Why Climate Change Is Making Flooding Worse

Although floods are a natural occurrence, human-caused climate change is making severe flooding events like these more common. 

Solar panels, heat pumps and hydrogen are all building blocks of a clean energy economy. But are they truly “essential to the national defense”?

We are facing a much different fire regime in a hotter, drier world. In the western U.S., the area burned by wildfires has doubled since the mid-1980s compared to natural levels. 

An extreme heatwave in India and Pakistan has left more than a billion people in one of the most densely populated parts of the world facing temperatures well above 40℃. Although this has not broken all-time records for the regions, the hottest part of the year is yet to come.

While the first decade of the 2000s saw huge growth in natural gas generation, and the 2010s were the decade of wind and solar, early signs suggest the innovation of the 2020s may be a boom in “hybrid” power plants.

It’s easy to feel pessimistic when scientists around the world are warning that climate change has advanced so far, it’s now inevitable that societies will either transform themselves or be transformed. But as two of theauthors of a recent international climate report, we also see reason for optimism.

The report finds that in addition to rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse emissions, CO₂ removal is “an essential element of scenarios that limit warming to 1.5℃ or likely below 2℃ by 2100”.

Waterfront homes are selling within days of going on the market, and the same story is playing out all along the South Florida coast at a time when scientificreportsare warning about the rising risks of coastal flooding as the planet warms.

Brace yourselves, allergy sufferers – new research shows pollen season is going to get a lot longer and more intense with climate change.

Scientists regularly study the ongoing degradation of Earth’s environment and track the changes wrought by a warming planet. Economists warn that intensifying disasters are harming people’s quality of life.

Climate change means extreme events such as floods, bushfires and droughts will become more frequent and severe. Those events will disrupt food supply chains, as people along Australia’s sodden east coast have seen again in recent weeks.

This isn’t the first time that Britain has experienced drastic climate change, however. By the 16th and 17th centuries, northern Europe had left its medieval warm period and was languishing in what is sometimes called the little ice age.

Mountain glaciers are essential water sources for nearly a quarter of the global population. But figuring out just how much ice they hold – and how much water will be available as glaciers shrink in a warming world – has been notoriously difficult.

China has more solar power capacity than any other country and makes many of the world’s solar cells, but coal is still its top energy source.

Coral reefs have long been regarded as one of the earliest and most significant ecological casualties of global warming.

Humans have cooked with fire for millennia, but it may be time for a change. Natural gas appliances warm the planet in two ways: generating carbon dioxide by burning natural gas as a fuel and leaking unburned methane into the air.

It’s a common argument among climate deniers: scientific models cannot predict the future, so why should we trust them to tell us how the climate will change?

Perth smashed its previous heatwave records last week, after sweltering through six days in a row over 40℃ – and 11 days over 40℃ this summer so far. On top of that, Perth has suffered widespread power outages and a bushfire in the city’s north.

Indonesia can become a significant global player in tackling the climate crisis if it optimises the work of protecting and rehabilitating forests. This is because the country is home to Asia’s largest tropical forest.

More people are going to hospital, compared with 20 years ago. It turns out, that’s not the only surprise in this new report. Here’s how else climate change is affecting health in Britain.

Two centuries of burning fossil fuels has put more carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere than nature can remove.

Every disaster movie seems to open with a scientist being ignored. “Don’t Look Up” is no exception – in fact, people ignoring or flat out denying scientific evidence is the point.