Climate Change News and Article Collection

[Peter Lemkin]

We have been too kind to those who are destroying the planet.
We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.
-Derrick Jensen

These are Jensen's opening remarks from the Nov. 2011 Earth At Risk Conference........

What is the problem?

There's a sensea very real and overwhelmingly devastating sensein which you could say that the problem is that this culture is killing the planet. One hundred and twenty species were driven extinct today. Another 120 will be driven extinct tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after. Ninety-seven percent of native forests are gone. Ninety-nine percent of native grasslands. Amphibian populations are collapsing, migratory songbird populations are collapsing, mollusk populations are collapsing, fish populations are collapsing, and so on. Nearly all rivers in the US (and world) are dammed. Dams are the death of rivers. There are two million dams in the United States alone: with 60,000 dams over 13 feet tall and 70,000 dams over 6 and a half feet tall. If we took out one of those 70,000 dams every day it would take two hundred years to remove those dams. And the salmon don't have that time. Sturgeon don't have that time. Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. There is six to ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton in much of the oceans. The oceans are being acidified. The oceans are being murdered. Big cats are going. Great apes are going. Vertebrate evolution has effectively been ended by this culture. The world is being poisoned: there is dioxin (and many other carcinogens) in every (human and nonhuman) mother's breast milk. More than half of the fish in many rivers are changing genders because of endocrine disrupting chemicals put out by this culture. And of course humans have grotesquely overshot carrying capacity, and are committing unparalleled drawdown.

And our response is utterly incommensurate with the multiple crises we face.

There's a sense, however, in which the fact that this culture is killing the planet isn't so much the problem as it is the ultimate expression of this insane culture's deeper problem, which is that it is omnicidal. It doesn't "just" destroy every nonhuman community it encounters, but it also destroys other human cultures: human languages are being driven extinct at an even greater relative rate than nonhuman species. It dispossesses or otherwise destroys indigenous cultures. It harms women: the gold standard studies reveal that 25 percent of all women in this culture have been raped in their lifetimes, and another 19 percent have had to fend off rape attempts.

Not every culture has destroyed its landbase. The Tolowa Indians, on whose land I live, lived here for at least 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time. Likewise, not every culture has had such extraordinarily high rates of rape, in fact many cultures, prior to conquest by this culture, have had either extraordinarily low rates of rape, or have been rape free. The same is true for child abuse.

Why do members of this culture act as they do? Well, we can discuss (and I have in book after book) reason after reason, whether it is this culture's system of social rewards (it generally socially rewards behaviors that benefit the individual at the expense of the group, rather than behaviors that benefit the group as a whole), which leads inevitably to competition, and ultimately to atrocious behavior; or whether it is that a way of life based on constant conquest gives that culture a short-term competitive advantage over other groups who are organized sustainably (if you cut down forests and mine mountains to make war machines, you will probably have a more well-equipped army than a group that does not do this: this is not a hypothetical example: the forests of North Africa, to provide one example among far too many, were felled to build the Phoenician and Egyptian navies), while of course leading to the collapse of landbase after landbase; or whether it is that a way of life based on the importation of resources can never be sustainable; or whether it is that a way of life that produces waste products that do not benefit the natural world can never be sustainable; or whether it is, as many indigenous peoples (for example, Jack Forbes, as in his wonderful book Columbus and Other Cannibals) suggest, that members of the dominant culture are insane, or suffer from a spiritual illness that turns them into types of vampires or zombies who need to consume the souls of others in order to survive. All of those and other suggestions make some sense to me. But I guess for now I'll just say that many indigenous peoples have said to me that the fundamental difference between western and indigenous ways of being is that most westerners perceive the world as consisting of resources to be exploited, as opposed to other beings to enter into relationship with. And this is crucial, because how you perceive the world affects how you behave in the world. There is a great line by a Canadian lumberman: when I look at trees I see dollar bills. If when you look at trees you see dollar bills, you will treat them one way. If when you look at trees you see trees, you will treat them differently. And if when you look at this particular tree you see this particular tree, you'll treat it differently still. So part of the problem is that members of this culture perceive the world as consisting of resources. This is insanely narcissistic, indeed sociopathic. And of course it is destructive.

