Climate Change Puts Trillions of Dollars of Assets at Risk: Study

Trillions of dollars of non-bank financial assets around the world are vulnerable to the effects of global warming, according to a study on Mondaythat says tougher action to curb greenhouse gas emissions makes sense for investors. Rising temperatures and the dislocation caused by related droughts, floods and heatwaves will slow global economic growth and damage the performance of stocks and bonds, …

Amelia Urry – The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought

The rewards of being right about climate change are bittersweet. James Hansen should know this better than most — he warned of this whole thing before Congress in 1988, when he was director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies. At the time, the world was experiencing its warmest five-month run since we started recording temperatures 130 years earlier. Hansen said, …

Orrin H Pilkey, Linda Pilkey-Jarvis and Keith C Pilkey – Developers don’t get it: climate change means we need to retreat from the coast

Sea-level rise may be the most predictable outcome of climate change. Expanding warmer waters and melting land ice both contribute to flooding – and scientists agree that we are locked into sea-level rise for centuries to come. The question is not if we will retreat from the coast, but when. Still, the rush to develop the coast occurs at a maddening pace. …

When sea levels rise, damage costs rise even faster

Damages from extreme events like floods are even more relevant than the mean sea level itself when it comes to the costs of climate impacts for coastal regions. However, while it is now rather well understood how sea-levels will rise in the future, only small progress has been made estimating how the implied damage for cities at the coasts will …

Study: Gulf Stream slower than ever before

The Gulf Stream is the weakest it’s been in the last 1,000 years. And as glacier melt in the Arctic continues to accelerate, the foot of the Atlantic’s most powerful ocean current keeps pressing harder and harder on the brake pedal. A team of researchers recently analyzed an exhaustive catalog of geologic samples — including ice cores, tree rings and …

What’s Going On In The North Atlantic?

The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record – while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study (Rahmstorf et al. 2015) attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is …