Whether Texas lawmakers want to admit it or not, they are already planning for the effects of climate change.

Much of Texas has suffered a prolonged drought that has drained reservoirs to some of their lowest levels — this year could be even worst. The situation is so dire that the GOP-led Texas House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a long-term “rainy day” fund that invests in water infrastructure to prepare for the more frequent droughts in coming decades, although they did not acknowledge the connection to climate change.

ClimateWire reports on the initial funding of the plan from the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB):

To a round of applause, 146 state legislators approved H.B. 4, which would finance a new fund to begin investing in new infrastructure and other projects by dipping into the state’s so-called rainy day fund. The $2 billion that would be taken from the rainy day fund for the water plan is just a down payment toward TWDB’s call for some $53 billion in spending over the next 40 years, $27 billion of which is expected to come directly from the state government.

Texas is one of many states to face the brunt of hotter, drier weather. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says Texas droughts are now 20 times more likely than they were in the 1960s. In 2011, a Texas climatologist described the drought as once in “maybe 500 or 1,000 years.” But “one more year and we’re already talking about a drought more severe than anything we’ve ever had.”

Higher temperatures driven by climate change worsen the drought cycle, and once the ground is dry, temperatures soar higher.

NOAA’s latest map shows how drought covers now virtually the entire state:

The Texas legislature, packed with climate-deniers, did not make any mention of what fuels the state’s predicament. But their move shows that drought and a hotter climate is a new reality for even the most conservative policymakers.

A wind storm earlier this month covered a southwestern Idaho mountain range with dust from Oregon and Nevada and accelerated snowmelt due to the darker surface absorbing heat from the sun as opposed to being reflected by pristine white snow, scientists say.

Dust covers slopes of snow in Owyhee Mountains, March 8, 2013. Credit: USDA.

Another day, another amplifying feedback of Dust-Bowlification. The Idaho Statesman reports:

A dust storm that covered the mountains accelerated runoff at the end of winter, exposing scientists to a strange event.

Scientists say the storm on March 6 caused unprecedented melting. The dust-on-snow show came during five hours of wind that averaged 34 miles per hour and gusted up to 57 mph on ridgelines at the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed in the northern Owyhee Mountains.

Hydrologists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture research area then observed accelerated melting from March 10 to March 16, when a new dusting of snow covered the layer of dirty snow.

“Nobody on our staff has ever witnessed anything similar,” said research hydrologist Adam Winstral.

Considerable snow had already melted by March 11 at the same spot in Owyhee Mountains. Credit: USDA

The photos can be found on the The Idaho Statesman blog.

So what caused the dust storm? Remarkably, The Idaho Statesman explains:

Scientists are careful not to speculate about what could be causing the shifts in weather. They generally say that climate change is giving Idaho warmer winters and hotter summers that fuel bigger fires – which in turn leave the deserts with less native grasses to hold the soil.

Dust storms were reported in Oregon and Nevada last year after major wildfires. The Holloway Fire started Aug. 5 along the Oregon-Nevada border and quickly grew to 461,000 acres. The Long Draw Fire burned 582,000 acres in July.

According to a new report from the New York Times, the ongoing drought in the Midwest is causing the American biofuels industry to begin crumbling around the edges.

The United States has mandated for several years that gasoline contain 10 percent biofuel — a requirement generally met with corn-based ethanol. It also maintained a tax credit for ethanol of 45 cents per gallon, though that was allowed to expire at the end of 2011. That led to the establishment of hundreds of ethanol plants throughout the Corn Belt, and communities which in turn heavily rely on those plants for their livelihoods.

But now it looks like the punishment Midwest corn yields took from the drought — one Cairo, Missouri farmer quoted in the piece said his corn crop last year was just 5.5 percent of his usual yield — has driven the price so high that ethanol plants are being forced to shut down:

Nearly 10 percent of the nation’s ethanol plants have stopped production over the past year, in part because the drought that has ravaged much of the nation’s crops pushed commodity prices so high that ethanol has become too expensive to produce.