Which leads to the final thing I guess I want to say for now, which is that another part of the problem is, and this is of course in line with the narcissism and sociopathy, perceived entitlement. This culture as a whole perceives itself as entitled to take whatever it is it wants. And many of its members individually perceive themselves as entitled to take whatever it is they want. God gave man dominion over the earth, after all. And it doesn't much matter whether you believe God gave man dominion over the earth, or whether you believe, as one social change author puts it, that "We humans are Creation's most daring experiment," or whether you believe, as Richard Dawkins put it, that "Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command," (which means that the very epistemology of this culture is based on enslaving others, on forcing them to jump through hoops on command), if you believe you are somehow superior to these othersand it doesn't matter whether these others are nonhumans, women, children, the indigenous, members of other races or classes: anyone other than the "Chosen People"then you can easily come to believe that it is acceptable for you to take what these others have, including their bodies, including their lives. So I guess for now I'd say a significant part of the problem includes beliefs in male supremacy and entitlement, which certainly leads to the atrocities of this rape culture; white supremacy and entitlement, which certainly leads to the race-based atrocities we see, whether they are the horrors of the Middle Passage, or the current rates of incarceration of African-Americans in the United States; imperial supremacy and entitlement, which certainly leads to the atrocities of colonialism; civilized supremacy and entitlement, which certainly leads to the ongoing dispossession and extermination of land-based peoples the world over; and finally (for now) human supremacism, the belief that humans are separate from and superior to nonhumans, and the consequent belief that somehow it is acceptable to destroy nonhuman communities, which certainly leads to the ecocide we see around us at every turn.

I want to put this one more way, and I want to be very clear about this. If you asked ten thousand scientists if they believed that all of evolution has taken place so that humans could come into being, I'm sure the overwhelming majority would say no. They might even laugh at the absurdity of the question. But when they were finished laughing, and got back to work, what would they do? Most likely their work consists of in some way contributing to, as Dawkins put it, science's "spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command." So if you judge the answers not by what these scientists saynot by mere rhetoricbut by what they doby their actionsthe answer from an equally overwhelming majority would be a resounding yes: you cannot act as though the world consists of resources to be exploited unless you believedeeply, oftentimes beyond conscious statementthe world was made (or evolved) for you. I recently got into an argument with a high school science teacher who believes this culture won't collapse, because "we will find better and better ways to exploit our resources and maintain our way of living while still protecting our forests and oceans and the rest of our environment." Leave aside the utter lack of historical or current evidence for this possibility, and leave aside that humans have grossly exceeded carrying capacity, meaning his statement is also physically impossible, and just focus on his language: exploit; our resources; our forests and oceans; our environment. I pointed out to him that forests and oceans are not ours but that they belong to themselves, and have lives and relationships all their own. I pointed out to him that resources do not exist, that perceiving a tree or fish or river as a resource means you are, as he stated, perceiving it as something to be "exploited" and not as something with its own life, own desires, independent of him, that was not put here for him. No matter how many times I explained it, he could not understand. Even though he does not believe in Christianity, and even though he does not believe God created the world for him, or that God created the world at all, his belief that the world was made for him to use remains such a deeply fundamentalist article of faith that it is entirely invisible to him: from his perspective it is not faith, but simply the way the world is, and it is utterly inconceivable to him that any other way of perceiving is possible, even when at least one other way has been laid out before him. I may as well have been quacking like a duck.

The fundamental religion of this culture is that of human dominion, and it does not matter so much whether one self-identifies as a Christian, a Capitalist, a Scientist, or just a regular member of this culture, one's actions will be to promulgate this fundamentalist religion of unbridled entitlement and exploitation. This religion permeates every aspect of this culture. This is a big problem, a problem big enough that it is killing the planet.




http://www.earthatrisk.net

[Lauren Johnson]

USN are big believers in climate change.

[video=vimeo;30772895]http://vimeo.com/30772895[/video]

[Magda Hassan]

USN are big believers in climate change.

And they are one of the biggest causes of it. All their bloody air-conditioned tents in the Middle East and Asia and gas guzzling tanks and other hardware. Insane.

[Lauren Johnson]

USN are big believers in climate change.

And they are one of the biggest causes of it. All their bloody air-conditioned tents in the Middle East and Asia and gas guzzling tanks and other hardware. Insane.

Titley's speech is of course absurd. He wants the Navy to be as carbon neutral and indeed the rest of the planet as carbon neutral as possible so that our fine young men and women in uniform can continue to dominate the planet.

From Peter's post above:

There's a sense, however, in which the fact that this culture is killing the planet isn't so much the problem as it is the ultimate expression of this insane culture's deeper problem, which is that it is omnicidal.

