2022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #42

A chronological listing of news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Oct 16, 2022  thru Sat, Oct 22, 2022. 

Mother Nature Always Bats Last!

‘Nature is striking back’: flooding around the world, from Australia to Venezuela

It has been a drenched 2022 for many parts of the world, at times catastrophically so. A year of disastrous flooding perhaps reached its nadir in Pakistan, where a third of the country was inundated by heavy rainfall from June, killing more than 1,000 people in what António Guterres, the UN secretary general, called an unprecedented natural disaster.

While floods are indeed natural phenomena, a longstanding result of storms, the human-induced climate crisis is amplifying their damage. Rising sea levels, driven by melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of water, are increasingly inundating coastal areas, while warmer temperatures are causing more moisture to accumulate in the atmosphere, which is then released as rain or snow.

Scientists have said flash floods are becoming a problem in some countries, with short, severe bursts of rain causing anything from annoyance to mayhem. Some places are whiplashing between severe drought and these sudden downpours, heightening the risk of mudslides and other knock-on effects.

As the world heats further, the sort of floods seen this year from Australia to Nigeria will probably become more common. “We have waged war on nature, and nature is striking back, and striking back in a devastating way,” Guterres lamented after visiting Pakistan in September.

‘Nature is striking back’: flooding around the world, from Australia to Venezuela by Oliver Milman, Ope Adetayo, Donna Lu, Fiona Kelliher & Luke Taylor, Environment, The Guardian, Oct 20, 2022


Links posted on Facebook

Sun, Oct 16, 2022

Mon, Oct 17, 2022

Tue, Oct 18, 2022

Wed, Oct 19, 2022

Thu, Oct 20, 2022

Fri, Oct 21, 2022

Sat, Oct 22, 2022

Posted by John Hartz on Saturday, 22 October, 2022


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