Climate Change Working Group

Image: Smoke rises from a chimney of a garbage processing plant on the outskirts of Chandigarh December 3, 2011. Reuters/Ajay Verma/Files

in.reuters.com - October 2nd, 2015 - Tommy Wilkes

India has promised to shave a third off the rate at which it emits greenhouse gases over the next 15 years, in a long-awaited contribution towards reaching a deal to slow global warming at a U.N. climate summit in December.

The world's third-largest emitter and last major economy to submit plans ahead of the Paris summit did not, however, commit to any absolute cuts in carbon emissions.

Of the top two polluters, China has promised its emissions will peak by around 2030, and the United States is already cutting, but India says its economy is too small and its people too poor to agree to absolute cuts in greenhouse gases now.

Image: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was opened on Feb. 26, 2008. Carved into the Arctic permafrost and filled with samples of the world's most important seeds, it's a Noah's Ark of food crops to be used in the event of a global catastrophe. AFP/Getty Images

npr.org - September 23rd, 2015

A tall rectangular building juts out of a mountainside on a Norwegian island just 800 miles from the North Pole. Narrow and sharply edged, the facility cuts an intimidating figure against the barren Arctic background. But the gray building holds the key to the earth's biodiversity.

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This chart shows how Antarctic ice would be affected by different emissions scenarios. “GTC” stands for gigatons of carbon. Ken Caldeira and Ricarda Winkelmann

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Combustion of available fossil fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic Ice Sheet

newsweek.com - by Zoë Schlanger - September 11, 2015

“Combustion of available fossil fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

Few peer-reviewed study titles sound quite so much like a line spoken by the bad-news-bearing scientist from a dystopian sci-fi movie. But there it is. A real-world—and apparently very possible—dystopia.

About 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded when Hurricane Katrina's storm surge overwhelmed the city's levees.
Credit: Kelly Garbato/flickr

climatecentral.org - by Andrea Thompson - September 1, 2015

Black swans are catastrophic events that no one sees coming, while “grey swans,” as the are known, are extreme events for which there’s no historical precedent, but that could still potentially be predicted. A new study takes this concept into the realm of weather and climate, finding that global warming might sharply increase the odds of grey swan hurricanes and storm surge over the coming century.

While such tempests would still remain relatively rare, they could pose unrecognized but potentially serious threats to coastal areas like Tampa, Fla., and Dubai, with storm surge totals reaching into the double digits when measured in feet.

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CLICK HERE - STUDY - Grey swan tropical cyclones