[Greg Burnham]

What I believe and, in some cases, know to be true:

1) Planetary survival is not threatened by human activity

2) The continued survival of humans and other species is threatened by aggressive, power mongering, human activity

3) Human inhabitability of planet Earth could become threatened by seemingly innocuous human activity, but not the Earth itself

4) The human contribution to global and regional pollution is evident, it is irresponsible, sometimes dangerous, and in most cases, (but not all--at this time) avoidable

5) Irresponsible public policy toward pollution is driven by the Central Bank's "need under our present system" for an ever expanding economy, which is entirely driven by (consumer and government) debt

6) Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant, it is a trace element in the atmosphere, essential to all life...

7) Carbon Dioxide is not a forcing factor on climate

8) Carbon Dioxide has become "the patsy" for Wall Street banking interests who will be trading Carbon Credits for cash to prop up their depleted so-called "reserves"


In the absence of real contributions to their fellowman's well being, environmental alarmists opt to create straw men with which to wage pseudo battles against insurmountable opposition in order to avoid doing anything of real consequence.

My advice: Volunteer your time at a local hospital; or care for the homeless; or spend a day at a local beach, lake, or river cleaning up the litter from the shore; adopt a highway and clean it up; ...put up or shut up.


...

[Lauren Johnson]

A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.
The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.
Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

Some commentators believe that such convoluted arrangements are becoming increasingly common to shield the identity and backgrounds of the wealthy supporters of climate scepticism some of whom have vested interests in the fossil-fuel industry.
The Knowledge and Progress Fund, whose directors include Charles Koch and his wife Liz, gave $1.25m to Donors in 2007, a further $1.25m in 2008 and $2m in 2010. It does not appear to have given money to any other group and there is no mention of the fund on the websites of Koch Industries or the Charles Koch Foundation.

The Donors Trust is a "donor advised fund", meaning that it has special status under the US tax system. People who give money receive generous tax relief and can retain greater anonymity than if they had used their own charitable foundations because, technically, they do not control how Donors spends the cash.

Anonymous private funding of global warming sceptics, who have criticised climate scientists for their lack of transparency, is becoming increasingly common. The Kochs, for instance, have overtaken the corporate funding of climate denialism by oil companies such as ExxonMobil. One such organisation, Americans for Prosperity, which was established by David Koch, claimed that the "Climategate" emails illegally hacked from the University of East Anglia in 2009 proved that global warming was the "biggest hoax the world has ever seen".

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has estimated that over the past decade about $500m has been given to organisations devoted to undermining the science of climate change, with much of the money donated anonymously through third parties.

The trust has given money to the Competitive Enterprise Institute which is currently being sued for defamation by Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University, an eminent climatologist, whose affidavit claims that he was accused of scientific fraud and compared to a convicted child molester.

Dr Brulle said: "We really have anonymous giving and unaccountable power being exercised here in the creation of the climate countermovement. There is no attribution, no responsibility for the actions of these foundations to the public.

"By becoming anonymous, they remove a political target. They can plausibly claim that they are not giving to these organisations, and there is no way to prove otherwise."

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment...66312.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.
The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.
Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

Ah the luverly Koch Brothers.

DPF has a thread on them here.

[Lauren Johnson]

In the Northern Atlantic south of Iceland, an extratropical storm that brought up to 6" of snow to Maryland on Thursday has put on a remarkable burst of rapid intensification over the past 24 hours, with the center pressure dropping 58 mb in 24 hours. The Free University of Berlin, which names all major high and low pressure systems that affect Europe, has named the storm "Jolle." This meteorological "bomb" was analyzed with a central pressure of 988 mb at 12Z (7 am EST) Friday morning by NOAA's Ocean Prediction Center, and hit 930 mb by 7 am EST Saturday morning. The storm may deepen a few more millibars today, but it is close to maximum intensity. A 930 mb central pressure is what one commonly sees in Category 4 hurricanes, and is one of the lowest pressures attained by an Atlantic extratropical storm in recent decades. Since extratropical storms do not form eyewalls, the winds of the massive Atlantic low are predicted to peak at 90 mph (Category 1 hurricane strength), with significant wave heights reaching 52 feet (16 meters.) The powerful storm brought sustained winds of 52 mph, gusting to 72 mph, to Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland at 6 pm local time Saturday. Fortunately, the storm is expected to weaken dramatically before Jolle's core hurricane-force winds affect any land areas.


