1. Making Sense of Climate Change, Part 2:
Warming, sea level rise and extreme weather
Bert G Drake
Senior Scientist, Emeritus
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
Photo courtesy of the Chesapeake Bay Program

4. Washington Post, August 10, 2016
2016 hottest year on record!!
Temperature in Baghdad at the international airport hit 109 or higher nearly every day since June 19.
Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, all-time high of nearly 126 degrees. Basra 129!
Heat index 140 across Uniteed Arab Emirates.
Washington Post, August 10, 2016
Persian Gulf may be too hot for human survival by 2090.
Washington Post, October 2015

5. Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe
Image: NASA

6. Arctic sea ice surrounded by land
Antarctic sea ice surrounded by water
Photo: Andreas Weith, Creative Commons

7. Albedo: relative “whiteness”
Photo: Sam Carana/Arctic-News.Blogspot.com

9. Declining snow cover Credit: Robert Simmon, NASA Earth Observatory

10. Rhone Glacier (Gletch Valley, Switzerland)
shrunk dramatically since 1850
Photograph courtesy of bigfoto.com, inset courtesy Library of Congress

11. Boulder Glacier, Montana, Glacier National Park.
Why glaciers matter
Drinking water for hundreds of millions of people
Irrigation for crops and water for animals during drought
Electric power from dams on glacier rivers

12. Scientific and Technical Working Group Maryland Climate Change Commission

13. River deltas where rising sea level threatens communities
Profiling risk and sustainability in coastal deltas of the world
Tessler et al. Science 7 August 2015

14. http://www. climatecentral
Kopp et al (PNAS)

15. Spanger-Siegfried, E. , M. F. Fitzpatrick, and K. Dahl. 2014
Spanger-Siegfried, E., M.F. Fitzpatrick, and K. Dahl Encroaching tides: How sea level rise and tidal flooding threaten U.S. East and Gulf Coast communities over the next 30 years. Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists.

18. Largest hurricane in the Atlantic…over 1,000 miles wide
Superstorm Sandy, October 2012
Largest hurricane in the
Atlantic…over 1,000
miles wide
Caused $75 billion in
damage
Killed 233 people
Credit: NASA

19. Adaptive …”measures fall into three categories: defending against the sea, accommodating rising water, and retreating from the immediate shoreline”
Spanger-Siegfried, E., M.F. Fitzpatrick, and K. Dahl Encroaching tides: How sea level rise and tidal flooding threaten U.S. East and Gulf Coast communities over the next 30 years. Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists.