Wendy Cohen
August 8, 2008 |
12:22 pm EST
A study published yesterday by Science Express finds a statistical link between warming weathers and extreme tropical downpours. 20 years of data from NASA satellites images found a rise in the heaviest tropical rains and is about double what computer simulations estimated.
Such changes in extreme rainfall are quite important in my view, as flash flooding is produced by the extreme rain events, said Anthony J. Broccoli, the director of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers University. In the U.S., flooding is a greater cause of death than lightning or tornadoes, and presumably poses similar risks elsewhere.
And it is worse for developing countries. Poor drainage can shut down a city and cause outbreaks of waterborne disease. And the World Bank estimates that heavy rains can stunt economic grown by 7%. And if countries can’t handle extreme weather now, who’s to say what will happen as the earth gets warmer.
takepart with ClimateCrisis.net
Related:
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Tropical Warming Tied to Flooding Rains
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Tagged as:Center for Environmental Prediction • climate change • climate change effects • downpours • effects of global warming • environmental issues • extreme rainfall • extreme weather • global climate change • global warming • global warming effects • inconvenient truth • Inconvenient Truth of the Day • ITOTD • NASA • rain • Rutgers University • Stop Global Warming • tropical storm • tropical storms • warming weather
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15 posts in the last 24 hours
“Who’s to say what will happen as the Earth gets warmer?” Waaaaaal now, let me think? Dhhhhhh! We get more, much, much, more of the same! Time the U.S (and other countries including my own UK) citizens got their heads out of the sand because Mother Earth is hitting back! She can’t help it, we are the polluters, the ones who have started a disasterous chain of events, it’s not too late, we can make changes, we can, even now make a difference, each and every one of us, by making ourselves heard, by asking our Goverments what they are playing at by pretending that ‘Nope, there’s nothing wrong here!’ Also by needing less, less gas/petrol, less energy to run our homes, turn down,switch off! Don’t think that your ‘little effort’ ‘won’t make a difference’ if everyone thinks that your grand children will need houses on stilts! Boats not cars to get to work, thats if there is work available for them. Think about what you can do for the Future of Humankind on this suffering Planet Earth.
KerrisAn inconvenient truth that is escaping most of the learned scientists and the uneducated masses alike is the fact that the current climate we now enjoy is a short-lived anomaly in the normal weather cycle of this planet. We all learned that 63 million years ago, our planet was a warm, wet place dominated by large, unpleasant reptiles. for most of the intervening period, with a few rare exceptions (ice ages, maunder minimum, our present conditions), this has been our worlds norm. The fact that it is tending to return to its normal state should not be surprising to anyone, yet no one remembers the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods of warm, swampy conditions that comprise the bulk of the millions of years of our Earths existence. It will return to this state, and there is little or nothing that can be done about it except to prepare to adapt to the conditions that exist.
Michael