The other half of this is falling demand for gasoline — a result of both the recession, and a renewed policy push for electric and hybrid vehicles and tougher fuel economy standards. Most cars can only take a fuel blend of only 10 percent ethanol, and most service stations are set up to only handle that amount, resulting what’s referred to as the “blend wall.” The Environmental Protection Agency allows for blends of up 15 percent, but cars that can take that haven’t caught on in the marketplace. Nor have “flex-fuel” vehicles, which can take up to 85 percent.

That’s left ethanol with a smaller amount of gasoline to be blended with, squeezing the industry:

Thousands of barrels of ethanol now sit in storage because there is not enough gasoline in the market to blend it with — and blends calling for a higher percentage of ethanol have yet to catch on widely in the marketplace….

[Demand for fuel] has shrunk to 8.7 million barrels a day from 9.7 million in 2007, said Larry Goldstein, an economist and a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. And with corporate average fuel economy rules now in place to double the number of miles that the average car gets per gallon by 2025, “you know we’re on a trend,” he added.

Globally, the combined effect of U.S. and European biofuel policy has been a massive divergence of corn crops into biofuel production, which in turn drove up the price of corn and contributed to global food insecurity. Much of the carbon-reducing benefits of biofuels are diluted if not reversed entirely by the carbon output from the agricultural production required to produce them. Nor does the conversion of more grasslands and forest into biofuel cropland to take advantage of the higher prices help, as those environments actually sequester more carbon that cropland.

Cellulosic biofuels, by relying on crops that don’t double as food, could provide a solution. But whether they can be widely commercialized without requiring high levels of water and land use remains an open question.

All told, our reliance on biofuels as an answer to the challenge of climate change has been an ongoing policy and humanitarian disaster, so there’s a certain irony now that the droughts and extreme weather driven by climate change are starting to eat away at the biofuel industry itself.

Of course, the people paying the price of that irony aren’t the Beltway insiders who developed America’s biofuels policy. They’re the global poor, as well as the everyday working Americans whose communities and towns are being threatened by the loss of the plants. The plant in Cairo, Missouri had been buying 16.5 million bushels of corn per year before it shut down. And the town of Walhalla, North Dakota is bleeding families due to the closure of its plant.

Variations in total water storage from normal in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins (from 1/03 through 12/09), as measured by NASA’s GRACE satellites (Full image here).

By Alan Buis, Steve Cole, and Janet Wilson, via NASA

A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade.

Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the Dead Sea. The researchers attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs.

The findings … published Friday, Feb. 15, in the journal Water Resources Research, are the result of one of the first comprehensive hydrological assessments of the entire Tigris-Euphrates-Western Iran region. Because obtaining ground-based data in the area is difficult, satellite data, such as those from NASA’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, are essential. GRACE is providing a global picture of water storage trends and is invaluable when hydrologic observations are not routinely collected or shared beyond political boundaries.

“GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India,” said Jay Famiglietti, principal investigator of the study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine. “The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.”

Famiglietti said GRACE is like having a giant scale in the sky. Within a given region, rising or falling water reserves alter Earth’s mass, influencing how strong the local gravitational attraction is. By periodically measuring gravity regionally, GRACE tells us how much each region’s water storage changes over time.

“GRACE really is the only way we can estimate groundwater storage changes from space right now,” Famiglietti said.

The team calculated about one-fifth of the observed water losses resulted from soil drying up and snowpack shrinking, partly in response to the 2007 drought. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs accounted for about another fifth of the losses. The majority of the water lost — approximately 73 million acre feet (90 cubic kilometers) — was due to reductions in groundwater.

“That’s enough water to meet the needs of tens of millions to more than a hundred million people in the region each year, depending on regional water use standards and availability,” said Famiglietti.
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According to the latest report from U.S. Drought Monitor, drought conditions expanded in Florida and West Texas last week.

