Climate Change

Tar sands not only contribute to climate change through the greenhouse gases they generate they also destroy habitats and contaminate air, soil, and water. Tailing ponds at tar sands extraction sites have been growing in Alberta for decades and they keep getting bigger. There are now more than a trillion liters of tailings in artificial ponds covering cover 230 km² or 88 square miles. By 2030 there will be a trillion and half. These tailings contain bitumen, toxic acids, and metals. They emit methane and other greenhouse gases and they are a source of carcinogenic volatile organic compounds like benzene. ...

As Californians combat three major forest fires Trump takes to Twitter to blame the state for forest mismanagement and threatens to withdraw federal funding. The president is once again misinformed as these are urban interface fires and have nothing to do with forest management. These statements prompted California Firefighters Union President to call Trump "an idiot".  In addition to the deaths associated with the most recent spate of fires in the state there has been an unprecedented amount of property destruction. In the face of the the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history, Trump is blaming the state...

Trump does not do hurricanes well. In fact it would be fair to say that Trump relates to hurricanes the way oil mixes with water. Maybe it has something to do with his lack of empathy, perhaps it has to do with the fact that every extreme weather event exposes the irrationality of his rejection of climate science and highlights the insanity of this administration's energy agenda.  A succession of once in a lifetime storms provides tangible support for the veracity of climate change.  However, Trump is not one to accept reality unless it suits him. When he is confronted...

We can now see with ever-increasing confidence that climate change is making storms more severe and more frequent and the situation will only worsen as the planet continues to get hotter. Advances in attribution science are making it clear that climate change is fueling deadly extreme weather events. The basic physics (the laws of thermodynamics) connecting climate change to extreme weather are well known. Warmer oceans cause more evaporation and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. This in turn increases rainfall and Hurricane Florence is a good example. "Florence is yet another poster child for the human-supercharged storms that are...

We know that we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to address the climate crisis. It is getting hotter and it will get hotter still. Left unchecked we will create a future in which there will be swaths of the earth that will be uninhabitable for parts of the year. In an Intelligencer's, David Wallace-Wells described July as, "a month of historic, even unprecedented, climate horrors". This is but the most recent manifestation of decades long warming trends. In 2018 we witnessed another summer of extreme heat, especially in the Arctic. This is driving a whole host of phenomenon including...

The Arctic is being ravaged by three interrelated phenomena that are all connected by climate change. Global warming is contributing to more heat waves. Hotter average temperatures in the Arctic are also melting the ice and causing wildfires. These three phenomena are interacting synergistically to amplify climate changes. These interrelationships can also be described as climate feedback loops, meaning they are vicious cycles that accelerate warming. Various permutations of feedback loops can be found between these three phenomenon. Heat Waves This year's hot summer is but the latest example of decades of hot data. Weather in the Arctic is completely...

A talk titled Selling the Sexy Science: A New Narrative on Climate Change, will take place Wednesday, September 19, 2018, 12:00 - 1:15 p.m., Memorial Union, Room 207, Arizona State University, Tempe campus.  In today’s media, the future seems ominously uncertain. These “doomsday” narratives on climate change can serve to instill hopeless inaction, rather than spur positive societal change. In this talk, Jesse Hernreich, will present a contrasting climate-change narrative -- a perspective designed to propel us into positive action on a seemingly overwhelming problem. Hernreich is from the Ecosa Institute, a design school in Prescott, AZ focused on Regenerative...

A global heat wave is fueling wildfires from South America to the Arctic Circle.  Research links climate change to heatwaves and drought both of which are important catalysts for wildfires. As reported by the BBC a recent study suggests that climate change has made heat waves more than twice as likely in Europe. The research concludes that the European heatwave of 2003 was 500% more likely due to climate change and the so-called "Lucifer" heatwave in Eastern Europe was made 10 times more likely by climate change. Studies show how heat and drought make vegetation and trees more combustible. We...

Marked by record setting heatwaves in July, this has been an unusually hot summer in the northern hemisphere. All around the world we are seeing evidence of longer and more intense heatwaves. The temperature data over the last three decades clearly indicate that the world is getting warmer and 2018 is no exception. If the trend continues this will be one of the warmest years on record alongside 2015, 2016, and 2017. July was the hottest month in one of the hottest summers in recorded history. This follows June which was the second warmest on record. Millions of people around...

Against the backdrop of an eerie post-apocalyptic sky Trump fiddles on Twitter as California burns. As one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern American history unfolds Trump hands out paper towels in Puerto Rico declaring, "let them eat cake".  ________________________________________________  Trump and the GOP's climate denial stands out in stark relief against the backdrop of increasingly fierce wildfires and severe weather. The recent wildfires in Northern California have killed at least 42 people and almost 7,000 homes and buildings have been destroyed. At its peak, more than 100,000 had to be evacuated. The preliminary property loss claims are already...