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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For one thing, there are many many people in the denialist camp who have no interest in constructive dialogue, such as the meteorologists mentioned above, some of whom refuse to even acknowledge that the Earth is getting warmer (a position that even vaunted skeptic Richard Muller, of the BEST study, has since renounced). For people like this, there is no room for constructive dialogue, only accountability.

Fine, you might say, but what about those meteorologists who are “on the fence.” Maybe they acknowledge that the globe is warming, and that man “might be responsible,” but they’re “not sure how much.” (We talked to several such broadcasters at the recent American Meteorological Society conference.) Maybe Forecast The Facts will drive them into the opposite camp. Maybe, but let’s remember a few things.

First, these meteorologists are already getting constant implicit and explicit pressure from climate change deniers. They know that if they talk about climate change on air, the switchboards of their stations will light up. Many of them are also being told by their news directors to avoid anything controversial. There are just so many incentives for them to say nothing or, at best, to “report the debate” even when that has long been indefensible from a scientific point of view. But until now, they have yet to systematically hear from viewers who adamantly want them to do their job and tell them what is going on, not just with their weather but with the broader context in which that weather occurs–the climate. Those viewers deserve to have their voices heard.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, the stakes of this issue simply do not allow for an exclusive embrace of the patient, conciliatory approach that Samenow advocates. We don’t want to unnecessarily belabor the science here, but when the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. military, and the insurance industry all agree that humans are a leading cause of climate change, when prediction after prediction of climate models is borne out, when highly trained and incredibly learned professionals tell us that the window for action is closing, and when the effects of inaction are going to negatively impact millions if not billions of lives, it is simply not acceptable for professional journalists (that is, after all, what broadcast meteorologists are) to refuse to inform their viewers of this information, or worse to say that these things that directly contradict these facts.

Just to bring this point home, let’s imagine a different setting for this conversation. Let’s say these TV meteorologists were a large group of doctors who persisted in telling their patients that smoking does not increase the chance of lung cancer. And let’s say we started an accountability campaign that demanded that these doctors stop giving that advice to their patients, and that the American Medical Association make a clear and unequivocal statement about the links between smoking and lung cancer. Would Mr. Samenow call on us to tone it down? Would he instead argue that we just need to calmly present the doctors denying the smoking-cancer link with the current facts, and politely ask them to reconsider their position? We doubt it.

This brings us to the role of the AMS, an organization which undoubtedly would prefer to not be in the midst of this conversation. Members of the AMS staff will tell you (as they told me) that the vast majority of their members are not even broadcast meteorologists, but mostly academicians and government employees. The AMS will also tell you that the vast majority of their members fully understand and embrace the science behind global warming. And all of this is true.

The problem is, the majority of broadcast meteorologists are also members of the AMS. And they also happen to be the members who are by far the most well known, with the widest reach in the public. And almost certainly for this reason, the AMS has actively sought to cultivate and promote their affiliation with these members, creating certification programs that allow broadcast meteorologists to carry the imprimatur of a scientific association. The AMS, quite literally, has given these meteorologists their stamp of approval.

Like it or not, that decision puts the AMS squarely in the midst of this conversation. And in our eyes, there is only one way for them to appropriately comport themselves — quickly pass a statement that is consistent with the current scientific consensus, and then vigorously promote that statement to their members. Anything short of this would be a dereliction of their duty as a scientific association. That is the conclusion that more than 13,000 people — those who have signed the Forecast the Facts petition — have come to, and we hope that number grows significantly in days to come. Because in the end, Forecast The Facts exists for one purpose — to make sure these people’s voices are heard. We can only hope that the AMS, and broadcast meteorologists across the country, start listening.

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 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.

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.

Sparse snow at Vail

Mountain resorts across the U.S. are desperate for fresh powder. For the first time since the 1800s, Lake Tahoe received no December snow. Peaks in the Northeast saw rain. Vail Resorts recently reported a 15% decrease in total skier visits at its six properties, and not for 30 years have Vail Mountain’s back bowls, perhaps the most prized terrain in the country, been roped off so late in the season for lack of snow.

The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen describes the freak conditions only as “peculiar La Niña weather,” ignoring the existence of global warming, which has been predicted for by climate scientists to bring warmer winters with fewer and more intense storms. This year’s weather patterns are being driven primarily by unusual distributions of hot and cold surface water in the warming Pacific, as well strange circulation patterns in the rapidly warming and melting Arctic.

While it’s cute to give credit for recent snowfall to a tribal snow dance, the unfortunate reality is that our actual influence on the weather is from the hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution we have spewed into the atmosphere.

Forecast the Facts, a new campaign of 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters, and the new Citizen Engagement Lab, aims to turn the tide. The first call to action challenges the American Meteorological Society to vote next week for a strong climate change statement that rejects science denial:

It’s a big problem: weather reporters reach millions of people every night, and right now they’re not telling their viewers the full story. We can change that. Meteorologists are meeting this month at the annual conference of the American Meteorological Society, where the AMS Council will vote on a new official statement on climate change. Denier meteorologists don’t want the statement to pass, and are doing everything they can to derail the process. We can’t let that happen.

In 2009, ThinkProgress Green exposed weathermen James Spann and Joe D’Aleo as Marc Morano’s go-to climate deniers. Forecast the Facts has identified dozens more zombie weathermen (yes, they’re all male) from around the country. These climate denier meteorologists are betraying the public’s trust and distorting America’s airwaves with ideological science denial:

The primary barrier to national action on climate change is the intransigence of corporate polluters, and the amount of influence they wield over the political system. Climate zombies have overrun Congress, and every Republican candidate for president denies the reality of greenhouse pollution.