Figure 1. Winter Storm Jolle, as seen at 10 am EST January 26, 2013. Three hours prior to this image, Jolle was analyzed with a central pressure of 930 mb--one of the lowest pressures in recent decades for an Atlantic extratropical storm. Image credit: [URL="http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/htdocs_dyn_pregen_sat/PUBLIC/nexsat/pages/Europe/Latest.html"]Navy Research Lab, Monterey.

According to wunderground's weather historian Christopher C. Burt's post on [/URL]Super Extratropical Storms, the all-time record lowest pressure for a North Atlantic extratropical storm is 913 mb, set on January 11, 1993, near Scotland's Shetland Islands. The mighty 1993 storm broke apart the super oil tanker Braer on a rocky shoal in the Shetland Islands, causing a massive oil spill.

Other notable Atlantic extratropical storms, as catalogued by British weather historian, Stephen Burt:

920.2 mb (27.17") measured by the ship Uyir while she sailed southeast of Greenland on December 15, 1986. The British Met. Office calculated that the central pressure of the storm, which was centered some distance southeast of the ship, was 916 mb (27.05").

921.1 mb (27.20") on Feb. 5, 1870 measured by the ship Neier at 49°N 26°W (another ship in the area measured 925.5 mb)

924 mb (27.28") on Feb. 4, 1824 at Reykjavik, Iceland (the lowest on land measured pressure in the North Atlantic)

925.5 mb (27.33") on Dec. 4, 1929 by the SS Westpool somewhere in the Atlantic (exact location unknown)

925.6 mb (27.33") on Jan. 26, 1884 at Ochtertyre, Perthshire, U.K. (the lowest pressure recorded on land in the U.K.)

For comparison's sake, the lowest pressure measured on land during an extra-tropical storm in the United States (aside from Alaska) was 952 mb 28.10" at Bridgehampton, New York (Long Island) on March 1 during, the Great Billy Sunday Snowstorm.


Figure 2. Infrared satellite image of the North Atlantic Storm of January 11, 1993 at 0600Z when it deepened into the strongest extra-tropical cyclone ever observed on earth, with a central pressure of 913 mb (26.96"). Satellite image from EUMETSAT Meteosat-4.

Links
You can see a nice AVHRR image of the east side of the storm at the University of Bern. The raw MODIS pass is here.

The Meteorological Institute of Norway has a nice satellite animation of Jolle.

Wunderground's weather historian Christopher C. Burt's posts on Super Extratropical Storms and [URL="http://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/article.html?entrynum=50"]World and U.S. Lowest Barometric Pressure Records

Claudio Cassardo's January 23, 2013 post, [/URL]Very low minima of extratropical cyclones in North Atlantic

Read my story of what it was like to fly though a 936 mb Atlantic low pressure system on January 4, 1989.

Intense winter storms are expected to increase in number due to climate change
In my 2010 blog post, The future of intense winter storms, I discuss how evidence for an observed increase in intense wintertime cyclones in the North Atlantic is uncertain. In particular, intense Nor'easters affecting the Northeast U.S. showed no increase in number over the latter part of the 20th century. This analysis is supported by the fact that wintertime wave heights recorded since the mid-1970s by the three buoys along the central U.S. Atlantic coast have shown little change (Komar and Allan, 2007a,b, 2008). However, even though Nor'easters have not been getting stronger, they have been dropping more precipitation, in the form of both rain and snow. Several studies (Geng and Sugi, 2001, and Paciorek et al., 2002) found an increase in intense winter storms over both the North Atlantic, but Benestad and Chen (2006) found no trend in the western parts of the North Atlantic, and Gulev et al. (2001) found a small small decrease of intense winter storms in the Atlantic.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a scientific advisory board created by the President and Congress, concluded this in their 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report: "Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent". The USGRP concluded that an increase of between four and twelve intense wintertime extratropical storms per year could be expected over the Northern Hemisphere by 2100, depending upon the amount of greenhouse gases put into the air (Figure 3). If we assume that the current climate is producing the same number of intense winter storms as it did over the period 1961-2000--about 53--this represents an increase of between 8% and 23% in intense wintertime extratropical storms. Two studies--Pinto et al. (2007) and Bengtsson et al. 2006--suggest that the more intense winter cyclones will affect only certain preferred regions, namely northwestern Europe and Alaska's Aleutian Islands. At least three other studies also find that northwestern Europe--including the British Isles, the Netherlands, northern France, northern Germany, Denmark and Norway--can expect a significant increase in intense wintertime cyclones in a future warmer world (Lionello et al., 2008; Leckebusch and Ulbrich 2004; and Leckebusch et al., 2006). None of these studies showed a significant increase in the number of intense Nor'easters affecting the Northeast U.S.


