Our guest blogger is Alice Thomas, Climate Displacement Program Manager, Refugees International. In May, 2011, Alice wrote how the extreme floods of Colombia were devastating the nation. This post describes Colombia’s continued fight for survival in our poisoned climate.

As we approach the town of Manatí, in northern Colombia, I look eagerly out the window for signs of change. When I was here almost a year ago, makeshift shelters and tents lined the sides of the road. Random pieces of furniture were piled nearby: a refrigerator or a rocking chair – anything people could save from the floodwaters.

Today the tents are gone. But just outside of town, we turn off the road and into a lot, where temporary shelters made of fiberboard and corrugated metal have been constructed. I see Irida emerge from one of them. Smiling and laughing, we embrace each other.

Irida is one of approximately 225,000 people who were affected when unprecedented rains in the fall of 2010 caused the nearby Dique Canal to rupture. The break in the canal, which connects Colombia’s coastal city of Cartagena to the Magdalena River, submerged half of the northern state of Atlántico under 80 million cubic meters of water. When I first visited Manatí in March 2011, half of the town was still underwater, and Irida was living under plastic sheeting after being evicted from the local school. Irida’s house, which she showed me by canoe, had water up to the rooftop.

To some extent, Irida was lucky. Hers was one of the first families in the town able to move into these temporary shelters last April. In many of the nearby towns we have visited, they were not completed until three months ago.

But the shelter where Irida now lives was designed to last only three months. She has been there for almost a year. Worse than that, the floodwaters have still not dissipated, and her house is still flooded. According to the state governor’s office, 60 percent of the area that flooded when the Dique Canal burst in 2010 is still underwater today. Pumping has proven ineffective because much of this area was once wetland and is now returning to its natural state. So Irida and the roughly 600 other families in Manatí who’ve lost their homes are now being told they will have to relocate.

The day after our reunion with Irida, we join a town hall meeting where the governor tells a schoolyard full of flood-affected families that his priority is to find land and build homes for the thousands still displaced more than a year later. But Irida tells me that she doesn’t want to take the piece of land being offered. It is too far away from the center of town, she says. Before the floods, she ran a small grocery shop out of her house. If she relocates, she will be unable to restart her business and will be isolated from her community.

Like so many other Colombians we are meeting on this trip, Irida is quick to smile and laugh. But the pain and anxiety are nevertheless visible on her face. Beyond the relocation troubles, she has many more immediate worries. The toilets at her temporary shelter do not work, and two of the plastic water tanks have recently ruptured in the heat. The Colombian government discontinued food deliveries to the area in November. Her husband has been unable to find work. Without permanent homes or work, how can the process of recovery even begin?

I am at a loss for words as we say our goodbyes. I hope things will be better for Irida the next time we meet; I wish I could be more certain.

As the United States has a freakishly warm and calm winter, Europe has been experiencing a frighteningly cold and dangerous season. Hundreds have died in frigid temperatures, snow and ice storms, and floods. This freakish weather in the Northern Hemisphere is connected by unusual behavior in the jet stream, which scientists are attributing to the dramatic changes in the Arctic caused by global warming pollution. In a new paper published in Tellus, scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research find that declines in summer Arctic sea ice are a factor in changing the Arctic Oscillation, the circulation pattern that dominates winter weather:

Scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, say the frigid, snowy European winter has its origins in a warm Arctic summer. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that July 2011 was the fourth-warmest July on record. A warm summer in the Arctic cuts the amount of sea ice. NOAA reports that sea-ice levels last July were the lowest in three decades.

The effect is twofold, the Wegener scientists report. First, less ice means less solar heat is reflected back into the atmosphere. Rather, it is absorbed into the darker ocean waters. Second, once that heat is in the ocean, the reduced ice cap allows the heat to more easily escape into the air just above the ocean’s surface. Because warmer air tends to rise, the moisture-laden air near the ocean’s surface rises, creating instability in the atmosphere and changing air-pressure patterns, the scientists say.

