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The Most Important Climate Change Effect
Forbes Magazine’s columnist Peter Gleick is a hydroclimatologist who writes for the magazine. His recent article on climate change indicators is very instructive.
The item copied below is among the last parts of that article. I have excerpted it because I think this issue of extremes and variability may be the source of the major problems to be faced by small islands. . . it may be less significant that there are trends toward the enumerated climate change effects, and more important that the changes are likely to be expressed in unpredictable extreme events with massive impacts on human welfare.
A warming planet also means more extremes of climate.
Anyone watching or reading the news or looking out the window probably had a sense that 2011 was a weird year with one bad, extreme weather disaster after another. It was. As the climate changes, scientists anticipate more extremes, and the reality around us confirms that. Here are two graphs: the first from NOAA shows the fraction of the United States in either extreme drought or extreme flood over the past century: 2011 had the highest fraction ever recorded – nearly 60% of the country. The second, also from NOAA, shows that 2011 had the largest number of weather/climate disaster events exceeding a billion dollars ever – 14 of them, even adjusting for inflation.
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