Figure 3. The projected change in intense wintertime extratropical storms with central pressures < 970 mb for the Northern Hemisphere under various emission scenarios. Storms counted occur poleward of 30°N during the 120-day season beginning November 15. A future with relatively low emissions of greenhouse gases (B1 scenario, blue line) is expected to result in an additional four intense extratropical storms per year, while up to twelve additional intense storms per year can be expected in a future with high emissions (red and black lines). Humanity is currently on a high emissions track. Figure was adapted from Lambert and Fyfe (2006), and was taken from Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate, a 2009 report from the the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The USGRP began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which called for "a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change".

Jeff Masters

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMas...rynum=2336

[Peter Lemkin]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4323[/ATTACH]An epic blizzard is bearing down on New England fed in part by relatively warm coastal waters.

I asked Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to comment on the role climate change has on this storm. He explained:

This is a perfect set up for a big storm, with the combination of two parts: a disturbance from the Gulf region with lots of moisture and a cold front from the west.
Ingredients for a big snow storm include temperatures just below freezing. In the past temperatures at this time of year would have been a lot below freezing but the ability to hold moisture in the atmosphere goes down by 7% per degree C (4% per deg F), and so in the past we would have had a snow storm but not these amounts.
The moisture flow into the storm is also important and that is enhanced by higher than normal sea surface temperatures (SSTs). These are higher by about 1 deg C [almost 2°F] than a normal (pre-1980) due to global warming and so that adds about 10% to the potential for a big snow.

Every storm and "event" is unique. It always has unique ingredients. So it is hard if not impossible to take apart, because any piece missing means the storm behaves differently. So event attribution is not well posed. Instead we look for the environment in which the storm is occurring and how that has changed to make conditions warmer and moister over the oceans.

Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace. And like a baseball player on steroids, it's the wrong question to ask whether a given home run is "caused" by steroids. As Trenberth wrote in his must-read analaysis, "How To Relate Climate Extremes to Climate Change," the "answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be."

On the warmer SSTs, Climate Central's Andrew Freedman explains:

As was the case when Hurricane Sandy struck in late October, sea-surface temperatures are running a couple degrees above average off the East Coast, which according to climate scientists may reflect both natural climate variability and the effects of manmade global warming.

The presence of unusually warm waters could aid in the rapid development of the storm system, and infuse it with additional moisture, thereby increasing snowfall totals.

Heavy precipitation events in the Northeast, including both rain and snowstorms, have been increasing in the past few decades, in a trend that a new federal climate report links to manmade global climate change. As the world has warmed, more moisture has been added to the atmosphere, giving storms additional energy to work with, and makingprecipitation extremes more common in many places.

Sea surface temperature anomalies off the East Coast. Credit Wunderground/NOAA via CC.

The blizzard is also pulling in an extraordinary amount of moisture, which is consistent with recent trends in the Northeast toward more frequent one-day precipitation extremes during the cold season, including snowstorms. The satellite-derived image of total precipitable water shows that the storm has been drawing tropical moisture from the Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean

Trenberth's second point is an important one warmer than normal winters favor snow storms (See "We get more snow storms in warm years"). A 2006 study, "Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States" found we are seeing more northern snow storms and that we get more snow storms in warmer years:

The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901-2000…. Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901-2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activity….

Assessment of the January-February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%-80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years…. a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901-2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) U.S. Climate Impacts Report from 2009 reviewed that literature and concluded, "Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.

So it is no surprise that a 2012 study found extreme snowstorms and deluges are becoming more frequent and more severe. Freedman points out:

For the northern hemisphere as a whole, winter storms have become more common and intense during the past 50 years, according to the draft federal report. Observed changes in winter air circulation in the northern hemisphere, possibly related to Arctic sea ice loss, has been linked to large swings in seasonal snowfall from one winter to the next in the Northeast. Other studies indicate that as global warming continues, nor'easters such as the one about to hit New England may become more frequent in this region, and less common in the Mid-Atlantic states, as storm tracks shift closer to the poles.

Again, the Northeast has been especially vulnerable to deluges and Snowmaggedons, experiencing a sharp increase in one-day precipitation extremes during the October to March cold season:

The other big impact of global warming on the destructiveness of superstorms like this (and Sandy) is sea level rise:

The coastal flooding threat for this storm in New York pales in comparison to what it was during Hurricane Sandy, when large parts of the city's iconic subway system flooded in the face of a record storm surge, and many New Yorkers drowned in flood waters.