In an interview with Conducive Chronicle, Dr. Jeff Masters explained why greenhouse pollution should be considered the most likely suspect for unprecedented behavior in the climate system:

The laws of physics demand that the huge amount of heat-trapping gases humans are pumping into the atmosphere must be significantly altering the fundamental large-scale circulation pattern of the atmosphere. Unprecedented behavior like we’ve witnessed in the configuration of the winter jet stream over North America — with the four most extreme years since 1865 occurring since 2006 — could very well be due to human-caused climate change. Something is definitely up with the weather, and it is clear to me that over the past two years, the climate has shifted to a new state capable of delivering rare and unprecedented weather events. Human emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide are the most likely cause of such a shift in the climate.

It’s critical to note that the southern hemisphere is also experiencing utterly extreme weather during its summer: Australia is deluged by flood, and heat waves and drought are crippling South America and Africa.

Following the most damaging year of climate disasters in the United States in history, the insurance regulators in three states – California, Washington, and New York – announced that all major insurance companies operating in their states will be required to assess and publicly disclose the climate-change related risks they face, both in their underwriting as well as in their investment activities. Because of the consolidation of the insurance industry, this state-level action is effectively a national policy, as it affects 90 percent of the entire U.S. insurance market. Benjamin M. Lawsky, superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services, whose portfolio includes insurers, said in a statement that global warming pollution presents “unique risks” for the insurance industry to address:

Global warming presents unique risks, and it is vital that our insurance industry adequately account for the impacts of climate change. We look forward to working with the industry to address these important and growing risks.

Climate scientists have predicted broad-scale increases in extreme weather due to greenhouse pollution — particularly sea level rise, heat waves, drought, and extreme precipitation — for decades. The science that is of utmost important for the insurance industry to embrace is that these long-term trends are accelerating with the exponential increase in fossil fuel burning. Insurance models based on the assumption of a stable climate, using historical averages, are dangerously wrong.

Now, climatologists are starting to be able to quantify the influence of greenhouse pollution on specific events. In 2006, Dr. Kevin Trenberth estimated the global warming influence on the deadly 2005 hurricane season. Climate scientists broadly agree that the 2011 Texas drought shows a clear global warming signal, though different methodologies deliver different estimates. In future years, as disasters rise, climatologists will be able to better explain how changing the chemistry of our atmosphere and oceans with the burning of coal and oil is poisoning our weather.

The other unavoidable fact of manmade climate change is that no-one can truly prepare for what will happen. Climate scientists know that global warming is influencing the jet stream, El Nino cycles, and other mesoscale weather phenomena, but cannot predict how that influence will manifest in future decades. Hurricane intensity is expected to increase but future storm tracks and frequency are largely unknown. Even without a global warming influence, tornadoes and high-wind events are unpredictable. And the cumulative impacts of accelerating damage to transportation, agricultural, electrical, and other infrastructure are impossible to insure against.

This morning, Punxsutawny Phil came out of his burrow on a unseasonably warm, sunny day, and predicted six more weeks of winter — but much of the United States has skipped the season entirely. Punxsutawny, like most of the United States, has been experiencing a freakishly warm winter, as our planet’s climate heats up from greenhouse pollution. A record high of 59°F was set in Punxsutawny on Tuesday — the mean high based on previous decades is 34 degrees. Today, instead of the chilly, snowy 17-degree morning that was normal when the Bill Murray film was made in 1993, the crowd cheered on the groundhog at above-freezing temperatures.

Much of the country is experiencing a “year without winter,” with thousands of daily record highs set in January. Even including Alaska — which has been seeing some record-cold temperatures as the Arctic climate grows more unstable — there were 22 times as many record highs as there were record lows in January. (Without global warming, one would expect about the same number of record highs as record lows.) Excluding Alaska, the lower 48 states saw 29 times as many record highs as record lows.

Many people in the United States are enjoying the warm weather, but it’s also bringing weird and dangerous change. In Washington DC, cherry trees are already budding. WIth hibernation signals disrupted, suburbs are seeing an influx of bears. Wheat crops are threatened as the warmth saps soil moisture. With the acceleration of global warming due to ever more fossil fuel pollution in the atmosphere, these disruptions are only a small hint of what is to come in future decades.

