Human Activities Are Now Changing the Climate

The Third National Climate Assessment has been released.  Few informed people will find anything surprising in the report.  Among the key messages regarding health:

Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including impacts from increased extreme weather events, wildfire, decreased air quality, threats to mental health, and illnesses transmitted by food, water, and disease-carriers such as mosquitoes and ticks. Some of these health impacts are already underway in the United States.

There is also a focus on regional impacts such as for the Northwest:

Changes in the timing of streamflow reduce water supplies for competing demands. Sea level rise, erosion, inundation, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity post major threats. Increasing wildfire, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread tree die-off.

Update (May 7):  Brian Merchant makes the point that "[c]limate change is quite capable of overtaking us" with cascading effects felt throughout society.

The greater threat, as outlined in the report, is that more frequent and fiercer natural disasters will begin to break down the technologies and implements of modern society, posing dangers not just to a few unfortunate disaster victims, but everyone who has become accustomed to clean water and a steady flow of power.

Update (May 8):  The Carbon Tracker Initiative evaluates financial risk for oil production investments. One trillion dollars is at risk if warming is to be held below 2 degrees Celsius.  A breakeven price of $95 per barrel for nonconventional sources suggests that we're past peak for all the "easy" oil.

Update (May 9):  Jonathan Chait analyzes climate skeptics George Will and Charles Krauthammer.  By disputing the value of consensus

Krauthammer ... has taken a radically skeptical position not merely on climate science, but on all science. His argument implies that no scientific argument merits respect. Given the provisional and socially constructed peer pressure driving the consensus theory of aerodynamics, it is amazing that he is willing to travel in an airplane.

Update (May 13):  Dahr Jamail reiterates the growing impacts of climate change.

Update (August 20):  Elizabeth Douglass reports on the Carbon Tracker Initiative's evaluation of high-risk oil megaprojects.  And Dahr Jamail seems to provide regular climate updates.

Update (September 24):  A study has determined that most of the warming off the coast of the Pacific Northwest is due to natural climate patterns.