By Bernice Napach
A little less than a year ago Superstorm Sandy swept through the mid-Atlantic and East Coast of the United States, leaving millions without electricity and transportation and thousands without homes. More than a hundred people died.
Scientists attribute the ferocity of the storm to climate change. Unusually warm ocean waters off the cost of New York and New Jersey, where the storm made landfall, collided with a cold jet stream that was moving south -- in big part because of melting Arctic ice. The cost: an estimated $60-$70 billion.
“We’re paying the cost of global warming pollution, chiefly CO2, in lots of ways,” says Al Gore, former vice president, now chairman of The Climate Reality Project which is hosting a 24-hour online global broadcast called “The Cost of Carbon” starting Tuesday, Oct. 22.
Former Vice President Gore tells The Daily Ticker that Sandy is just one of many examples of how climate change is affecting the planet. Other examples: recent floods in Boulder, Colorado, and Pakistan and the 2012 U.S. drought which affected 60% of the farmland in the country during the hottest year on record in the states.
Gore explained: “We are putting 90 million tons of carbon pollution in the earth’s atmosphere every day as if the atmosphere were an open sewer. The accumulated amount of manmade CO2 and global warming pollution now traps as much heat every day as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs going off every day.”
A UN panel of climate scientists recently found with 95% certainty that humans are responsible for the earth’s warming temperatures, up from 90% certainty six years ago. They concluded that only a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions could possibly reverse the global warming trend.
So why isn’t more done to do reverse this trend?
Gore blames the largest carbon polluters who “have used the power of money…to pretend that this [climate change] is not real, the same way some people pretended that there would not be any consequences from defaulting on U.S. debt.”
His prescription:
•Stop spending billions of dollars to subsidize carbon based fuels
•Tax carbon-based energy sources through cap-and-trade
•Regulate emissions like the EPA does
“We should put a price on carbon," says Gore. "It’s much better to put a price on carbon than to continue to pay extra this escalating cost of carbon in the form of extreme weather events, the vulnerability to a disruption to oil supply lines in the Gulf of Mexico, the poisoning and acidification in the ocean…the enhanced forest fires...in the West, the dust storms, the climate refugees that are causing instability in many countries.”
In the meantime, Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his climate change efforts, sees more investment in renewable energy sources, which don’t contribute to global warming. “The price of renewable electricity from solar and wind is now equal to the grid average price in many countries around the world and that list is growing because there is a cost down curve…The more we use, the more scaling of production, the cheaper it gets. The more oil and coal we use the more expensive it gets. Within less than seven years 86% of the people in the world will live in areas where the price of renewable electricity y is cheaper than the price from other sources.”
Link:
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/al-gore-put-price-carbon-131955992.html
RELATED:
Hurricane Season 2013: Year Without a Major Hurricane?
By Chris Dolce
So far this hurricane season, the Atlantic basin has produced ten named storms, two of which have become hurricanes.
Based on long-term averages from 1966-2009, the Atlantic has typically seen nine named storms by Oct. 4 and five hurricanes by Oct. 7. As you can see, the 2013 season is fairly close to average when it comes to the number of named storms, but lagging behind in the hurricane category.
Neither of this season's two hurricanes, Humberto and Ingrid, reached major hurricane status, a Category 3 or higher rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.
Since 1851, roughly 75 percent of all the major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher) have formed during the months of August and September. Given that we've almost made it through September, and are headed for the final two months of the hurricane season, this raises the question of how rare it would be to go an entire season without a major hurricane in the Atlantic.
Last Time Was Nearly Two Decades Ago
Since the satellite era began in 1960, only four years have had no major hurricanes. That's an average of about once every 13 years that we see an Atlantic hurricane season with no majors.
You have to go back almost 20 years to 1994 to find the last time we did not have a major hurricane in the Atlantic, Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico. That hurricane season had only seven named storms and three hurricanes, which is much lower than the long-term seasonal average of 11 named storms and six hurricanes. This was also the last year before the current so-called active era for tropical storms and hurricanes began in 1995.
The other seasons since 1960 with no major hurricanes were 1986, 1972 and 1968.
Read more:
http://www.weather.com/news/weather-hurricanes/hurricane-season-2013-major-hurricanes-20130926
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