‘The weather outside is frightful’, according to the

Christmas song ‘Let it Snow’. Now the United Nations has confirmed

it is so, and we are responsible.

Washington, DC, November 18, 2011 - A

definitive UN science
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report released today confirms the link between climate

change


and extreme weather events, including punishing heat waves,

droughts, and torrential rains and resulting floods.

The report warns that the U.S. will suffer heat waves, droughts,

and more powerful hurricanes like Irene, with vulnerable people and

places likely to suffer most from extreme weather, including

low-lying island States facing sea level rise and stronger storm

surges, and drought-prone countries in Africa. 

New York released its own
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target=”_blank”>climate study this week, predicting that with

expected sea level rise and stronger storms, future hurricanes

could flood the tunnels into Manhattan within an hour and put

one-third of the city underwater, with climate induced impacts

beginning  within a decade.  The cost of US weather

disasters in 2011 is already  approaching $50 billion,

according to the National Climate Data Center. 

It is now certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases and

warming aerosols like black carbon are increasing the frequency and

intensity of extreme weather by putting more heat energy into

the


climate system. 

“These climate change impacts have become so clear and so close

now that we need fast, aggressive mitigation if we hope to

avoid


the worst consequences,” said Durwood Zaelke, President of the

Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development.

“Fast mitigation is the best adaptation,” Zaelke added.

“Fast  mitigation means cutting short-lived climate forcers,

including black carbon, ground-level ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons,

or HFCs, used in refrigeration.  Cutting these

non-CO₂ climate forcers can be done quickly and

inexpensively using existing technologies and in most cases

existing laws and institutions.” 

This can cut the rate of global warming in half for several

decades and the rate of warming in the Arctic by two-thirds,

according to a
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report by the UN Environment Program and the World

Meteorological Organization. 

Vulnerable island States, along with the U.S., Mexico, and

Canada, are calling on the Montreal Protocol ozone treaty to reduce

HFCs.  The parties will be discussing an HFC phase-down next

week at their annual meeting in Bali, Indonesia.

Zaelke stated, “States and cities need to start thinking how

they will pay for adaptation and for cleaning up after extreme

weather events, including following the precedent set by states in

their battle with tobacco companies, which included lawsuits to

recoup health


care costs the states were paying to care for victims of

tobacco


injuries.”  The lawsuits resulted in a historic $350 billion

national


tobacco settlement.

Addressing climate change also requires cutting emissions of

CO₂, the principal greenhouse gas, protecting and

expanding forests and other “carbon sinks” that remove and store

CO₂, and developing other CO₂ removal

strategies to draw down excess CO₂ from the atmosphere

on a time scale of decades, rather than the millennial time scale

of the natural CO₂ removal process.