Climate change spawning disasters. FOR many decades, climate was seen as constant and even the science shows that it was constant because first rains fell between October 15 and 18 every year in Zimbabwe, with local farmers arranging their planting calendars in line with the seasons.
But over the past 30 years, the situation has changed as onset of the rains appears to have shifted as seasons have drastically changed, with rainfall falling much later in the year in November or December, or sometimes in January the following year. In fact rainfall patterns have become so unpredictable that many farmers are left off guard, encountering so many losses. Speaking during a recent indaba on climate change, principal researcher-Climate Change Management Department in the Ministry of Environment Water and Climate, Elisha Moyo, noted that Zimbabwe could fall into the United Nations’ “absolute water scarcity category” by 2080.
“Recently, hotter and less cold days are being experienced that is what used to happen in the past. Climate change 'triple threat' increases severe flooding risk in biggest US cities. America’s biggest cities are at far greater risk of serious flooding in the coming decades than was previously thought, because of a “triple threat” produced under climate change, researchers said on Monday.
A combination of sea-level rise, storm surge and heavy rainfall – all functions of climate change – exposes New York, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, San Diego and Boston to a much greater degree, research published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change found. “Call it a triple threat,” said Steven Meyers, a scientist at the University of South Florida and one of the authors. “What this shows is that there is an increasing risk of compound flooding, from storm surge and rainfall at the same time.” About 40% of the US population lives in coastal cities – where flooding in the wake of storms is already proving increasingly costly in built-up areas, swamping subway lines and electricity stations. 8 Major Cities Running Out of Water. Earlier this year, an obscure United Nations document, the World Water Development Report, unexpectedly made headlines around the world.
The report made the startling claim that the world would face a 40 percent shortfall in freshwater in as soon as 15 years. Crops would fail. Businesses dependent on water would fail. Illness would spread. A financial crash was likely, as was deepening poverty for those just getting by. The UN also concluded that the forces destroying the world’s freshwater supply were not strictly meteorological, but largely the result of human activity. Wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Gippsland-Coast-2100.pdf. Six degrees of devastation. IT'S 2100.
A sci-fi movie version of the future is finally here – flying cars, robots, choking pollution. Oh, and the planet is 5 degrees hotter than it was at the turn of the millennium. It’s nearly 90 years since scientists warned (again) that the planet could warm by between 4 and 6 degrees if we didn’t cut greenhouse gas emissions. We didn’t, and it did. The average global temperature, for night and day, is now 19 degrees, up from 14 degrees at the turn of the 20th century. The best scientific estimates suggest that the last time it was this hot was during the Eocene, more than 30 million years ago, and long before humans turned up. Illustration: Simon Letch What is life like? Advertisement Meanwhile, the colder days have melted away like the snow at Thredbo and Mount Buller.
Weather similar to Victoria's summer of 2009 – when scientists estimated that 374 people, mostly elderly, died due to heat stress as the temperature topped 43 degrees three days straight – has become more common. Photos du journal.
ExtremeWeather. Cryosphere. Diseases. Water. Drought. EconomicImpacts. BiodiversityLoss.