From the President’s Desk

Data: WRI via Axios

QWhat will be the impacts from climate change?

AFrom the human perspective, an increase of even a few degrees in global temperatures can have a significant impact. With each additional increase of 1° centigrade, the atmosphere’s capacity to hold water vapor increases by 7%. This will lead to more significant storm and flooding events. Globally, floods and extreme rainfall events now occur four times more often than in 1980.

live trees remove co2 FROM THE AIR AND their burning releases co2 INTO THE AIR

That extra heat also allows more water evaporation from the oceans and pulls moisture even more quickly from the soil, causing longer and deeper droughts. Each 1° centigrade of warming also increases lightning strikes by 1012% increasing the probability of wildfires on parched forests. As the temperature rises, so does freshwater use for people, crops, energy, industry and animals. Water scarcity already affects more than 40% of the world’s population. Glacier-fed streams originating in the Himalayan Mountains provide water to approximately one-quarter of the world’s populations. The rate of ice melt in the Himalayas has doubled since the year 2000, which leads to flooding in the short term and the risk of water shortages in the future as the glaciers decrease. Greenland, which is 3 times the size of Texas, is covered with an ice sheet 1-2 miles thick. If all that ice were to melt and flow into the ocean, sea levels around the world would rise by 24 feet. Currently, Greenland’s ice is melting 4 times faster than climate scientists originally thought, and the ice has decreased by 4,000 gigatons in the last 16 years.