Rising sea levels due to warming seas and melting ice caps are already making typical nor'easters such as the upcoming event more damaging, since they provide the storms with a higher launching pad for causing coastal flooding. According to the draft National Climate Assessment report released in January, even without any changes in storms, the chance of what is now a 1-in-10-year coastal flood event in the Northeast could triple by 2100, occurring once every 3 years, due to rising sea levels.

According to research by Climate Central scientists, the sea level trend in Boston Harbor from 1959 to 2008 in Boston Harbor has been 2.31 milimeters per year, which is slightly below the global average over the same period. In the past 50 years, the water level has risen by about 4.5 inches at that location, although it has increased much more in other spots along the northeastern coast.

On Nantucket Island, where coastal flooding is anticipated from this storm along with hurricane-force winds, the sea level has risen by about half a foot during the past 50 years.

People should take the weather forecasts of this storm seriously and act accordingly.

Similarly, the nation should take seriously the climatic projections of ever worsening storms from global warming and act accordingly.

[Lauren Johnson]

CHAKBARA, BANGLADESHIt is hard to imagine Shamisur Gazi sprinting up a tree. He is 86, has a hump on his back and, at the best of times, he needs a cane to walk.

But people do extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances.

On May 25, 2009, a few hours before Cyclone Aila hit Bangladesh and India, Gazi remembers the rain it was relentless, it came down in brown sheets and visibility was barely two metres.

The wind was fierce, but toward mid-afternoon, it suddenly picked up more momentum and began toppling houses and hurling fences. Within minutes, Gazi knew that if he didn't find refuge, he would be blown away.

Gazi climbed a palm tree.

He doesn't remember how he did it or how long it took. But he did it. He stayed there for six hours as the wind howled and giant waves surged.

Climate change means higher temperatures, more rain, stronger winds. It will trigger a migration unlike anything the world has seen.

As it gradually render parts of Asia and Africa uninhabitable, as many as 250 million people seven times the population of Canada will be forced to move by 2050, experts predict.

They will go from deserts to places where water is less scarce, the land not so arid; from coasts, they will move inland, where they are safe from cyclones and tidal waves. They will move from flatlands to higher ground, where sudden storm surges don't flood their villages and destroy farmland with salt water.

They will leave to look for jobs and for safety.

They will migrate to neighbouring towns and cities; some will leave for neighbouring countries. Some will also leave for countries far away. But they will leave they won't have a choice.

The worst-case scenario is predicted for the Maldives and other small islands in the Pacific. Those islands will disappear, as early as the end of this century.

It is already happening: the sea level has risen 20 centimetres in the past century in the Maldives, say scientists who fear in another 100 years, it will rise an additional 56 centimetres.

But the biggest migration is expected to be in Bangladesh.

Rising sea levels, a result of melting glaciers, could flood 17 per cent of the country or erode the land and create between 20 million and 30 million refugees by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (IPCC is a scientific body assessing climate change for more than 190 countries. The panel shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice president Al Gore.)

Bangladesh also faces more extreme weather patterns: monsoon rains are already shorter and fiercer; the periods of drought longer. Tornadoes and cyclones are more powerful, more devastating.

"All this could happen faster because of lack of reduction of greenhouse gases," says Atiq Rahman, one of the authors of the IPCC report. "And even if we stopped now, it would take a lot of time for things to get better."

Rahman lives in Dhaka. His office in the chic Gulshan neighbourhood is crammed with dozens of maps and graphs showing Bangladesh's predicament.

He uses one to explain why Bangladesh is Ground Zero: geographically, the country is flat, especially in the south. Its 150 million people live in the delta of three mighty rivers the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna and the majority of the country sits a scant six metres above sea level; some coastal areas are barely three to four metres above sea level. By the end of the century, experts say part of the country could be under water.

But the issue is not just disappearing land. According to the IPCC, rising sea levels will wipe out more cultivated land in Bangladesh than anywhere else in the world. By 2050, rice production a dietary staple in the country is expected to drop almost 10 per cent and wheat production as much as 30 per cent. That's a huge risk for a population that is poor and growing. Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh and one of the authors of the IPCC report, says climate change poses a quadruple whammy for Bangladesh.

