scholarly journals Climate Change and Extreme Weather Linked in U.N. Climate Report

Eos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenessa Duncombe

A major scientific assessment of global climate science found a much stronger connection between climate change and extreme weather than ever before.

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (15) ◽  
pp. 8295-8302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcy Rockman ◽  
Carrie Hritz

Climate science has outlined targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions necessary to provide a substantial chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change on both natural and human systems. How to reach those targets, however, requires balancing physical realities of the natural environment with the complexity of the human social environment, including histories, cultures, and values. Archaeology is the study of interactions of natural and social environments through time and across space. As well, the field of cultural resources management, which includes archaeology, regularly engages with values such as site significance and allocation of funding that the modern social environment ascribes to its own history. Through these two approaches, archaeology has potential to provide both data for and methods of addressing challenges the global community faces through climate change. To date, however, archaeology and related areas of cultural heritage have had relatively little role in the global climate response. Here, we assess the social environment of archaeology and climate change and resulting structural barriers that have limited use of archaeology in and for climate change with a case study of the US federal government. On this basis, we provide recommendations to the fields of archaeology and climate response about how to more fully realize the multiple potential uses of archaeology for the challenges of climate change.


2014 ◽  
Vol 521 ◽  
pp. 423-428
Author(s):  
Ling Ling Pan ◽  
Feng Li ◽  
Sheng Chun Yang ◽  
Shu Hai Feng ◽  
Yong Wang

Frequency and severity of some extreme weather events are increasing, and weather can impact the power system and its components in a number of ways. This paper identifies key technical issues facing the electric power industry, related to global climate change. The technical challenges arise from: 1) impacts on supply and demand balance; 2) impacts on system operating strategies, and power generation scheduling; 3) impacts on power grid structure, and power infrastructure response to extreme weather events; and 4) impacts on operation parameters of power system. The objective of this paper is to facilitate continued discussion of power systemclimate change interactions. To this end, this paper identifies key issues relating to the interactions between the electric power industry and global climate change. These issues will not be resolved quickly, and it requires sustained attention if they are to be resolved successfully.


Author(s):  
Libby Robin

As global climate change shifts seasonal patterns, local and uncertain seasons of Australia have global relevance. Australia’s literature tracks extreme local weather events, exploring ‘slow catastrophes’ and ‘endurance.’ Humanists can change public policy in times when stress is a state of life, by reflecting on the psyches of individuals, rather than the patterns of the state. ‘Probable’ futures, generated by mathematical models that predict nature and economics, have little to say about living with extreme weather. Hope is not easily modelled. The frameworks that enable hopeful futures are qualitatively different. They can explore the unimaginable by offering an ‘interior apprehension.’


Author(s):  
Jaime Bunting ◽  
Jaime Bunting ◽  
Krysta Hougen ◽  
Krysta Hougen ◽  
Mary Helen Gillen ◽  
...  

In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, Audubon has worked with local school systems to integrate climate science units into upper elementary and middle school curriculum. Pickering Creek Audubon Center worked closely with public schools to implement grade-wide climate programming with students in fifth and sixth grade. Through participation in the Maryland and Delaware Climate Change Education, Assessment, and Research project and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Climate Stewards Education Project we are sharing these successes with statewide partners and working towards implementing climate change curriculum more broadly across the state. Through academic and teacher professional development programs, Pickering Creek Audubon Center educators train teachers on integrating climate science into their current lessons and review and collaborate on parts of the program teachers will lead in the classroom. Students are connected to climate change through a series of engaging in class and field activities over the course of several weeks. With the term “global climate change” making climate change seem more like a global problem and less like a local problem, Pickering Creek educators use wetlands and birds as examples of local habitats and wildlife impacted by climate change. Through these lessons led by Pickering Creek Audubon Center educators and augmented by material covered by classroom teachers, students get a thorough introduction into the mechanism of climate change, local impacts of climate change on habitats and wildlife, and actions they can take as a community to mitigate the effects of climate change.


