Extreme Weather

WASHINGTON - Think of the Texas drought, floods in Thailand and Russia's devastating heat waves as coming attractions in a warming world. That's the warning from top climate scientists and disaster experts after meeting in Africa. The panel said the world needed to get ready for more dangerous and "unprecedented extreme weather" caused by global warming. These experts fear that without preparedness, crazy weather extremes may overwhelm some locations, making some places unlivable. The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report on global warming and extreme weather Friday after meeting in Kampala, Uganda.

I 'M DISAPPOINTED by the Daily News' lack of coverage on last week's historic opportunity to cap U.S. global-warming pollution. You remained silent while Sens. Specter and Santorum rejected this opportunity. The McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act would have required a reduction in global-warming pollution to 2000 levels by 2010, a long-overdue first step to stopping global warming. Scientists warn that doing nothing to reduce global-warming pollution will increase the frequency and severity of costly extreme weather events like drought, floods and hurricanes.

Concerned about the weather, the Philadelphia public schools are to close early Monday, at noon, the district said Sunday. The The district said that "the expected extreme weather coupled by the high humidity levels could create a situation in which heat illness is possible. " The National Weather Service, on Sunday afternoon, was forecasting a high of 89. At the noon dismissal time, routine transportation will occur for students. Staff will remain in the building until all students have left or have been picked up. The closing will include the early childhood education program.

On the Jersey Shore, there are generally two kinds of storms: the punishing ones that leave destruction in their wake, and the purifying ones that scour souls as well as beaches. Movies about extreme weather are slightly more varied. On Sunday, after refrigerators were stocked with water, pantries with staples, and flashlights with D batteries, the e-mails started coming in to my inbox: Which movies paired best with a hurricane? Well, exactly what kind of storm are we talking about?

WASHINGTON - With scant snowfall and barren ski slopes in parts of the Midwest and Northeast the last couple of years, some scientists have pointed to global warming as the culprit. Then, when a whopper of a blizzard smacked the Northeast with more than two feet of snow in some places earlier this month, some of the same people again blamed global warming. How can that be? It's been a joke among skeptics, pointing to what seems to be a brazen contradiction. But the answer lies in atmospheric physics.

Wildfires in the southwest, flooding in North Dakota, tornadoes all over the place. Is this a fluke? Or something we can expect more of, a consequence of climate change? On Tuesday, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change released a "white paper" that attempts to explain the connection between extreme weather and climate change. It was put out with a three-part series in Scientific American. "Is global warming causing more extreme weather?" the introduction to the Pew paper posits.

By George Jugovic Jr. This weekend I will be camping in the heart of the Pennsylvania Wilds, in the north-central part of the state, to attend an annual wild game feed. The Wilds provide more than two million acres of lush forests, mountain trails, and cold streams in which to be active. Peering out into the Kinzua Gorge from the Kinzua Bridge Skywalk brings a lot into focus in February: It raises questions about how much of what you look down on from 301 feet will remain for future generations.

RESCUE missions continued yesterday and power was restored to some of the millions who lost it during what was, according to several measures, an unprecedented storm. It was the kind of weather event, with its combination of rain, snow and wind, that isn't supposed to happen, according to scientists. October tropical-storm systems typically weaken as they move north over cold water and then bend out to sea. This storm was different, in part because the Atlantic Ocean is five degrees warmer than usual for this time of year, meaning that it got farther north than hurricanes usually do. While hurricanes per se aren't caused by global warming, the way Sandy blasted the Northeast and Midwest certainly could have been.

It's been some year. And it ain't over yet. Floodwaters deluged Philadelphia and the region over the weekend, swamping motorists at Fort Washington and sending the Schuylkill lapping over its banks at Philadelphia by more than half a foot. It was the latest in a yearlong stream of weather calamities. It got started with a record 30-inch snowfall in January, followed by devastating floods and one of the coolest, wettest summers in memory. Two deaths apiece were recorded in heavy flooding from slow-moving storms in the Yardley area of Bucks County in June and Abington, Montgomery County, in September.

By Vinod Thomas The dangerous surge of the Mississippi River is yet another reminder that the global incidence of floods is on the rise. What's more, the growing frequency and ferocity of such events suggest an ominous link with human-driven global warming. In the absence of timely action, uncommonly extreme weather will likely put all progress at risk. Flooding and windstorms in particular are linked with climate change, and the number of disastrous floods and storms reported globally has tripled over the past three decades.