The year 2006 will probably remain the record warmest winter for the United States, with 2011 coming in close behind.

Our guest blogger is Daniel Souweine, Campaign Director of Forecast The Facts.

The Forecast the Facts campaign is already gaining attention, and as is to be expected, not everyone is applauding our efforts. On the far right, well known climate change deniers Anthony Watts and Michael Lewis accuse us of “laying the ground work for society controlled by corporate-government-military oligarchies,” while leading denier weathermen like John Ghiorse and John Coleman dust off tired canards that the planet is actually cooling and that CO2 does not cause global warming. While those criticisms don’t warrant a response, there is another line of analysis that does. Writing for Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, Jason Samenow labels our efforts a “smear campaign” and a “colossal waste of energy,” saying that we should be “establishing common ground with the unconvinced.”

The smear allegation is disturbing and important to dispense with first. Presumably Samenow is referring to the fact that we have included quotations from climate change-denying meteorologists on our site. As yet, not one of those quoted has suggested that we have misrepresented their views. Indeed, many of these TV meteorologists are openly proud to be considered deniers. They say so on air, online, in emails to us, and in their affiliation with prominent denial sites like Icecap. Compiling a careful count of weather reporters who reject the scientific consensus on climate change hardly qualifies as a smear campaign. In fact, there are many weather reporters we have researched that we believe fall in the denial camp, but we have not quoted on our site because we do not have sufficient evidence.

That said, Samenow’s other criticism, that our efforts are unproductive, seems almost reasonable, which is why we think it’s important for us to explain clearly why we take the approach we do.

Samenow backs up his main argument by juxtaposing our campaign with other, more “constructive” approaches that seek to convince climate change denying broadcast meteorologists through dialogue and factual presentations. To be clear, we applaud these efforts and think they should continue and be expanded. But it is totally implausible that these approaches alone will ensure that the American public gets the unvarnished truth about climate change from the nation’s weather reporters.

How can we be so sure? Because these efforts have been going on for years, and they have yet to turn the tide. Early entreaties to broadcast meteorologists date back as far as 1997, when then-Vice President Gore invited hundreds of weather reporters to a discussion at the White House. Since then, there have been numerous other efforts at dialogue, and they continue today. Again, we’re not saying that such education campaigns should cease. We just don’t think that they, on their own, will solve the problem.

Read more

Former Vice President Al Gore is heading to Antarctica to highlight the extraordinary changes greenhouse pollution is causing even in our most remote continent. When Gore visited Antarctica in 1988, scientists were predicting it could warm more rapidly than the global average. “This prediction has proven true,” Gore writes. “Today, the West Antarctic Peninsula is warming about four times faster than the global average.”

Although the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent are remote from almost all of human civilization, their warming has drastic implications for billions of people. With the melting of those almost inconceivable reserves of ice, the planet’s sea levels are rising. Scientists now expect 21st-century sea level rise — on the scale of three to six feet or more — will be dominated by the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps.

Gore is leading an expedition of “civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens, as well as “many of the world’s leading climate scientists” to see how man’s negligence is transforming the forbidding continent:

To better understand the changes taking place near the South Pole and the impacts those changes will have around the world, I will be returning to Antarctica this month with The Climate Reality Project. A large number of civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens from many countries on this voyage will be joined by many of the world’s leading climate scientists and Antarctica experts to see firsthand and in real time how the climate crisis is unfolding in Antarctica.

The Climate Reality Project is asking everyone to host their own expeditions wherever they live. As the new plant hardiness zone maps from the USDA remind us, we don’t even need to leave our backyards to see the effects of the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon pollution we have pumped into the atmosphere with the profligate burning of fossil fuels.

Nor do we have to leave our neighborhoods to see the signs of positive change — community gardens, electric cars, solar panels, wind turbine manufacturers, and more in the growing mass movement to build a sustainable, resilient civilization on our changing planet.

