Climate change creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities across the United States, presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth.

(Urban Heat Island profile Image from Lawrence Berkeley Labs)

The impacts of climate change are already being felt in communities across the country. This is called the Urban Heat Island effect, and is in my opinion one of the major reasons urban dwellers believe in Climate Change, since they are experiencing it. Rural people on the other hand experience no such thing, they rather listen to their grand-father saying: It was much warmer and worse in the thirties. It remains a challenge though to build cities without an Urban Heat Effect; no more air conditioning, anyone?

Without substantial and sustained global mitigation and regional adaptation efforts, climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.

The best mitigation we can do is encouraging electrification in developing countries. Learning from the Amish one can do a lot by using wind mills and solar energy locally. Communities will need conventional power plants, the least expensive way is to build power plants, using coal or renewables, rather than cooking their food with dried cow-dung as fuel. Coal fired plants will be necessary in the near future, but the long term solution is to switch to a Thorium based energy economy.

Climate change affects the natural, built, and social systems we rely on individually and through their connections to one another. These interconnected systems are increasingly vulnerable to cascading impacts that are often difficult to predict, threatening essential services within and beyond the Nation’s borders.

Climate change presents added risks to interconnected systems that are already exposed to a range of stressors such as aging and deteriorating infrastructure, land-use changes, and population growth. Since the changes are mostly beneficial with less tornadoes

worldwide droughts are not increasing

Communities, governments, and businesses are working to reduce risks from and costs associated with climate change by taking action to lower greenhouse gas emissions and implement adaptation strategies. While mitigation and adaptation efforts have expanded substantially in the last four years, they do not yet approach the scale considered necessary to avoid substantial damages to the economy, environment, and human health over the coming decades.

As seen in the introduction most of the real threats are that we are entering a colder phase in the ever changing climate. Increasing CO2 will help mitigate the problem. Long term, coal , gas and oil will run out, and the alternatives are renewables, such as hydro energy, biomass, solar and wind. They will not solve the problem, the highest need for solar is in heavily populated areas where real estate is spoken for. Rooftop solar will help, but at a high price. The best windmill places are already spoken for, far from the user. Hydroelectric is in areas far from consumers, and is mostly already utilized, except the Kongo river in Africa.

To get a grip on the need for more energy we need to develop Thorium nuclear energy as fast as possible. This will give us enough electrical energy for the next million years, saving precious hydrocarbons for carbon based transportation, like airplanes.

The quality and quantity of water available for use by people and ecosystems across the country are being affected by climate change, increasing risks and costs to agriculture, energy production, industry, recreation, and the environment.

The safe, clean water essential to all life is rapidly running out in much of the world. Yet the politicians are concentrating on air pollution in the form of CO2 and methane as if a catastrophe is about to hit us. The world has not gotten any warmer in the last 20+ years, and the future trend is down, unless the sun does something quite unexpected. check US November average temperature.

In the meantime much of the world’s safe water supply is disappearing. The western US, much of the 10-40 corridor, Australia and western South America are using up its safe water much faster than it is replenished. In addition, what is left is getting polluted.Let me give you an anecdotal example.

A few years ago I was part of a team that made wet processing equipment for making  computer chip wafers. It involved cleaning and etching using isopropyl alcohol, hydrochloric, sulphuric, and hydrofluoric acid as well as Ozone, all potent stuff. To collect the used chemicals we had designed a 5-way output port, so the chemicals could be collected separately. The equipment was made and shipped off to South Korea. It was assembled in a brand new, state of the art positive air pressure clean room facility. The processing equipment was installed, and under the 5-way port was a large funnel, going  to the drain and directly out in the sewer.

A couple of years before, in the US we had a leaking valve, so a small amount of hydrofluoric acid got discharged into the sewage. This poisoned the sewage processing plant, and a large fine was levied. No such worry in Asia. The sewage goes directly out in the ocean to be diluted.

In China many of these facilities are inland, so large water aquifers get poisoned for centuries to come. In addition, Huang Ho (The Yellow River) does not empty out into the Ocean anymore part of the year, all the water is used. These are the people we entrust with our future production of just about everything, since we will have to cut down on our energy use thanks to a previous administration  hostile to energy development, while China is exempt, building dirty coal-fired plants as fast as they can. They install scrubbers, but scrubbers cost money to run, so they are frequently out of service ( being “serviced”). This results in a large brown upper atmosphere smog extending from China to Pakistan acting as a giant heat sink.

Impacts from climate change on extreme weather and climate-related events, air quality, and the transmission of disease through insects and pests, food, and water increasingly threaten the health and well-being of the American people, particularly populations that are already vulnerable.

The temperature in the tropics will not change at all. Except the effect from the el Ninos and la Ninas the tropics has found its temperature. Where temperature will rise somewhat is at the poles, mostly from increased snowfall, and to a lesser degree from increasing CO2. Since many more people die from excessive cold than from excessive heat, this leads to improved health. We are having increased challenges with allergies, asthma and other diseases due to an increasingly polluted environment but CO2 is not a pollutant. The health challenges are enormous. People travel to places with drastically different bacteria and virus cultures,and absent from putting people in quarantine upon return, these challenges will increase.