WASHINGTON - With scant snowfall and barren ski slopes in parts of the Midwest and Northeast the last couple of years, some scientists have pointed to global warming as the culprit. Then, when a whopper of a blizzard smacked the Northeast with more than two feet of snow in some places earlier this month, some of the same people again blamed global warming. How can that be? It's been a joke among skeptics, pointing to what seems to be a brazen contradiction. But the answer lies in atmospheric physics.

By George Jugovic Jr. This weekend I will be camping in the heart of the Pennsylvania Wilds, in the north-central part of the state, to attend an annual wild game feed. The Wilds provide more than two million acres of lush forests, mountain trails, and cold streams in which to be active. Peering out into the Kinzua Gorge from the Kinzua Bridge Skywalk brings a lot into focus in February: It raises questions about how much of what you look down on from 301 feet will remain for future generations.

CAPE MAY - When the agenda was planned for the 2013 Delaware Estuary Science and Environmental Summit - a biannual gathering of scientists, academics, and government officials - Sandy hadn't devastated the New Jersey Shore. But the storm that struck Oct. 29 was at the forefront of conversations and some workshop discussions during the four-day conference, titled "Weathering Change - Shifting Environments, Shifting Policies, Shifting Needs. " "So much has happened within the environment since our last summit in 2011, coming in on the heels of what perhaps is the worst natural disaster in the mid-Atlantic in modern times," said Jennifer Adkins, executive director of the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, which has hosted the event every two years since 2005.

RESCUE missions continued yesterday and power was restored to some of the millions who lost it during what was, according to several measures, an unprecedented storm. It was the kind of weather event, with its combination of rain, snow and wind, that isn't supposed to happen, according to scientists. October tropical-storm systems typically weaken as they move north over cold water and then bend out to sea. This storm was different, in part because the Atlantic Ocean is five degrees warmer than usual for this time of year, meaning that it got farther north than hurricanes usually do. While hurricanes per se aren't caused by global warming, the way Sandy blasted the Northeast and Midwest certainly could have been.

On the Jersey Shore, there are generally two kinds of storms: the punishing ones that leave destruction in their wake, and the purifying ones that scour souls as well as beaches. Movies about extreme weather are slightly more varied. On Sunday, after refrigerators were stocked with water, pantries with staples, and flashlights with D batteries, the e-mails started coming in to my inbox: Which movies paired best with a hurricane? Well, exactly what kind of storm are we talking about?

2012 is on pace to be the warmest on record in more than 100 U.S. towns and cities, including Philadelphia, and for the continental United States as a whole, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Philadelphia has certainly seen some extremes in recent years. 2011 was Philadelphia's wettest year on record, with precipitation equalling 64.33 inches of water. The winter of 2009-10 had the most snow ever, 78.7 inches. For the first nine months of 2012, Philadelphia's average temperature was 62.2 degrees, 3.5 degrees above the average during the two decades from 1981 to 2010.

This summer, many small businesses that depend on high temperatures got more than they bargained for. Across the nation, July was the hottest month ever in the continental United States, according to the government's National Climatic Data Center. It was also the driest since 2001, according to Planalytics Inc., a Berwyn company that analyzes weather and retailing trends. Records for high temperatures and lack of rain were broken in many areas. August has been pretty warm and muggy in many parts of the country.

Before the financial crisis hit, Americans were pretty sure that the globe was warming, and that humans were causing it, and that it was kind of a big deal. As the economy slumped, Americans decided that climate change wasn't actually happening — and even if it was, it wasn't our fault. And now, after a flurry of wild weather — deadly tornados, floods, droughts, an uncommonly mild winter, and recent heat waves — we're back to believing that global warming is real. But we're still hesitant to take the blame.

Concerned about the weather, the Philadelphia public schools are to close early Monday, at noon, the district said Sunday. The The district said that "the expected extreme weather coupled by the high humidity levels could create a situation in which heat illness is possible. " The National Weather Service, on Sunday afternoon, was forecasting a high of 89. At the noon dismissal time, routine transportation will occur for students. Staff will remain in the building until all students have left or have been picked up. The closing will include the early childhood education program.

WASHINGTON - It's been so warm in the United States this year, especially in March, that national records weren't just broken, they were deep-fried. Temperatures in the lower 48 states were 8.6 degrees above normal for March and 6 degrees higher than average for the first three months of the year, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That far exceeds the old records. The magnitude of how unusual the year has been in the U.S. has alarmed some meteorologists who have warned about global warming.