While storms and heavy precipitation rolled into much of the eastern United States, several weeks of low rainfall have pushed Florida’s peninsula into “abnormally” — and in some areas “moderate” or “severe” — dry conditions. And much of Texas remains blanketed by “moderate” to “severe” drought, with significant areas sliding all the way into “extreme” and “exceptional.” The state’s climatologist has warned that if the drought persists through the summer, only the record cumulative dry spell Texas suffered in the 1950s would be worse.

The latest outlook shows drought conditions persisting in both states through the spring, and possibly expanding in California and Oregon as well. And the massive drought conditions that’ve been pummeling the midwest remain as brutal as ever, as Climate Central reported late last week:

Although this is the climatological dry season for Florida, the current level of dryness is more intense than in normal years. Since Nov. 1, 2012, Daytona Beach has received just a little more than 40 percent of its normal rainfall, making it the 7th driest period in 80 years.

The past several weeks saw the drought in Texas intensify as well, which is a troubling sign moving into spring. Texas typically receives little widespread, steady precipitation during the spring and summer months and relies on the rains from the fall and winter to carry it through the year. Most of Texas has been under drought conditions since the summer of 2011, and that prolonged aridity has left reservoir levels across the state at record low levels, leaving the state vulnerable to water shortages and restrictions if conditions do not improve. [...]

According to the latest drought outlook, also released on Thursday, drought is forecast to develop and persist in both Texas and Florida this spring, but also may expand in the West and intensify in California and southern Oregon. The normal wet season in California begins to wind down in March, and precipitation is usually scarce by May. Parts of the West have already had well below normal amounts of precipitation for the winter season, and if that trend continues through spring, the drought could intensify significantly.

These droughts have hit Texas especially hard — a bitter irony, given that the state’s politics remain a hotbed of climate change denialism. Texas Republican leaders are begrudgingly supporting a bill to prop up the state’s struggling water infrastructure by tapping the rainy day fund, and Texas is actually involved in a web of suits with Oklahoma and New Mexico over water rights and river access, at least one of which will be heading to the Supreme Court.

Texas is the fifth largest rice-producer in the United States, with the crop’s farmers concentrated in three counties, and the Lower Colorado River Authority has been forced to cut them off from irrigation water for the second year in a row, thanks to the drought’s effect on reservoirs. The loss to rice production for the coming year is estimated to be roughly 55,000 acres.

The drought has also run Texas cattle herds down to their lowest level since 1952, shutting down beef production plants in the process.

A new report from the Illinois’ Department of Employment Security has concluded that “the 2012 summer drought could become the second most expensive weather event ever, behind only Hurricane Katrina.” Lower water levels may impact tourism and recreation along the Midwest’s ricers, and is already stifling shipping traffic on the Mississippi. Corn crops are being hit hard throughout the country, with Illinois taking the brunt of it:

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New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has a new piece out today on a report that investigates the web of interconnections between climate change and global insecurity, particularly in the Arab Spring.

“The Arab Spring and Climate Change” is a product of cooperative efforts between the Center for American Progress (CAP), the Stimson Center, and the Center for Climate and Security. The report “doesn’t claim that climate change caused the recent wave of Arab revolutions,” Friedman writes. “But, taken together, the essays make a strong case that the interplay between climate change, food prices (particularly wheat) and politics is a hidden stressor that helped to fuel the revolutions and will continue to make consolidating them into stable democracies much more difficult.”

Anne-Marie Slaughter, one of the report’s lead authors, used the preface of the report to lay out the idea of a “stressor” as a useful framework for thinking about these issues. Borrowed from criminal science concepts, a stressor is a “sudden change in circumstances or environment” that interacts with a complicated web of other factors (often a psychological profile, in criminal science’s case) to create sudden, unforeseen, and volatile change. In this instance, climate shifts such as drought our heat waves act as stressors on everything from crop production to food security, water security, the migration of peoples, the stability of governmental and non-governmental networks, and the informal associations and interactions of both local and more widespread communities.

As Friedman points out, these forces can layer on top of one another in ways that make the world more insecure — instigating, shifting, or intensifying geopolitical events such as the recent uprisings in the Arab world:

[T]this collection of essays opens with the Oxford University geographer Troy Sternberg, who demonstrates how in 2010-11, in tandem with the Arab awakenings, “a once-in-a-century winter drought in China” — combined, at the same time, with record-breaking heat waves or floods in other key wheat-growing countries (Ukraine, Russia, Canada and Australia) — “contributed to global wheat shortages and skyrocketing bread prices” in wheat-importing states, most of which are in the Arab world.

Only a small fraction — 6 percent to 18 percent — of annual global wheat production is traded across borders, explained Sternberg, “so any decrease in world supply contributes to a sharp rise in wheat prices and has a serious economic impact in countries such as Egypt, the largest wheat importer in the world.”

The numbers tell the story: “Bread provides one-third of the caloric intake in Egypt, a country where 38 percent of income is spent on food,” notes Sternberg. “The doubling of global wheat prices — from $157/metric ton in June 2010 to $326/metric ton in February 2011 — thus significantly impacted the country’s food supply and availability.” Global food prices peaked at an all-time high in March 2011, shortly after President Hosni Mubarak was toppled in Egypt.

As Friedman notes, the top nine global wheat importers are Middle Eastern countries, leaving them especially vulnerable to price or supply shocks brought on by climate change. And that vulnerability lines up with the potential for destabilization: in 2011, seven of those nine countries suffered political protests that killed civillians. Moreover, households in those countries spend over 35 percent of their incomes on food on average, versus less than 10 percent in developed countries. “Everything is linked,” Friedman says. “Chinese drought and Russian bushfires produced wheat shortages leading to higher bread prices fueling protests in Tahrir Square. Sternberg calls it the globalization of ‘hazard’”:

In 2009, [the study's co-editors] noted, the U.N. and other international agencies reported that more than 800,000 Syrians lost their entire livelihoods as a result of the great drought, which led to “a massive exodus of farmers, herders, and agriculturally dependent rural families from the Syrian countryside to the cities,” fueling unrest. The future does not look much brighter. “On a scale of wetness conditions,” Femia and Werrell note, “‘where a reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought,’ a 2010 report by the National Center for Atmospheric Research shows that Syria and its neighbors face projected readings of -8 to -15 as a result of climatic changes in the next 25 years.” Similar trends, they note, are true for Libya, whose “primary source of water is a finite cache of fossilized groundwater, which already has been severely stressed while coastal aquifers have been progressively invaded by seawater.”

As ThinkProgress’ Hayes Brown reported, Friedman and Slaughter recently sat down with Michael Werz in front of a packed house at CAP to discuss the implications of the report:

Friedman implored the audience to think of the Middle East not by the current national borders, but instead envisioning as overlaid maps of culture and climate to understand the region. Slaughter took the concept a step further, adding in maps of political networks — government, corporate, NGOs, and others — and seeing where the larger “nodes” in those networks exist. Tracing where those nodes intersect, Slaughter said, shows where policy can be made.

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As climate change makes the regions of the West, Southwest, and Great Plains warmer and drier, water demand will continue to increase, and the combined effect will place an ever greater burden on the country’s fresh water supplies — possibly completely draining important reservoirs in those areas, under some scenarios. That’s according to a new study authored by researchers with Colorado State University, Princeton and the U.S. Forest Service, and flagged yesterday by Summit County Citizens Voice.

This is consistent with other studies on the risk of future water shortages: The Department of the Interior is anticipating that by 2060 the gap between river supply and water demand in the states of the Colorado River Basin will be 3.2 million acre feet due to climate change. Research published in Environmental Science and Technology found that by 2050 one third of U.S. counties could face “high” or “extreme” risk of water shortage. And the International Energy Agency determined that if current policies remain in place, fresh water use by the energy industry alone could more than double — from 66 to 135 billion cubic meters annually by 2035.

Climate change, substantially driven by global warming and humanity’s carbon emissions, is anticipated to lead to more weather extremes in various areas — longer periods of low precipitation and water shortage in many areas, interspersed with greater deluges. And, of course, higher average temperatures to bake the same regions as they dry out. The Forest Service study used a number of different scenarios in its models, assuming different levels of future population growth, economic growth, and temperature increases:

[F]uture climate change will increase water use for agricultural irrigation and landscape maintenance in response to rising plant water requirements, and at thermoelectric plants to accommodate rising electricity demands for space cooling. Including these effects, per-capita withdrawals are projected to drop only moderately for the next few decades and then level off as the effects of climate change become greater, and total withdrawals are projected to rise nearly continuously into the future. Projected withdrawals differ across the global emissions scenarios examined, especially in the latter decades of the century.

Although precipitation is projected to increase in much of the United States with future climate change, in most locations that additional precipitation will merely accommodate rising evapotranspiration demand in response to temperature increases. Where the effect of rising evapotranspiration exceeds the effect of increasing precipitation, and where precipitation actually declines, as is likely in parts of the Southwest, water yields are projected to decline. For the United States as a whole, the declines are substantial, exceeding 30% of current levels by 2080 for some scenarios examined.

Here’s just one example of several permutations the study did, laying out the changes in future water yields in 2020, 2040, 2060 and 2080. The A1B scenarios were relatively middle-of-the-road, assuming medium population growth, high economic growth, and medium temperature increases in the future:

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The ramp up in biofuel production has thus far been a major misfire in the fight against climate change. By driving up the price of corn and other biofuel sources, standards passed in the United States and Europe requiring a certain level of biofuel use have encouraged producers to dedicate more corn to ethanol production and less to food supplies.

Meanwhile, production of biofuel crops is displacing production of food crops on available land, and encouraging deforestation in the developing world. All of which in turn intensifies the problem of global food insecurity.

Thanks to a new study from South Dakota State University, we can add another negative from biofuel policy: Accelerated destruction of grasslands in America’s Western Corn Belt (WCB) region — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa.

According to Christopher Wright and Michael Wimberly, the study’s authors, conversion of grassland to corn and soy production between 2006 and 2011 has proceeded at a pace comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In Iowa alone, the losses are approaching 12 million hectares (almost 30 million acres) of tallgrass prairie.

In sum, we found a net decline in grass-dominated land cover in the WCB totaling nearly 530,000 hectares (approx. 1.3 million acres). This change was concentrated in two states, South Dakota and Iowa, with the majority of grassland conversion occurring in the WCB’s three western states relative to the core corn/soy growing areas in Iowa and Minnesota.

Grassland loss from 2006 to 2011

As Brad Plumer at the Washington Post notes, a number of converging factors are driving this change: Subsidized crop insurance, as well as insufficient rewards for preserving grassland from conservation programs, are contributing along with the price boost in biofuels. But the latter is especially ironic, given that grasslands are themselves able to store carbon from the atmosphere better than cropland. So expanding biofuel crop production into grasslands specifically further dilutes biofuels’ already dubious benefits.

The destruction of grasslands is also part of the poor overall land management and climate change that’s contributing to the threat of “dust-bowlification” in the western and plains regions of the United States. As warming drives higher temperatures, heat waves, and more extremes between deluge and drought, that area of the country is increasingly left drier for longer. The loss of grasslands leave soil more vulnerable to erosion, and less able to hold and buffer water flows. That creates the possibility of a repeat of the Dust Bowls of the 1930s is growing, with all the attendant threats to food security.

In fact, Wright and Wimberly include the ominous note rates of grassland conversion this high “have not been seen in the Corn Belt since the 1920s and 1930s.”

By Lauren Morello and Andrew Freedman via Climate Central. See also the NY Times piece, “Thin Snowpack in West Signals Summer of Drought”

Time is running out to avert a third summer of drought in much of the High Plains, West and Southwest, federal officials warned Thursday.

Without repeated, significant bouts of heavy snow and rain in the remaining days of winter, a large part of the country will face serious water supply shortages this spring and summer, when temperatures are hotter and average precipitation is normally low.

