RELIABLE STATISTICAL DATA & REPORTS

 RELIABLE STATISTICAL DATA & REPORTS

Climate change impact

Because the global climate is a connected system climate change impacts are felt everywhere.

Among the most important climate change impacts are:

1) Increasing Sea Levels

Climate change impacts rising sea levels. The global average sea level has risen about 8 inches (20 cm) in the last 100 years, and climate scientists predict that it will rise even faster in the next 100 years as a result of climate change impacts.

Coastal cities such as New York are already seeing an increased number of flooding events, and by 2050, many such cities may require seawalls to survive. Estimates vary, but conservatively, sea levels are expected to rise by 1 to 4 feet (30 to 100 cm), enough to flood many small Pacific island states (Vanatu), famous beach resorts (Hilton Head) and coastal cities (Bangkok, Boston).

For example, if the Greenland ice cap and/or the Antarctic ice shelf collapsed, sea levels could rise by as much as 20 ft (6 m), inundating, for example, large parts of Florida, the Gulf Coast, New Orleans, and Houston.

(Source: National Climate Assessment )

 

2) Melting Ice

Within the next 100 years, if not sooner, the world’s glaciers will have disappeared, as will the polar ice cap, and the huge Antarctic ice shelf. Greenland may be green again, and snow will have become a rare phenomenon at what are now the world’s most popular ski resorts.

(Source: National Climate Assessment )To view an interactive map of changing polar ice coverage, 1979 to 2015 click here.

3) Torrential Downpours and More Powerful Storms

While the specific conditions that produce rainfall will not change, climate change impacts the amount of water in the atmosphere and will result in more violent downpours instead of steady showers when it does rain.

Hurricanes and typhoons will increase in power, and flooding will become more common.

Anyone in the United States who has tried to buy storm and flood insurance in the past few years knows that the insurance industry is completely convinced that climate change is raising sea levels and increasing the number of major storms and floods. (To understand the insurance industry’s thinking on the subject, consider the chart below, compiled by Munich Re-Insurance.)

(Source: Environmental Change @ Western)

(Source: Munich RE)

4) Heatwaves and Droughts

Despite downpours in some places, droughts and prolonged heatwaves will become common.

Rising temperatures are hardly surprising, although they do not mean that some parts of the world will not "enjoy" record cold temperatures and terrible winter storms. (Heating disturbs the entire global weather system and can shift cold upper air currents as well as hot, dry ones. Single snowballs and snowstorms do not refute climate change.)

Increasingly, however, hot, dry places will get hotter and drier, and places that were once temperate and had regular rainfall will become much hotter and much drier.

The string of record high temperature years and the record number of global droughts of the past decade will become the norm, not the surprise that they have seemed.

(Source: EPA adopted from Dai, Drought Under Global Warming)

5) Pests and Diseases

Rising temperatures favour agricultural pests, diseases, and disease vectors.

Pest populations are on the rise, and illnesses once found only in limited, tropical areas are now becoming endemic in much wider zones.

In Southeast Asia, for example, where malaria has been reduced to a wet season disease in most areas, it is now endemic almost all year.

Likewise, dengue fever, once largely confined to tropical areas, has become endemic to the entire region.

Increased temperatures also increase the reproduction rates of microbes and insects, speeding up the rate at which they develop resistance to control measures and drugs (a problem already observed with malaria in Southeast Asia).

Projected change in risk of Malaria

(Source: Global Warming – So what?)

(Source: Environmental Defense Fund)