The Yahoo News series looks at climate change risks in different regions of the country and how they will change in the future.
anxiety over finding a place to live safe from the ravages of climate change has been on the rise, as the negative consequences of rising global temperatures due to humankind's relentless burning of fossil fuels become more and more apparent in communities across the United States.
Millions of Americans will move because of climate change by the end of the century, according to a professor. Climate is one of the many drivers and I think it is a good idea to think about that.
According to a report by the United Nations, global temperatures are on track to warm by 2.1 C to 2.9 C by the end of the century. There will be a rise in extreme weather events. That increase is already occurring. According to a draft report of the latest National Climate Assessment, they happen every three weeks thanks to rising temperatures.
Climate risk is dependent on a number of factors, including luck, latitude, elevation, the upkeep of infrastructure, long-term climate patterns, and how warming ocean waters will impact the Frequency of El Nio-La Nia.
Climate change impacts will be severe in the continental United States and throughout the U.S. In some places they will be more severe and in other places they will be less severe. We all share the risk of the increase of extreme events, but certain places will be more moderate.
The strip of states in the center of the country are low lying and expansive.
The Great Plains include Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
The region of the Great Plains has warmed quickly in recent years, with states like Oklahoma and Texas baking in the summer and North Dakota enduring cold winters.
Since the turn of the 20th century, North Dakota has warmed by an average of 2.6F. Texas has warmed by 1.5F on average over that period.
Higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have amplified the greenhouse effect, speeding up the rate of temperature rise Scientists say the world will keep getting hotter unless action is taken to stop burning fossil fuels.
The average Texas surface temperature in 2036 is expected to be 3.0F warmer than the 1950-1999 average and 1.8F warmer than the 1991-2020 average. The number of days with a temperature of at least 100 degrees is expected to double by 2036.
All of the Great Plains' top 10 worst-rated counties are located in Texas. Dozens of other Texas counties are also on that list.
The state is close to the Gulf of Mexico and that is one of the reasons. The Rhodium ranked climate change in six categories: heat stress, the combination of heat and humidity, crop loss, sea level rise, and likely economic damages.
The state of North Dakota has placed two counties in the top 10 for climate change risk. Montana has Silver Bow, Glacier and Deer Lodge counties. Wyoming's Uinta County is eighth safest in the region.
In the southern Great Plains, summer temperatures this year were brutal, and the region continued to suffer from the effects of the El Nio weather phenomenon.
Oklahoma City set a new temperature record on July 19 when the temperature hit 112F during a heat wave. Many of the records that were set in 1936 during the Dust Bowl were not surpassed.
Climate deniers want to show that global warming isn't happening by recording high temperatures during the Dust Bowl years. The world isn't warming if the records were set in the 1930s.
Climate anomalies have continued to occur since humankind began pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, that the incidence of heat waves is increasing, and that the country on average still experiences fewer days of extreme cold. In Houston, five of the six hottest Julys on record have occurred since 2009, while the city's top 10 cooling Julys all happened before 1980.
Skeptics who argue that humans can't influence the Earth's climate also fail to address the impact that farming practices have had on the Dust Bowl. The continued decline of the Great Plains' water sources threatens progress.
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who also consults for ClimateCheck, a company that provides climate change risk assessments on real estate nationwide, told Yahoo News that right now they are seeing more dust storms. There isn't much on the order of what we saw in the 1930s, but there is a severe, worsening drought there and there are some self-fulfilling feedback mechanisms whereby things start to get warm and dry.
Climate change iswreaking havoc on the water cycle in the Great Plains, specifically when it comes to maintaining water levels in the High Plains Aquifer. Issues in the delivery of water for agriculture could be caused by that.
In the northern part of the Great Plains, it's possible to get a lot of rain in a short period of time. The EPA says that with climate change, precipitation in the winter and spring is projected to increasingly fall in the form of very heavy precipitation events, which can cause flooding and cause soil erosion. In the southern part of the region, there isn't a lot of water replenishment. Climate change will make this situation worse by making the situation more dry.
While it is not certain how climate change will affect precipitation trends across the Great Plains in the coming decades, there are warning signs in states like Montana, where the melting winter snow helps supply the region with water.
According to the EPA, higher spring temperatures will result in earlier melting of the snowpack, which will decrease water availability during the summer months.
It pours when it rains in the Great Plains. As the threat of wildfires grows, the progress made to avert future Dust Bowls can be put back. Climate change could plunge the Great Plains back into the danger zone despite advances in agriculture, warns a former Kansas State climatologist.
In 2021, he told the Mercury newspaper in Manhattan, Kan., that he had been saying that for a long time. There are other factors that can remove vegetation, so we wouldn't preclude the situation that plagued the Dust Bowl.
The bet on climate change for the Great Plains is that warmer average temperatures will be different across the region. The combination of hot temperatures and high humidity can make it hard for the body to cool itself down. It's one of the reasons why a place like Galveston County in Texas was so bad on the Rhodium analysis.
Climate change has disrupted the water cycle in a number of ways.
In late August of last year, Hurricane Harvey ravaged the Houston area with 1 trillion gallons of rain, enough to bring the falls to a halt. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner wrote in the introduction to the city's 2020 plan on how to use billions in taxpayer funds to strengthen the city against the changing climate that no other big American city has withstood such a natural disaster.
The $125 billion in damages caused by Harvey and the $5 billion in damages caused by Tropical Storm Imelda were both slow moving systems that unloaded huge amounts of rain from an over saturated atmosphere. Houston is vulnerable to flooding but that is not the only risk the city faces from rising global temperatures.
Hurricanes, tropical storms, and flooding are threats, but they are not the only ones. Climate change and the urban heat island effect are causing Houston's heat to increase.
It is easier to convince residents and elected officials to prepare for the risks of climate change after they have seen it first hand.
If the policy becomes to invest in sea walls and sewage and drainage and stronger construction, better infrastructure and so forth, places may be forecast to retain value and people may stay.
On the one hand, you can't have the American dream rest on your property values going up, and on the other hand, you have to rebuild after disasters. He said that the two things weren't compatible.
Even though it's expensive, a reluctance to prepare for climate change can prove to be even more costly.
The state of Texas had moved to deregulate its energy sector in the past. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses were without power.
Climate change has been linked to the winter outbreak. Thanks to the fact that theArctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth, those higher temperatures have been shown to disrupt the behavior of polar vortexes and weaken them so that they wander south over the continental U.S.
It happened this week when another high pressure ridge in Alaska sent another wave of cold air over the country.
The last eight years have been the warmest in recorded history, which will lead to an era of "climate chaos" in which a variety of new risks will present themselves. While states like Oklahoma and Texas are rolling out plans to help them endure hotter temperatures, they also face a choice about how much to spend on winterizing the electrical grid. It is estimated that it will cost between $5 billion and $20 billion to upgrade it to be able to deal with a polar vortex.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