To overcome that will require the mobilization of the American public, and science-denying weathermen are standing in the way.

Forecast the Facts (on Twitter at @ForecastFacts) defines a denier as anyone who expressly refutes the overwhelming scientific consensus about climate change: that it is real, largely caused by humans, and already having profound impacts on our world. Forecast the Facts also includes meteorologists who have suggested that extreme cold spells or snowstorms disprove climate science. They track the views of meteorologists through their on-air statements, blog posts, social media activity, public appearances, interviews, and interactions with viewers. To add to their database, email tips@forecastthefacts.org.

Climate zombie Chris Coutu (R-CT)

Chris Coutu, who is running for Congress in the 2nd District, said the Two Storm Panel strayed “far from its non-political mission and into the political minefield of global warming.” “The “Two Storm Panel” had a simple, non-political task: determining how Connecticut can better prepare for and respond to major storms. Instead of simply focusing on solutions, the panel veered into politics with its recommendations for global warming,” Coutu said in a press release issued a few hours after the panel released its report.

“I don’t believe global warming’s occurring,” Coutu told the Hartford Courant. “There’s climate changes every year, there’s weather changes.”

Of course, it’s radical anti-science ideologues like Coutu who have made the scientific fact of global warming into a political issue, putting the residents of his state, our nation, and the entire planet at deadly risk. This panel is taking long-delayed action to protect Americans from the impacts of global warming caused by political inability to stop the fossil fuel pollution driving it.

“It’s global warming,” Sue Gress of New Canaan, Connecticut, told the New York Times in November. “No one wants to believe it, but things are changing. There’s much more violent weather, and we’re not prepared to deal with it.”

The Two Storm Panel’s report states that rising sea levels brought on by a warming planet “raises serious concerns about the need to protect critical infrastructure along the coast and adjacent to rivers.” Experts told the group that sea levels are expected to rise about 1.5 feet by the middle of the century and from 3 to 5 feet by the century’s end. The panel recommended new engineering standards to “better protect the built environment from the effects of extreme weather.”

“There is a reality that comes with the trend in climate change that we have to be better prepared for the future,” Gov. Dannel Malloy said. “We’re in a warming cycle,” James Skiff, the retired U.S. Air Force Major General who co-chairs the panel, told the Courant. “Sea levels are going to rise, that creates a higher storm surge.”

Skateboarding in Rapid City, SD's 70-degree weather on January 5.

Fueled by billions of tons of greenhouse pollution, a surge of record warmth has flooded the United States, shattering records from southern California to North Dakota. “Temperatures have reached up to 40 degrees above early January averages in North Dakota,” the Weather Channel reports. Cities are seeing late-April temperatures at the start of January — Minot, ND hit 61 degrees, Aberdeen, SD hit 63 degrees, and Williston, ND hit 58 degrees, all-time record highs for the month of January.

Daily record highs have been set in Des Moines, Iowa (65 degrees), Rapid City, S.D. (73 degrees), International Falls, Minn. (46 degrees), St. Louis, Mo. (66 degrees) and Fargo, N.D. (55 degrees), to name a few locations. Although the record warmth subsides on Friday for the Plains, the mild air mass will bully its way eastward. We’re talking temperatures in cities such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit and Cincinnati enjoying highs on the order of 10-to-20 degrees above average. High temperatures around 5-to-15 degrees above average will make it all the way to the East Coast including New York City, Washington, D.C. and Charlotte, N.C.

“There has never been a 60 degree temperature recorded during the first week of January in Minnesota’s modern climate record.” Southwestern Minnesota reached the lower 60s.

In Southern California, decades-old records were snapped with 80- and even 90-degree weather, sending surfers to the beaches. Long Beach hit 88 degrees, UCLA hit 89 degrees, San Diego hit 83 degrees, and San Gabriel reached 91.

Although this heat is welcome to schoolchildren, this breakdown of normal seasons threatens serious economic disruption. The total lack of snowcover in the Dakotas means that wildland fires are much more likely. The seasonally cold air following this surge of heat will severely damage the winter crops that are usually protected by at least 3 inches of snow at this time of year.

A Reuters video shows flooding up to homes’ rooftops:

The disaster comes almost a year-to-date after one of Brazil’s worst floods in its history, which killed more than 900 people and left 31,000 displaced.

In an interview with PBS News Hour, Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters described the effect of the hundreds of billions of tons of global warming pollution as being like “steroids for the atmosphere,” intensifying extreme weather to unprecedented results:

We look at heat waves, droughts, and flooding events. They all tend to get increased when you have this extra energy in the atmosphere. I call it being on steroids for the atmosphere. Normally, you have the everyday ups and downs of the weather, but if you pack a little bit of extra punch in there, it’s like a baseball hitter who’s on steroids. You expect to see a big home run total maybe from this slugger, but if you add a little bit of extra oomph to his swing by putting him on steroids, now we can have an unprecedented season, a 70 home run season. And that’s the way I look at this year. We had an unprecedented weather year that I don’t think would have happened unless we had had an extra bit of energy in the atmosphere due to climate change and global warming.

Watch the program:

Nationwide, more than 6,000 heat records were broken this year. On average, the U.S. has three or four events every year that are considered major natural disasters. But, this year, there were at least fourteen billion-dollar disasters. Damages are expected to exceed $53 billion.