in the United States–suggests that the nation should take the steps needed now to prevent the worst impacts of global warming and to prepare for the changes that are inevitably coming down the road.”

Jeff Masters is co-founder of the Weather Underground. This piece was originally published at the WunderBlog.

The Ohio-based folk band Magnolia Mountain has just released a new music video documenting the environmental and human impact of mountaintop removal coal mining.

The song, “The Hand of Man,” was released as part of a new 21-track album with bands from Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia performing songs about protecting the Appalachian Mountains and surrounding communities from destructive coal mining practices.

Mountaintop removal mining is exactly what it sounds like: Explosives are used to to blow up mountains in order to access coal reserves, thus forcing rocks and soil into valleys and increasing concentrations of mercury and arsenic in water supplies. According to researchers from Washington State University and West Virginia University, communities located near mountaintop mining sites have seen double the amount of birth defects than the national rate. To date, almost 3,000 mountain ridges have been blown apart to access coal.

Watch the music video:

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Ten cyberpennies for your thoughts. But I’d like some real pennies in return for our new cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan:

Stephanie has kindly given me permission to reprint her cartoons. She notes that “cartoonists are struggling and economically collapsing along with the newspapers that used to be our living.”

So I said I’d post the link to Paypal where you can donate to her if you like her cartoons.  CLICK HERE (then click where it says donate).

If we can crowd-source her some support, perhaps she’ll even write a special cartoon just for Climate Progress readers.

She writes, “Code Green is the only weekly editorial cartoon focusing exclusively on the environmental emergency.” Here is some of her work on recent events:

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