Climate Change Roundup

Here's a summary of recent climate change developments.

A conference on climate and security at The Hague has heard that climate change poses an "imminent" security threat fueling violence and terrorism.

“Climate change is not about something in the far and distant future. We are discussing imminent threats to national security,” said Monika Sie Dhian Ho, general director of the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank.

The drying of Africa’s Lake Chad basin, for instance, has helped drive recruitment for Islamist militant group Boko Haram among young people unable to farm or find other work, said Haruna Kuje Ayuba of Nigeria’s Nasarawa State University. 

“People are already deprived of a basic livelihood,” the geography professor said at a conference on climate and security at The Hague. “If you give them a little money and tell them to destroy this or kill that, they are ready to do it.”

...The threat of worsening violence related to climate change also extends to countries and regions not currently thought of as insecurity hot spots, climate and security analysts at the conference warned. 

The Caribbean, for instance, faces more destructive hurricanes, coral bleaching, sea-level rise and looming water shortages that threaten its main economic pillars, particularly tourism. 

“We’re facing an existential crisis in the Caribbean,” said Selwin Hart, the Barbados-born executive director of the Inter-American Development Bank.

Australians are coming to grips with "uninsurable" homes.

Houses in flood-hit Townsville and other parts of north Queensland are “on track to become uninsurable”, according to analysis that shows the risk to homes from flooding will more than double under climate change. 

The modelling, based on current global emissions trajectories, says flooding in Townsville is already about 20% more to likely to occur than previously thought. The total flood risk in the region is likely to increase by 130% by the end of the century. 

Climate Valuation, which advises the property and finance industry, said the result would be that more homes would find flood cover difficult to obtain and too expensive.

In Miami, some homeowners are being told to sell while the market is good and before everybody else gets the same idea.

“Real estate is a huge economic driver here,” Laura Geselbracht, a senior marine scientist with the Nature Conservancy, said. “And it’s at risk from sea level rise. People don’t want to believe it. That’s a normal human condition – suspension of belief. 

“If you’re not a millionaire and you own a property in a vulnerable area, it may be a wise decision to think about moving before the masses think about moving,” Geselbracht said. She also owns waterfront property on a canal in Fort Lauderdale, and is deeply invested in her community, but has cautioned her child not to expect the same lifestyle in the future.

A report in the Harvard Gazette notes that parts of America's eastern seaboard are facing a double threat - sea level rise coupled with land subsidence.

In the coming decades, cities and towns up and down the eastern seaboard will have to come to terms with the impact of rising sea level due to climate change. A new study, however, is suggesting that rising sea levels may be only part of the picture — because the land along the coast is also sinking. 

That’s the key finding of Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Peter Huybers, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science Jerry Mitrovica, and Christopher Piecuch, an assistant scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who used everything from tide gauges to GPS data to paint the most accurate picture ever of sea-level rise along the east coast of the U.S. The researchers are co-authors of the study, recently published in Nature. 

“The fact that the mid-Atlantic is subsiding because of long-term geologic processes means that it will continue for centuries and millennia, in addition to whatever other changes in sea level occur,” Huybers said. “The mid-Atlantic is already having to cope with routine coastal flooding, and this problem is only going to get worse with time.”

A report out of MIT predicts climate change will bring stormier summer weather and more smoggy days to the Northern Hemisphere.

Climate change is shifting the energy in the atmosphere that fuels summertime weather, which may lead to stronger thunderstorms and more stagnant conditions for midlatitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere, including North America, Europe, and Asia, a new MIT study finds. 

Scientists report that rising global temperatures, particularly in the Arctic, are redistributing the energy in the atmosphere: More energy is available to fuel thunderstorms and other local, convective processes, while less energy is going toward summertime extratropical cyclones — larger, milder weather systems that circulate across thousands of kilometers. These systems are normally associated with winds and fronts that generate rain.

Look for muggy, hot, stormy, stagnant and - well - nasty, lots of nasty.