The country faces rising sea levels in the south, more annual flooding in the central region because of stronger monsoons, drought in the northwest, and inadequate water for rice production, due to a shorter monsoon season, in the east.

"We face (climate change) challenges in every corner of the country," says Huq. "The convergence of climate-related factors has created the ultimate storm here."

It is a storm that Bangladesh didn't create, but one it will have to deal with.

Cyclone Aila certainly wasn't the first cyclone to hit Bangladesh.

Every year, there are typhoons, there are cyclones. Most of the land is barely above sea level; every storm sweeps across the country without obstacles and tidal surges batter the coast. People lose everything: their animals, their crops, their homes.

In the past, resilient Bangladeshis would have built new huts, bought more livestock, stockpiled food and carried on.

But Aila was different.

It hit the country less than 18 months after Cyclone Sidr, which inhaled dozens of villages, killed hundreds and flooded coastal regions. People were still picking up the pieces when Aila struck.

Aila killed 300 people, inundated dozens of villages with a three-metre storm surge and destroyed 4,000 kilometres of roads and embankments.

It also brought in saline water from the Bay of Bengal, making the soil unfit for agriculture, the livelihood of most rural people.

That saline water never receded.

"There was no choice . . . people had to leave," says Majid Khan, 52.

He lives in Baringa, a village of about 600 in southwest Bangladesh, less than a kilometre from a river that makes its way into the Bay of Bengal. It is like every village near the coast: there are mud-caked huts, children in tattered clothes on the streets, fields that no one plows anymore and fish ponds where no one fishes.

In Baringa, villagers used to earn a living growing rice or gathering fish eggs in ponds scattered throughout the village.

Saline water wrecked even that.

Before Aila made landfall, Khan and his four sons earned a "good living" collecting fish eggs. "We were OK, we were happy . . . everyone lived in the same house," says Khan, wiping away tears. After Sidr, they tried fishing in the sea but never caught enough; then they lost their fishing net in a storm.

A few months after Aila, three of his four sons left with their wives: two went to Dhaka, one to Jessore. Two work in construction, one pulls a rickshaw. It is a rough life and they hate what they are doing, says Khan. "This (the village) is their life, this is what they wanted to always do. . . ."

Khan, too, almost left. But he couldn't abandon his 90-year-old mother.

He walks out to see the Bay of Bengal every day. From his vantage point, there are signs the water is rising. "Look at those," he says, pointing at stone steps leading to a mud hut near a bank. When he was growing up, he could count 15; now, it is just a dozen.

Khan is no scientist or climatologist but he knows something is happening.

"I don't think my great grandkids will see their village . . . It will be gone," he says.

Salt has contaminated the drinking water supply. Aid workers say water-related illnesses are rising. Malaria is up, so is dengue fever. Research shows elevated incidence of high blood pressure, especially among women, and problems during childbirth.

In nearby Gabura, Roshan Ara, a shy 34-year-old, says she left the village when grey sludge deposited by Aila destroyed her shrimp ponds. The same thing happened to hundreds of thousands of shrimp ponds in the area, she says.

She moved to Satkhira, a town of narrow streets, chaotic traffic and shanties about 120 kilometres inland. A farmer's daughter and a farmer herself, Ara now works as domestic help and earns less than $15 a month. She sends half of it to her parents.

"I want nothing more than to come back here, but I don't think it will ever happen," she says, throwing her hands up in despair during a visit to Gabura. "Because villages like mine will disappear. What did we do wrong?"

Bangladeshis, like others in developing countries, are least responsible for climate change but among the worst affected by it.

In Bangladesh, the issues are compounded by population density and poverty, says James Pender, a missionary who wrote an exhaustive paper in 2010 on Bangladesh and the impact of climate change. The country's dependence on agriculture makes it much more vulnerable, he says.

About 35 per cent of the population lives under the poverty line of $1 a day, and about 40 per cent depend on agriculture for a living.

(Pender has lived in Bangladesh for years and has focused on climate change adaptation.)

Food production will be "particularly sensitive to climate change, because crop yields depend directly on climatic conditions," wrote Pender. In tropical areas, even a tiny increase in warming will reduce the harvest. Higher temperatures will lead to large declines in wheat and rice production around the world.

Bangladesh is one of the world's most densely populated countries at about 1,200 people per square kilometre. (In Canada, it's 3.7 people per square kilometre.) With so many people, it can scarcely afford to lose farmland. Lost land means less land for a growing population and less farmland to feed them.

But not everyone agrees with such dire predictions.

