![]() And those events are occurring more often. “Hurricane Harvey (2017) ranks second, Hurricane Maria (2017) ranks third, Hurricane Sandy (2012) ranks fourth, and Hurricane Irma (2017) ranks fifth.”Īs the decade ended, the deadly Hurricane Dorian - a storm so powerful some called for the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to be extended to describe it as a “Category 6” storm - stalled over Great Abaco and Grand Bahama island with horrific consequences.īetween 19, climate and weather disasters wreaked billion-dollar damages 258 times in the United States, causing over $1.75 trillion in damages, NOAA reported this month. ![]() ![]() “For all United States hurricanes, Katrina (2005) is the costliest storm on record,” a 2018 National Hurricane Center analysis found, using inflation-adjusted figures. The decade also saw some of the most catastrophic storms to ever strike along the Atlantic Coast, including four of the five most damaging hurricanes in U.S. In Phoenix, Arizona, June temperatures climbed so high that commercial airplanes were grounded amid concern that their wings could not generate the lift that makes manned flight possible. The 2010s brought evidence that even familiar principles of physics can operate in unfamiliar ways in a climate-changed world. New #Methane craters in #Siberia caused large explosion and pillar of fire: #climate #climatechange #Arctic #cdnpoli /0soX509VA6 Amid the Arctic thaw, building foundations sank while trees and cemetery gravestones began to tilt and lean as the world’s permafrost began shedding its permanence. Researchers soon linked the craters to both a thawing Arctic and the release of methane and carbon previously locked in the frozen landscape. It was the decade when scientists discovered huge mysterious craters opening in fields of Russian and Alaskan permafrost. While so-called “fire whirls,” or narrow vortices, aren’t all that uncommon during wildfires, 2018’s unprecedented “firenado” was 1,000 feet wide and tossed vehicles aloft, sent a steel shipping container flying a half-mile, and killed a Redding, California, firefighter. experienced its first recorded full-blown EF-3 tornado made of - and by - wildfire during 2018’s Carr fire in California. In 2017, the world on average reached one full degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of human-induced warming above pre-industrial levels, NASA reports.Īnd the 2010s saw previously unfamiliar weather-related terms like “ thundersnow,” “ polar vortex,” and “ bombogenesis” popularized, as well as a host of climate-linked firsts and rarities. “We know that this has been driven by human activities.” Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told The New York Times. “These trends are the footprints of human activity stomping on the atmosphere,” Gavin A. The past decade was the warmest on record, according to two analyses by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) that were released on January 15. Moody’s observed that oil and gas debt defaults represented 91 percent of the country’s total corporate debt defaults during the next-to-last fiscal quarter of the decade.Īs the new decade starts, it’s worth taking stock of the last decade’s rush to drill and frack for oil and gas and to consider what we now know about how the costs of climate change have begun piling up at increasing rates over the past 10 or so years. The year 2020 arrived amid tens of billions of dollars in new fiscal write-downs and losses for oil drillers and fracking firms. smashed global records for the production of oil and gas - two of the three fossil fuels most responsible for the ongoing climate crisis.Īnd at the same time, the last decade’s rush to drill continued to prove spectacularly unprofitable. Over the past decade, as the climate crisis worsened, hundreds of drilling rigs dotted both the Permian Basin’s desert expanses in Texas and the Marcellus Shale’s Appalachian hills, grinding through rock to reach oil and gas trapped in brittle shale deep underground. Global carbon emissions had leveled off in the middle of the last decade, but began to climb again in 2017, breaking records anew each year since. Today’s climate impacts have been shaped heavily by actions taken during the last 10 years, particularly in the U.S., where the climate benefits of coal power plant retirements were undermined by the rise of natural gas. A University of Sydney professor estimated the number of animals killed likely tops one billion. So far, 29 people have been reported dead. The new year started amid devastating wildfires, tied to the worst droughts Australia has experienced in hundreds of years, which encircled much of the continent. As 2020 begins, the impacts of climate change have become increasingly clear around the world.
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