Climate Central

Nestled on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, Buffalo is considered one of the cloudiest, dreariest cities in the U.S. — not exactly the first place many people consider prime real estate for solar power development. But Buffalonians have good reason to be excited about rooftop solar, and not just because a solar panel factory is creating jobs.

Buffalo and some other cloudy northeastern cities have the potential to satisfy more than half of their electricity needs if their roofs were fully covered in solar panels —  as much as 68 percent of electric power demand in Buffalo’s case, according to National Renewable Energy Laboratory research published in March.

NREL researchers found that rooftop solar alone could supply 39 percent of the nation’s electricity needs and 83 percent of all small buildings in the U.S. are well suited for solar panel installation.

From Hawaii’s flurry of hurricanes, to record high sea ice in Antarctica, and a heat wave that cooked the Australian Open like shrimp on a barbie, 2014 saw some wild weather. How much of that was tied to climate change is what scientists around the world tried to answer in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s annual attribution report, which was published Thursday.

What they discovered was that the clearest impacts of warming could be found in heat-related events, from heat waves on land to unusually hot ocean waters. Other events, like droughts in East Africa and the Middle East, California’s intense wildfires, and winter storms that continually swept across the eastern U.S., were harder to pinpoint. In part this is because such events are inherently complex, with a multitude of factors influencing them.

For example, while the East African drought was found to be both more likely and more intense because of warming, the situation in the Middle East was less clear, with no discernable climate change connection to the various factors that influenced it. Likewise, no direct push from climate change could be found in California’s wildfire activity, though it is clear that it is increasing the overall wildfire risk there.

And while some events, like the U.S. winter storms and the record high Antarctic sea ice extent, could be pinned to a particular cause, that cause could not be linked to climate change. For other events, like the drought in Brazil and flooding in the Canadian prairies, humans influenced the likelihood in other ways besides the greenhouse gases that continue to be emitted into the atmosphere.

What was clear, though, is that the fast-growing field of what is called extreme event attribution is gaining momentum. Researchers are casting a wider net for extreme events to examine and continually refining their methods. Attribution work has traveled a considerable distance since its inception just over a decade ago.

Obama: Climate Change Urgent and Growing Threat

President Barack Obama warned Monday that climate change is no longer a problem of the future, but rather a challenge for now and one that will define the next century.

Describing the “urgent and growing” threat that was not being addressed quick enough, Obama sketched the problems already facing people living in one of America’s last wilderness frontiers.

The challenge “will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other,” he told a conference in Anchorage, before a scheduled visit to a glacier.

It’s getting incredibly hot — incredibly quickly

Temperatures in Alaska aren’t just getting warmer. Instead, they’re rising at about twice the rate of the rest of the planet. Over the past 60 years, the average air temperature, state-wide, has increased 3 degrees Fahrenheit, and winters are 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they used to be. True, some of the earlier gains in temperature could be attributed to a natural shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). But when the PDO shifted back to a cool phase, it wasn’t enough to correct for the underlying pattern of unnatural warming.

The permafrost is melting, and the tundra is slowly sinking

About 80 percent of Alaska sits atop permafrost, and when it thaws, everything else sort of goes with it. Literally: buildings and infrastructure are collapsing as the ground disappears beneath them. “You can see and hear the ice melting,” researcher Ted Schuur recently told USA Today. Since the mid-1980s, the permafrost about three feet down on the Alaskan Arctic coast has already warmed by 6 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit, and more than 70 percent of permafrost land is at risk of sinking as it continues to melt.

Sea ice is disappearing before our eyes

“One of the most visible impacts we see as a result of climate change” is the dramatic melting, and thinning out, of Arctic sea ice. Septembers these days features about half as much sea ice as they did in 1979, and for the month of October, the amount of open water in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas hasdecreased by 14 and 16 percent, respectively. Wave goodbye…

Rising seas are lapping at the shores of some of the world’s first climate refugees

Some of the world’s largest glaciers are in Alaska, and Alaska is where we’re seeing some of the fastest loss of glacier ice: for each year between 1994 and 2013, they lost an incredible 75 gigatons of ice to the oceans. The small, northern town of Kivalina is expected to succumb to rising sea levels within this decade; Newtok, further south on Alaska’s west coast, may wash away even sooner.

The state is hot, dry and on fire

It was a hell of a year for wildfires, with 2015 turning out to be Alaska’s second-largest wildfire season on record. That’s par for the course: a combination of climate change and other human activity, like logging and development, has made it so that the total acreage of forest burned each year in the state has increased fivefold since 1943.