Darryl Fears reports in the Washington Post that according to the government's newest national assessment of climate change, Americans are already feeling the effects of global warming. "For a long time we have perceived climate change as an issue that's distant, affecting just polar bears or something that matters to our kids," says Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University professor and lead co-author of the changing climate chapter of the assessment. "This shows it's not just in the future; it matters today. Many people are feeling the effects." The assessment carves the nation into sections and examines the impacts: More sea-level rise, flooding, storm surge, precipitation and heat waves in the Northeast; frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean; more drought and wildfires in the Southwest. "Residents of some coastal cities see their streets flood more regularly during storms and high tides. Inland cities near large rivers also experience more flooding, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Insurance rates are rising in some vulnerable locations, and insurance is no longer available in others. Hotter and drier weather and earlier snow melt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the spring, last later into the fall, and burn more acreage. In Arctic Alaska, the summer sea ice that once protected the coasts has receded, and autumn storms now cause more erosion, threatening many communities with relocation."
The report concludes that over recent decades, climate science has advanced significantly and that increased scrutiny has led to increased certainty that we are now seeing impacts associated with human-induced climate change. "What is new over the last decade is that we know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now. While scientists continue to refine projections of the future, observations unequivocally show that climate is changing and that the warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. These emissions come mainly from burning coal, oil, and gas, with additional contributions from forest clearing and some agricultural practices."
(Score: -1) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @01:25PM
I don't really care for the spin called "climate change",
but i do urge everyone to spin the "right-way" 'cause some
"left-spinners" are spinning towards more nuclear power plants or
"long-lasting-poison generation plants" that produce electricity
as a side effect as a mitigating solution (obviously wrong).
the earth has pockets of heat-banks waiting to be liberated:
oil, gas, coal, uranium are heat sources waiting to combust and
according to some law of thermodynamics generate irreversible heat.
so spin the right way and intercept the heat from sol BEFORE it's
turned into heat and let that energy do something before being heat again, yes?
i'm sure we can have interesting discussion about the global thermodynamic effects of:
1) air-conditioner powered by oil, gas, coal, uranium
2) air-conditioner powered by solar-panels
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 07 2014, @02:43PM
If you try to suggest that the climate change is generate by the amount of heat produced by humans, you are absolutely mistaken.
The Sun's energy that reaches the Earth surface every single second is >127,500 TJ (the Solar constant [wikipedia.org] is around 1kW/sqm after absorption in atm, the Earth radius is 6371 km). This makes a total energy/year of 1.1e+9TWh.
Total energy consumption: 1.5e+5TWh - i.e 0.1%. Most of it finish as heat, but not all of it: part goes into chem.energy (e.g fertilizer, bleach, detergents), part of it gets emitted into space as RF (where do you think most of the radiation emitted by your mobile phone non-directional antenna goes?), etc.
The problem is not the heat generated by producing energy from "pockets of heat-banks" by "global thermodynamic effects", the problem is with that pesky CO2 that traps more heat from the Sun radiation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 07 2014, @02:45PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by wantkitteh on Wednesday May 07 2014, @04:24PM
It may come as a surprise to you, but coal power plants emits orders of magnitude more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear ones produce waste - uranium exists as a trace element in coal, only 1ppm or so but given the amounts of coal we burn every year, that's a hell of a lot of nuclear waste we're already flinging around with gay abandon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08 2014, @05:29PM
oh i see! .. let's just go straight to uranium?
coal is bad because it can contain uranium so uhm
i'm not pro-coal per se but at least we have bio-nano-machines infesting this plan(e)t
that can convert them exhaust volatiles to oxydizing agents for your daily jogging trip.
matter of fact without that volatile this would be a barren planet.
actually some people enjoy living in skeletal remains of structures build by above ...
mentioned nano-machines
on the other hand the volatiles from a "poison-production-plant" are just that. poison! ... unlike removing (not burning) all coal.
nothing on this planet depends on it. if you could remove all uranium from this planet today
i'll wager a bet that tomorrow nothing would go to hell