Climate change increasingly threatens Indigenous communities’ livelihoods, economies, health, and cultural identities by disrupting interconnected social, physical, and ecological systems.

Many Indigenous peoples are reliant on natural resources for their economic, cultural, and physical well-being and are often uniquely affected by changing environmental conditions. The impacts of change on water, land, coastal areas, and other natural resources, as well as infrastructure and related services, are expected to increasingly disrupt Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods and economies, including agriculture and agroforestry, fishing, recreation, and tourism. Adverse impacts on subsistence activities have already been observed. As CO2 increases, adverse impacts on culturally significant species and resources are expected to result in continuing need for adaption as has always been the case.  The biggest impact on indigenous people is still the radio, TV and the internet.

Ecosystems and the benefits they provide to society are being altered by climate change, and these impacts are projected to continue. Without substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, transformative impacts on some ecosystems will occur; some coral reef and sea ice ecosystems are already experiencing such transformational changes.

Many benefits provided by ecosystems and the environment, such as clean air and water, protection from coastal flooding, wood and fiber, crop pollination, hunting and fishing, tourism, cultural identities, and more will continue to be challenged as the climate always changes. One of the biggest challenges is the introduction of invasive species, leading to disruption in the ecosystem. One must exercise continuing vigilance limiting their introduction. One example is the introduction of the Kudzu vine as use for cattle fodder and to prevent soil erosion.

Rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on rangelands, and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly disrupt agricultural productivity in the United States. Expected increases in challenges to livestock health, declines in crop yields and quality, and changes in extreme events in the United States and abroad threaten rural livelihoods, sustainable food security, and price stability.

Agriculture is one of the major beneficiary of increasing CO2 levels. Photosynthesis works better with increasing CO2, and it consumes less water to do its work! As we can see from the picture below, the greatest increase in efficiency occurs in arid Sub-Sahara and the western part of the United States, India and Australia, all water starved regions.

Our Nation’s aging and deteriorating infrastructure is further stressed by increases in heavy precipitation events, coastal flooding, heat, wildfires, and other extreme events, as well as changes to average precipitation and temperature. Without adaptation, climate change will continue to degrade infrastructure performance over the rest of the century, with the potential for cascading impacts that threaten our economy, national security, essential services, and health and well-being.

Climate change and extreme weather events are expected to continue to disrupt our Nation’s energy and transportation systems, threatening power outages from a vulnerable national grid. Infrastructure designed for a time long past is deteriorating, vulnerable to weather extremes and increasingly to terrorist and cyber threats.. The continued increase in the frequency and extent of high-tide flooding due to the sinking of the Atlantic coast threatens America’s trillion-dollar coastal property market and public infrastructure.

Amazon has just decided to move their corporate headquarters to two new locations, one of which is the tidewaters of Queens, a location that was completely flooded by superstorm Sandy, so Amazon Corporation, for one, is not worried.

Coastal communities and the ecosystems that support them are increasingly threatened by the impacts of climate change. Without significant reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions and regional adaptation measures, many coastal regions will be transformed by the latter part of this century, with impacts affecting other regions and sectors. Even in a future with lower greenhouse gas emissions, many communities are expected to suffer financial impacts as chronic high-tide flooding leads to higher costs and lower property values.

Global average sea levels have not risen at all the last 2 years.

And if we look at the data from 1993 (the year satellite measurements began) the amount of sea level rise is not increasing.

The average sea level rise over the whole world is 3.4 mm/year or about a foot per century, and is not increasing. We are still recovering from the last ice age. The planet is becoming less ovoid, more like a sphere. In the Bothnian Bay land is rising out of the ocean at a rate of about 3 feet per century and in Hudson Bay the rise is as much as 4 feet per century. It is by no means over yet.

The displaced water gets redistributed over the rest of the earth. In addition the Mid-Atlantic ridge is expanding and rising with numerous undersea volcanoes, maybe up to one third of all undersea volcanoes are located between Jan Mayen and Svalbard. Tectonic plate movements explain the rest.

The Eastern Seaboard is slowly sinking into the sea, more than the rest of the world. The expansion of the ocean water volume is not accelerating.The take home from this picture is that there are cyclical factors quite apart from rising CO2, but sea level rise is not accelerating.

As to ocean acidification, blame the Chinese. They use half of the worlds coal production and spews out more acidification emission than the rest of the world combined. This ends up in the upper pacific region, and some even reaches the Arctic snow, resulting in lower albedo and earlier snowmelt, even as overall snowfall is increasing.

Check the brown cloud over China!

Outdoor recreation, tourist economies, and quality of life are reliant on benefits provided by our natural environment that will be degraded by the impacts of climate change in many ways.

The greening of the world that is occurring with increased CO2 does not only have great benefits to agriculture (point #9), but it beneficial to wild plants and animals as well. Trees will grow in areas before considered too dry, and their roots will help reduce erosion, and in time improve the soil. More vegetation, more birds and animals make for better wildlife areas. Yes there will be more flies, gnats and other insects as well, but that is part of nature. If you don’t like nature, even though they are shrinking, there will still be a few deserts left for you to tourist in.