The Department of Agriculture’s plant hardiness maps are finally reflecting a fact that gardeners have already realized — the United States is changing dramatically with global warming pollution. The USDA released a new plant hardiness zone map to replace the 1990 map, reflecting twenty years of rapid global warming:

The 1990 map was based on temperatures from 1974 to 1986, the new map from 1976 to 2005. The nation’s average temperature from 1976 to 2005 was two-thirds of a degree higher than it was during the old time period, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

The new map is generally one half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. Cities as varied as Boston, Honolulu, St. Louis, Des Moines, Iowa, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Fairbanks, Alaska, are in newer, warmer zones. Almost all of Ohio, Nebraska and Texas are in warmer zones.

The Washington Post quoted several experts who noted the new map, whose changes in hardiness zones are based on rising minimum temperatures across the nation, isn’t news to gardeners.

Boston University biology professor Richard Primack:

People who grow plants are well aware of the fact that temperatures have gotten more mild throughout the year, particularly in the wintertime.

George Ball, chairman and CEO of the seed company W. Atlee Burpee:

Climate change, which has been in the air for a long time, is not big news to gardeners.

Stanford University biology professor Terry Root:

It is great that the federal government is catching up with what the plants themselves have known for years now: The globe is warming and it is greatly influencing plants (and animals).

Vaughn Speer, an 87-year-old master gardener in Ames, Iowa, said he has seen redbud trees, appear ten miles north of their traditional limit in recent years. Our nation’s forests are dying with the changes. Lodgepole pines, aspens, walnut trees, and other dominant species adapted to a climate without greenhouse pollution are already suffering in our hotter planet.

In coming decades, the rate of global warming will increase significantly, a result of the rapid rise in fossil fuel pollution, making it ever more difficult for plants to adapt, and destabilizing all of our nation’s ecosystems.

As carbon pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, our weather is growing more intense and unpredictable, threatening the health of the union. Following the freakishly warm and dry start of this January, extreme storms then pummeled the nation:

WASHINGTON ICE STORM: “A monster Pacific Northwest storm coated the Seattle area in a thick layer of ice Thursday and brought much of the state to a standstill, sending hundreds of cars spinning out of control, temporarily shutting down the airport and knocking down so many trees that members of the Washington State Patrol brought chain saws to work. East of Seattle, a man was killed by a falling tree as he was backing an all-terrain vehicle out of a backyard shed, authorities said.” 90,000 customers of Puget Sound Energy lost power.

OREGON FLOODS: With a persistent flow of Pacific moisture targeting the Pacific Northwest, several inches of rain have fallen across the western third of Oregon. Widespread flooding has developed with Salem, Corvallis and Philomath just some of the cities that have dealt with the worst of the rising waters. Torrential rain swept away a car from a grocery store parking lot, killing a mother and her one-year-old son.

NEVADA WILDFIRE: A destructive wildfire erupted shortly after noon on Thursday and raced quickly through the dry countryside surrounding Reno, NV, propelled by wind gusts of 82 mph. At its height, the fire forced evacuation calls for some 10,000 people. The fire destroyed 29 homes over six square miles before a storm on Saturday brought precipitation after the region’s driest winter in recorded history. Reno had no precipitation at all in December.

JANUARY TORNADOES: Last Tuesday, a powerful storm front spawned one EF-1 tornado in metropolitan Louisville, Kentucky, and a second hit near Madison, Indiana. At least 10 tornadoes struck the South overnight Sunday as a powerful storm system moved across the Great Lakes and into southern Canada, killing two in Alabama. The tornadoes were spawned along the southern end of a front that arced through the eastern US like a comma’s tail, bringing severe thunderstorms, hail, and twisters to Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee before moving into Georgia later Monday morning.

Extreme weather is wreaking increasing damage on the people of the United States. With cutbacks in local, state, and federal government services, continued inaction on fighting greenhouse pollution, and ideological opposition to preparing for the ravages of unchecked climate change, the state of our union is under threat.