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As climate change strikes with ever greater ferocity, five henchmen dominate the news: Storm, Flood, Heat, Smoke and Fire. During the first 6 months of 2021, there have been 8 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disaster events across the United States. The U.S. has sustained 298 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2020). The total cost of these 298 events exceeds $1.975 trillion. The total cost over the last 5 complete years (2016-2020) exceeds $630.0 billion — averaging more than $125.0 billion/year — both new records. The image on the right shows very high temperatures over North America end July 2021, with fire radiative power as high as 247.3 MW. The NASA Worldview satellite image below shows large smoke plumes on July 7, 2021, reaching Hudson Bay. Furthermore, large smoke plumes are also visible over British Columbia. The NASA Worldview satellite image below shows smoke traveling ...

As temperatures rise, the weather is getting more extreme. Around the globe, extreme weather events are striking with ever greater frequency and intensity.  In 2020, in the U.S. alone, a record number of 22 climate and weather disasters took place that each caused damage of more than 1 billion dollar, while jointly causing the deaths of 262 people.  Rising temperatures cause stronger storms, droughts, heatwaves and forest fires. Rising temperatures are also behind the cold weather that is currently hitting large parts of North America. Two mechanisms that, by distorting the Jet Stream, are contributing to more extreme weather are described below.  Distortion of the Jet Streams - two mechanisms The Jet Streams used to circumnavigate the globe in narrow bands. World climate zones used to be kept well apart by stable Jet Streams.  On the Northern Hemisphere, the coldest point used to be the North Pole, so wind used to flow from the tropics to the North Pole, while the w...

The unthinkable consequences of global warming by Andrew Glikson “We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet”. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber 2009. “Burning all fossil fuels would create a different planet than the one that humanity knows. The paleoclimate record and ongoing climate change make it clear that the climate system would be pushed beyond tipping points, setting in motion irreversible changes, including ice sheet disintegration with a continually adjusting shoreline, extermination of a substantial fraction of species on the planet, and increasingly devastating regional climate extremes” and “this equates to 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year ” James Hansen et al. 2012 . Humanity is fast reaching our moment of truth. What Hansen, Schellnhuber and others have warned us is based on evidence consistent with the basic laws of science, the discipline which, contrary to medieval superstition, is founded on direct observations, calculat...

Global warming and ice sheet melting: Portents of a Younger dryas-like stadial event by Andrew Glikson Linear climate projections by the IPCC are difficult to reconcile with the paleoclimate evidence of stadial cooling events which closely succeeded warming peaks, including the Younger dryas (12.9–11.6 kyr ago), Laurentian melt (~8.3 kyr) and earlier interglacial stadials . Each of these events followed peak interglacial temperatures, leading to extensive melting of the ice sheets and transient stadial cooling events. Current global temperature rises in the range of ~ +1.19 ± 0.13 °C (Northern Hemisphere) and higher in the Arctic are consistent with this pattern, leading to the build-up of ice melt pools south of Greenland and around Antarctica. The growth of these pools is likely to progress toward large-scale to a global stadial, inducing differential warming and cooling effects leading to major weather disruptions and storminess, possibly analogous to the Younger dryas and Laurent...

The changing face of planet Earth Andrew Glikson Earth and Climate scientist Australian National University 12-8-2019 Preamble The inhabitants of planet Earth are in the process of destroying the habitability of their world through the perpetration of the largest mass extinction of species since 66 million years ago, when a large asteroid impacted Earth, and 55 million years since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum ( PETM ) reaching 5–8°C. The late Holocene-Anthropocene climate change represents an unprecedented event, triggering a fast shift in climate zones and a series of extreme weather events, with consequences for much of nature and civilization. The changes are manifest where green forests are blackened by fire, droughts are turning grassy planes to brown semi-deserts, brilliant white snow and ice caps are melting into pale blue water and clear blue skies turn grey due to aerosols and jet contrails, most particularly in the northern hemisphere. Unless effective efforts are u...