More American Climate Refugees

This past July was the hottest month on record, by a lot. And it wasn't a fluke: it was the 15th straight month of record breaking temperatures.

This has produced crazy floods in Louisiana:

In just one day over the weekend, more than 31 inches of rain fell in some parts of Louisiana. The ground became saturated, and some rivers rose six feet higher than ever recorded. Rescuers evacuated more than 30,000 people, and about one-third of those have been forced to stay in emergency shelters. On Tuesday, the governor also added eight parishes to the list of federal disaster areas, raising the total to 12.

Two months ago West Virginia was hit by a "1,000-year rain," killing 23 people. Last week parts of Minnesota had eight inches of rain -- two months worth -- in just a few hours.
We're having 100-, 500- and 1,000-year rains a couple of times a year, all over the country.

Why? Higher temperatures produce heavier rains because warmer air can hold more water vapor.

Climate change has wrought a different disaster in California: drought, which has brought a slew of wildfires.

A small brush fire that started Tuesday morning near San Bernardino, California, has rapidly spread to 18,000 acres and forced more than 80,000 people from their homes.

California’s drought, now in its fifth year, has left the landscape and its vegetation parched; that, along with hot temperatures and dry winds, has given the Blue Cut fire such explosive growth that Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in San Bernardino County. The fire was first reported at about 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, and within two hours it’d scorched 1,500 acres. By Wednesday morning, the fire was expanding in every direction. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department went door-to-door asking people to leave their homes, and the fire now threatens to burn several communities in the rural hills in Southern California.

The problem with all that water in the air is that it doesn't come down evenly: geography dictates precipitation patterns, and California and the American West get stiffed on rain because of their mountain ranges and other factors.

Sea level rise is hammering the Alaskan coast, and forcing an island village in Alaska to move:

Residents of Shishmaref, Alaska, voted Wednesday to relocate its ancestral island home to safer ground, escaping eroding shores and rising seas brought on by climate change.

Melting sea ice has strengthened the storms that beat along the island's shores, causing chunks to drop off into the ocean, even as the permafrost on which the community is built is rapidly disappearing.

A band of Louisiana Indians were the first American climate refugees, forced out of their homes in February.

All of these disasters were forecast by climate scientists decades ago. Yet their computer models have historically underestimated the pace of climate change.

It's been 10 years since Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth came out, and most of its warnings have proven true. The prediction that hurricanes in the Atlantic would become more severe hasn't panned out, but it wasn't totally wrong: warmer water in the Pacific has produced a large number of record-breaking tropical cyclones and typhoons in the western Pacific.

Ultimately these problems boil down to simple physics: the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets. The hotter it gets, the more water vapor the air holds, and the more energy in the atmosphere. More water and more energy bring heavier rains and more severe storms, which means more flooding in areas prone to heavy rainfall and drought in other areas.