Polling Shows Growing Climate Concern Among Americans. But Outsized Influence of Deniers Remains a Roadblock (excerpt): DeSmog

 

California burns

"More Americans than ever before — 54 percent, recent polling data shows — are alarmed or concerned about climate change, which scientists warn is a planetary emergency unfolding in the form of searing heat, prolonged drought, massive wildfires, monstrous storms, and other extremes.

Climate change denial

These kinds of disasters are becoming increasingly costly and impossible to ignore. Yet even as the American public becomes progressively more worried about the climate crisis, a shrinking but vocal slice of the country continues to dismiss these concerns, impeding efforts to address the monumental global challenge.

Weather Extremes Driving Climate Concern

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. has already seen 16 billion-dollar weather disasters this year, including horrific fires in the West and powerful storms like Hurricanes Sally, Laura, and Delta on the Gulf Coast.

Florida's coast regularly floods

This reality of intensifying climate disasters in part helps explain the rise in concern on this issue among the American public, says Ed Maibach of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. Maibach is part of a research team that since 2008 has surveyed and categorized American attitudes on climate change into six different groups that they call the “Six Americas.”"

 Go to complete DeSmog story

 Read time: 9 mins  By Dana Drugmand  

Related: Anxiety Mounts Abroad About Climate Leadership and the Volatile U.S. Election (excerpts): InsideClimate News

Polls Suggest the GOP's Climate and Environment Disinformation Efforts are Beginning to Falter : TGMO

"As reported in the Atlantic, several recent polls reveal that there is a nearly 10-point surge in concern about climate change among Americans."

"We’ve not seen anything like that in the 10 years we’ve been conducting the study," Anthony Leiserowitz, a researcher at Yale, told the Atlantic's Robsinson Meyer.

Extreme weather events are driving concern about climate change. Depending on where you live, flooding, hurricanes, droughts, superstorms and Nor’easters are all making it hard for people to ignore climate change."

Latest data shows steep rises in CO2 for seventh year : The Guardian

US Earth System Research Laboratory, measurements from Mauna Loa, Hawaii

Readings from Hawaii observatory bring threshold of 450ppm closer sooner than had been anticipated.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by the second highest annual rise in the past six decades, according to new data.

Atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas were 414.8 parts per million in May, which was 3.5ppm higher than the same time last year, according to readings from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, where carbon dioxide has been monitored continuously since 1958.

Scientists have warned for more than a decade that concentrations of more than 450ppm risk triggering extreme weather events and temperature rises as high as 2C, beyond which the effects of global heating are likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.

Read The Guardian article

U.S. Midwest Freezes, Australia Burns: This Is the Age of Weather Extremes : New York Times

Frozen Lake Michigan

"As for the extremely low temperatures this week in parts of the United States, they stand in sharp contrast to the trend toward warmer winters. They may also be a result of warming, strangely enough. 

Emerging research 

suggests that a warming Arctic is causing changes in the jet stream and pushing polar air down to latitudes that are unaccustomed to them and often unprepared. Hence this week’s atypical chill over large swaths of the Northeast and Midwest."

Read the NYT article

Related: 

A Closer Look at the Polar Vortex’s Dangerously Cold Winds

Chicago will be as cold as the Arctic on Wednesday. We’ll show you why.

Jan. 30, 2019

 

We have already created extreme extreme weather

Hurricane Michael, October 9, 2018. Source: NOAA

The Human Fingerprints on Extreme Weather

 

"Climate change is already taking a massive toll, and it’s only going to get worse."

"Hurricane Michael broke records Wednesday, when it became the most powerful cyclone ever recorded to make landfall along the Florida Panhandle. Abnormally warm waters fueled winds up to 155 miles per hour, which laid waste to homes and businesses caught in the storm’s path. As multiple outlets noted, climate change likely fueled the record-breaking wind speeds. That fact is notable given that both reporters and researchers have historically been reticent to link any one storm to climate change.

Five or ten years ago, if you asked a scientist how climate change figured into a particular hurricane, she would demur, saying that it was impossible to blame any single event on the overall warming trend. Those days are over. In the last decade, scientists have developed sophisticated tools for finding the human fingerprint on extreme weather. The emerging field of attribution research, as it’s known, investigates the role of climate change in specific events. A newly published report amassing more than 200 attribution studies makes clear that heat-trapping carbon pollution is already making the weather measurably more severe."

Read the Medium article

See also: Risks of 'domino effect' of tipping points greater...

#extremeweatherevents  #humancausedclimatechange  #hurricanemichael  #cyclones  #climatechange  #climateactionnow 

MP's letter to Queensland Premier re coal mine support

Cate Faehrmann MLC

Here is a letter I have sent to the Queensland Premier calling on her to stop approving coal mines if she is serious about responding to the horrific fires devastating the state right now.

- - - - -

Dear Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk MP,
I heard you on ABC radio this morning talking about the catastrophic fire conditions that Queensland is facing. “Unprecedented” was the word you used.

You told listeners across the country that temperatures had broken records by 5 or 10 degrees and that the lack of normally humid conditions in that part of Queensland was making the situation worse.

You’ve previously acknowledged that climate change is real and climate change is happening.

Just two months ago your government released a report warning of the increased risk of extreme floods and fires as a result of climate change.

So I just want to check that you’re aware of the link between burning coal and climate change?

Mother Jones: Even the Trump Administration Acknowledges That Global Temperatures Are Rising to Catastrophic Levels

"Predictions of climate change’s devastating impact—coastal flooding, demonstrable sea level rise, and more extreme weather events, to name a few—are so ubiquitous it becomes nearly impossible to fully understand their potentially catastrophic implications. But an acknowledgement last week that global temperatures may rise by a shocking 7 degrees by 2100 was startling for many reasons, especially because the Trump administration was the source of the estimate."

Dan Spinelli October 1, 2018 12:58 PM

Read original Mother Jones article