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Drought Encouraged Attila’s Huns to Attack the Roman Empire, Tree Rings Suggest
Hunnic peoples migrated westward across Eurasia, switched between farming and herding, and became violent raiders in response to severe drought in the Danube frontier provinces of the Roman empire.
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Record Low Water Levels on the Mississippi River in 2022 Show How Climate Change Is Altering Large Rivers
In 2022, water levels in some of the world’s largest rivers, including the Rhine in Europe and the Yangtze in China, fell to historically low levels. The Mississippi River fell so low in Memphis, Tennessee, in mid-October that barges were unable to float, requiring dredging and special water releases from upstream reservoirs to keep channels navigable.
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Major Fires an Increasing Risk as the Air Gets Thirstier
Greater atmospheric demand for water means a dramatic increase in the risk of major fires in global forests unless we take urgent and effective climate action, new research finds.
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The World’s Insurance Bill from Natural Disasters This Year: $115 Billion
Extreme weather events have caused an estimated $115 billion in insured financial losses around the world this year according to Swiss Re, the Zurich-based reinsurance giant. That’s 42 percent higher than the 10-year average of $81 billion.
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Renewable Power’s Growth Is Being Turbocharged as Countries Seek Energy Security
The global energy crisis has triggered unprecedented momentum behind renewables, with the world set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the past 20
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Global Warming Doubled the Risk for Copenhagen’s historic 2011 Cloudburst
On 2 July 2011, the Danish capital Copenhagen suffered a cloudburst of historic proportions, causing damage and destruction costing billions of kroner. Researchers have used detailed weather models to clearly tie increased temperatures to that historic cloudburst.
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Major Global Security Challenges
What are the major threats the world is facing? Researchers highlight five such threats: The growing role of disinformation; attacks on the idea of democracy; environmental challenges; economic instability; and terrorism – both domestic and foreign.
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Probable Maximum Flood Events Will Significantly Increase Over Next Decades
The flood capacity of dams could be at greater risk of being exceeded due to out-of-date modelling for potential maximum rainfall. A new study concludes that the rainfall model that engineers use to help design critical infrastructure such as large dams and nuclear power plants need to be updated to account for climate change.
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With Climate Impacts Growing, Insurance Companies Face Big Challenges
The impacts of climate change are all around us: sea level rise, severe heat waves, drought, extreme rainfall, more powerful storms. These impacts are making natural disasters more intense and more frequent. Losses from each disaster—drought and wildfires in the southwest, severe storms in the Midwest, flooding in Kentucky and Missouri, and hurricanes in the southeast—have exceeded $1 billion, with the cumulative cost of disasters over the last five years reaching $788.4 billion.
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Earth Had its 4th-Warmest October on Record
The planet added another warm month to a warm year, with October 2022 ranking as the world’s fourth-warmest October in 143 years. The Northern Hemisphere saw its second-warmest October and Europe saw its warmest October on record.
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Sea-Level Rise “May Cross Two Meters by 2100”
Land subsidence could worsen sea-level rise effects in the Asia Pacific region. Most islands in the Pacific are subsiding, presenting a challenge to infrastructure. Pacific Island Countries have low adaptative capacity to climate change.
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A Decade After Sandy, Manhattan’s Flood Barrier Is Finally in Sight — Sort of
In the wake of the October 2012 Superstorm Sandy, an ambitious project, called the “Big U,” was launched, aiming to wrap the island of Manhattan in miles of berms and artificial shorelines, creating a huge grassy shield that would both increase urban green space and defend the city from storm surge. The “Big U” shows how climate adaptation can succeed. It also shows how hard it is.
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As the Planet Warms, Risks of Geoengineering the Climate Mount
Because a climate-disrupted future remains possible, another danger needs our attention. As the impacts of warming become more extreme, countries are more likely to turn to riskier measures to combat them, including geoengineering.
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Managing Water Resources in a Low-to-No-Snow Future
With mountain snowpacks shrinking in the western U.S., new Berkeley Lab study analyzes when a low-to-no-snow future might arrive and implications for water management.
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Extreme Weather Events Do Not Lead to Policy Change
Extreme weather events and natural disasters, which result in hundreds of billions of dollars in damages and thousands of lives lost, are not associated with climate policy reforms.
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The long view
Huge Areas May Face Possibly Fatal Heat Waves if Warming Continues
A new assessment warns that if Earth’s average temperature reaches 2 degrees C over the preindustrial average, widespread areas may become too hot during extreme heat events for many people to survive without artificial cooling.