The drought already ranks as the worst, in terms of severity and geographic extent, since the 1950s. Though it’s not over yet, its economic impact appears to be severe, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist at the Agriculture Department’s Office of the Chief Economist.

It “will probably end up being a top-five disaster event” on the government’s ranking of the costliest weather events of the past three decades, he said at a Capitol Hill briefing Thursday.

There is little relief predicted in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) latest three-month drought outlook, which the agency released Thursday. Federal forecasters predict that drought will persist in the Rocky Mountain and Plains states, expand throughout northern and southern California and return to most of Texas, a state that has been mired in drought since 2011.

NOAA does forecast improvements in drought conditions in the Upper Midwest and Southeast, areas that have received beneficial precipitation in recent weeks.

“The next couple of months will kind of determine how the spring and summer plays out in that part of the country,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Crouch said that continued drought conditions could threaten water supplies in many areas, particularly in the Southwest.

Dwindling Water Supplies

With drought extending into its second or even third year in some areas, the main concerns are shifting from agriculture and recreation to water supplies as rivers run dry and reservoirs shrink.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Feb. 15, Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said water managers are especially concerned about the situation in West Texas, where emergency conservation plans have gone into effect as water supplies dwindle.

In the western U.S., low mountain snowpack is once again a concern, especially in portions of Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming that feed the Platte and Arkansas rivers, said Mike Strobel of USDA’s National Resources Conservation Service.

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National Journal’s Coral Davenport has written a wide-ranging new piece laying out the myriad ways climate change, driven by human carbon emissions, is threatening the American economy. The point is backed up by myriad scientific reports: The draft of the upcoming Fifth Assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that, by more than a 95 percent probability, human activities are to blame over half the observed increase in the global average surface temperature since the 1950s.

The draft of the Federal Advisory Committee’s Climate Assessment Report concluded that most of the United States is in for 9 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit of warming given the current path carbon emissions are following, with with ever-worsening extreme weather, sea-level rise, heat waves, deluges, droughts, storms, flooding, and ocean acidification as the result.

Using specific stories ranging from Norfolk, Virginia, to Netarts Bay in Oregon, to St. Louis, Missouri, Davenport illustrates the ways these impending upheavals in the climate and ecosystems can and already are undermining Americans’ chances of recovering from the Great Recession — or of prospering in future decades.

The Economic Costs Of Extreme Weather

Globally, extreme weather and climate change are already shaving 1.6 percent off worldwide gross domestic product — or about $1.2 trillion per year — according to a study by DARA. By 2030, it will be up 3.2 percent of global GDP, costing the United States over 2 percent of its GDP and India over 5 percent.

In the U.S. specifically, the heat waves and droughts that continue to sweep through Texas, Oklahoma and the Midwest have driven crop yields down a food prices up, resulting in record payouts for crop-insurance claims. Davenport cites a 2011 study by the consulting firm Mercer that warned climate change could increase investment-portfolio risk by 10 percent over the next two decades, by disrupting supply chains.

The country is suffering larger and more frequent wildfires, storms are damaging infrastructure and causing power outages and fuel-price spikes, and relief aid for Superstorm Sandy alone cost the federal government over $60 billion:

2011 and 2012 were the two most extreme years on record for destructive weather events. A record 14 weather disasters occurred in 2011, sustaining more than $1 billion each in economic losses for a total of $60.6 billion. Last year brought 11 weather disasters that each cost $1 billion or more; while the total economic loss has not been determined, experts say the dollar figure is almost certain to exceed 2011’s. Meanwhile, the insurance industry estimates that its losses from 2012’s natural disasters will total $58 billion—more than double the average yearly losses of $27 billion from 2000 to 2011.

Alternating droughts and floods have even disrupted shipping traffic on the Mississippi River, and lowered water levels on the Great Lakes have raised shipping companies’ costs by an average of up to 22 percent.

Ocean Acidification And The Marine Industries

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