"There is an emerging pattern but it is tough to say how much land (will become submerged), how many people will move," says Babar Kabir, senior director of disaster environment and climate change with BRAC, the world's largest NGO, which has offices in every district in Bangladesh.

"(Migration) is not happening to the degree we think it is."

He is sitting in his ninth floor office at the BRAC building in Dhaka. But Kabir spends a lot of time in coastal villages, where residents are being taught new livelihoods.

For instance, after Cyclone Sidr, BRAC gave rice farmers money to buy tiny crabs, which were fattened up and sold back for export to other Asian countries. "The project did well," says Kabir. "It showed other uses for land if it can't grow crops."

But he knows people are moving to higher, safer ground.

All migration is "not climate-change related," he argues; there is economic migration, too. "People are leaving certain areas where they can no longer sustain a living," he says.

Still, he concedes that agriculture affected by changing weather patterns is a main reason for these migrations.

While rising seas and eroding soil may be eating into this country's land, some scientists point out that more than one billion tonnes of sediment has been brought into the delta by the Himalayan rivers. The sediment can counter the rise in sea levels, says Maminul Haque Sarker, executive director of the Centre for Environment and Geographic Information Services in Dhaka.

After the IPCC's doomsday report, the agency conducted its own research and concluded much of the country's coastline will survive. "Sediment plays a role in the growth, it always has in this country," says Sarker. "They have shaped our coast for thousands of years."

Rahman acknowledges the IPCC report did not include the impact of sediment deposit, but he discounts its impact.

"Even if sediments save some part of the coast from going under water, that area can never be used for agriculture," he says. "There is too much turbulence there." There is another kind of turbulence in coastal villages.

It is a social change that bothers Pintu Bhai.

Bhai, 51, lives in the sprawling village of Munshiganj, about five kilometres from the coast, and runs a grassroots environmental group. He regularly visits coastal villages and worries about the skewed gender ratio, and the women left behind.

He says some women are abandoned because the men never return. Children are growing up without their fathers.

Lately, armed bandits have been stealing livestock from these areas. "They know there are few men left so no one will fight back," Bhai says. "It's dangerous."

Then there are prowling tigers from the adjacent Sundarbans mangrove forest, believed to be one of the largest reserves in the world for the endangered Bengal tiger.

Tigers rarely used to leave the forest, but changing tide patterns have driven away some of their prey and made it easier and necessary for them to roam. Now, they sometimes come to the villages at night. There are supposed to be tiger lookouts, but Bhai says there are not enough people to stand guard.

But humans are also invading tigers' space. As traditional livelihoods have dwindled, some villagers have taken to gathering wild honey in the thick of the Sundarbans forest.

Mohammad Robiul Islam, 35, lost a cousin to a tiger two years ago. "He was in the forest when he was attacked," says Islam.The death hasn't deterred other villagers from venturing into the forest to earn the equivalent of a few dollars a month.

There aren't many other ways to earn a living here, says Islam. "You either move to the cities or live here and take risks."

Back in Chakbara, Gazi also faces an impossible choice: to leave the land where he was born, raised and spent more than eight decades, or move to the city to be with his children and grandchildren.

Life has become harder in the past few years, but he knows it could be even tougher in the city. And he would also miss the tempestuous Bay of Bengal, he says.

A warm, good-natured man with a short beard and a wry smile, he says he would have liked his sons to stay in his village.

"All I wanted was to grow old with my children and their children. But now they are gone and I don't think they will ever return."

The palm tree, the one that saved his life during Aila, is still there.




When he climbed down, his coastal village in southwest Bangladesh had changed forever: houses were decimated, livestock drowned. The village was submerged.

Four years later, Gazi is still there. The houses have been rebuilt, as has the school, but the population has dwindled to about 500 from 800 before Aila.

Many of those gone are men, who have left behind women, children and elders. They work as labourers or pull rickshaws in nearby towns such as Jessore, Satkhira and Khulna; the enterprising ones have gone to the capital, Dhaka, to work in construction. Yet others have crossed the border to India, where they live in fear of being exposed as illegal immigrants and thrown into prison.

It is the same story in nearby villages, and in much of rural southwest Bangladesh.

Gazi's two sons are in Dhaka with their families. Gazi is clinging to village life the way he did the palm tree. It is the only existence he knows, but he realizes he soon may not have a choice but to leave. "Climate change has wrecked everything," he says. "Our people are living in other towns and cities, like refugees."


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