Climate Change is Here — and Worse Than We Thought

Living on the water in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia - one rated almost as bad as New Orleans for storm flooding potential - the boyfriend and I are well aware of the problems being brought on by global warming and rising sea levels.  To deal with increased flooding problems (our home - pictured above in November 2009 - cannot be raised in a financially feasible manner) we have installed a whole house generator and will have three high capacity industrial sump pumps installed next week so that when the next hurricane comes we can aoid having standing water in the house.  Others in the area are also taking steps" e.g., the U. S. Navy which plans on spending many millions of dollars at the Norfolk Naval base where water levels have increased some 14+ inches since the middle of the last century.  Meanwhile, the Neanderthals and flat earth crowd in the Republican Party of Virginia in the General Assembly deny the problem even exists. James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has a telling column in the Washington Post that looks at the reality that Republican refuse to exist.  Here are excerpts:

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.  But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened.  .   .   .   .   our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.

These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe.  .   .   .   .   Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.

There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.  The future is now. And it is hot.

Despite all the evidence, neither Virginia nor the USA has any plan to deal with what is happening.  In Hampton Roads there are 1.6 million people, many of who will be increasingly impacted by rising sea levels.  How bad do things need to become before the GOP pulls its head out of its ass?