Author(s):  
Michael B. McElroy

Chapter 4 presented an extensive account of current understanding of climate change. The evidence that humans are having an important impact on the global climate system is scientifically compelling. And yet there are those who disagree and refuse to accept the evidence. Some of the dissent is based on a visceral feeling that the world is too big for humans to have the capacity to change it. Some is grounded, I believe, on ideology, on an instinctive distrust of science combined with a suspicion of govern¬ment, amplified by a feeling that those in authority are trying to use the issue to advance some other agenda, to increase taxes, for example. More insidious are dissenting views expressed by scientists on the opinion pages of influential newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). If scientists disagree, the implication for the public is that there is no urgency: we can afford to wait until the dust settles before deciding to take action— or not, as the case may be. Missing in the discourse triggered by these communications is the fact that, with few exceptions, the authors of these articles are not well informed on climate science. To put it bluntly, their views reflect personal opinion and in some cases explicit prejudice rather than objective analysis. Their communications are influential, nonetheless, and demand a response. I begin by addressing some of the general sentiments expressed by those who are either on the fence as to the significance of human- induced climate change or who may already have made up their minds that the issue is part of an elaborate hoax to mislead the public. There are a number of recurrent themes: The data purporting to show that the world is warming have been manipu-lated by climate scientists to enhance their funding or for other self- serving reasons.Climate science is complicated; scientists cannot predict the weather. Why should we believe that they could tell us what is going to happen a decade or more in the future? The planet has been warmer in the past; we survived and maybe even prospered.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah S. Eggleston ◽  
Oliver Bothe ◽  
Nerilie Abram ◽  
Bronwen Konecky ◽  
Hans Linderholm ◽  
...  

<p>The past two thousand years is a key interval for climate science because this period encompasses both the era of human-induced global warming and a much longer interval when changes in Earth's climate were governed principally by natural drivers. This earlier 'pre-industrial' period is particularly important for two reasons. Firstly, we now have a growing number of well-dated, climate sensitive proxy data with high temporal resolution that spans the full period. Secondly, the pre-industrial climate provides context for present-day climate change, sets real-world targets against which to evaluate the performance of climate models, and allows us to address other questions of Earth sciences that cannot be answered using only a century and a half of observational data. </p><p>Here, we first provide several perspectives on the concept of a 'pre-industrial climate'. Then, we highlight the activities of the PAGES 2k Network, an international collaborative effort focused on global climate change during the past two thousand years. We highlight those aspects of pre-industrial conditions (including both past climate changes and past climate drivers) that are not yet well constrained, and suggest potential areas for research during this period that would be relevant to the evolution of Earth's future climate.</p>


2011 ◽  
Vol 92 (7) ◽  
pp. 909-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Gannet Hallar ◽  
Ian B. McCubbin ◽  
Jennifer M. Wright

Curriculum in High Altitude Environments for Teaching Global Climate Change Education (CHANGE) uses place-based education to teach middle school students about meteorology and climate as a basis to improve climate science literacy. The curriculum provides in-school and out-of-school instruction and connects students with scientists at Storm Peak Laboratory, a high-elevation atmospheric research facility above Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Following an initial 2-h classroom lesson, students record their own measurements of temperature, pressure, wind speed, and particle concentrations while traveling up the mountain to Storm Peak Laboratory. After returning to the classroom, students graph these data and analyze their results. Evaluation of this program showed that students improved their knowledge of key concepts pertaining to climate literacy. The hands-on, place-based format of CHANGE can be used as a model for middle school students in alpine communities to teach lessons in weather and climate and can be further refined by improved lesson plans, increased feedback to students, and an independent evaluation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-373
Author(s):  
Johannes Ungelenk

On 7 February 1861, John Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy, delivered a historical lecture: he could prove that different gases absorb heat to a very different degree, which implies that the temperate conditions provided for by the Earth's atmosphere are dependent on its particular composition of gases. The theoretical foundation of climate science was laid. Ten years later, on the other side of the Channel, a young and ambitious author was working on a comprehensive literary analysis of the French era under the Second Empire. Émile Zola had probably not heard or read of Tyndall's discovery. However, the article makes the case for reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart as an extensive story of climate change. Zola's literary attempts to capture the defining characteristic of the Second Empire led him to the insight that its various milieus were all part of the same ‘climate’: that of an all-encompassing warming. Zola suggests that this climate is man-made: the economic success of the Second Empire is based on heating, in a literal and metaphorical sense, as well as on stoking the steam-engines and creating the hypertrophic atmosphere of the hothouse that enhances life and maximises turnover and profit. In contrast to Tyndall and his audience, Zola sensed the catastrophic consequences of this warming: the Second Empire was inevitably moving towards a final débâcle, i.e. it was doomed to perish in local and ‘global’ climate catastrophes. The article foregrounds the supplementary status of Tyndall's physical and Zola's literary knowledge. As Zola's striking intuition demonstrates, literature appears to have a privileged approach to the phenomenon of man-induced climate change.


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