Climate Change News That Stuck With Us in 2016
By The New York Times
As the year ends, The New York Times asked reporters who have focused on climate change, global warming and the environment to choose the news they reported on that was the most memorable. These are their selections, ranging from sea level rise to the phenomenon of “rolling coal” to local actions to confront a warming planet.
Two other groups of reporters have also selected the articles they find most memorable: Visit this link for a roundup of science news, and this link for the year in medical and health news.
From One Hottest Year Into the Next
Clockwise from top left: flooding in Alexandria, Va., in June; a house raised on temporary supports in Norfolk, Va.; flooding in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in May; drought conditions at Lake Purdy in Alabama in October.CREDIT CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: GABRIELLA DEMCZUK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; ELIOT DUDIK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; ERANGA JAYAWARDENA, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS; BRYNN ANDERSON, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
The year in climate news began with a theme that is growing familiar: word that 2015 had been the warmest year on record, just beating out 2014.
The immediate cause in both cases was a powerful climate pattern, known as El Niño, in which the tropical Pacific Ocean poured an enormous amount of heat into the global atmosphere, disrupting weather patterns on every continent. But scientists said the back-to-back heat records would not have occurred without an underlying trend of global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
That physical reality does not seem to be making much of an impression in the United States Congress, where a large number of lawmakers continue to claim that the warming trend is somehow not real, or is even the product of a global scientific hoax. But in the real world, the effects are starting to be felt as never before. As land ice melts the world over and heat absorption causes ocean water to expand, the sea level is rising. Coastal communities from Norfolk, Va., to Miami are being forced to reckon with the consequences.
A small detail: Tidal flooding is becoming so common that towns are posting “No Wake” signs on the streets, where vehicles driving a little too fast through a foot or two of seawater can send damaging waves crashing against nearby property.
The extreme burst of global temperature records waned late in the year as the cooler La Niña weather pattern replaced El Niño in the tropical Pacific. But even so, the World Meteorological Organization predicted in November that 2016 would most likely beat 2015 to become the record-warmest year, the first time such a global temperature record will have been set three years in a row. — Justin Gillis
Countering Denial by Being Nice
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. CREDIT LEXEY SWALL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
How do you talk about climate change during a presidential administration that denies it’s happening?
President-elect Donald J. Trump has called climate change a hoax, and he has declared he will try to reverse the Obama administration’s environmental efforts on matters ranging from the 2015 Paris climate agreement to the landmark Clean Power Plan, intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But while administrations change, one thing appears to be stable: Most Americans already know that climate change is real and that human activity since the Industrial Age is the major cause. Polls by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that more than half of those surveyed said that global warming is real, and only one in five disagree. But these same surveys show that Americans tend to rank the issue rather low in their priorities of urgent need for action.
The question for those trying to fight climate change, then, is how best to build on the degree of agreement that already exists and to encourage action by governments, businesses and individuals. For a very long time, these issues have been hashed out in fiery arguments between those who deny the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate science and those who try to explain the science and the reasons for strong measures. I dealt with that important question in an article about Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who uses a gentle approach to reach the large number of Americans who are in the potentially persuadable middle. There is room for every kind of discourse, from raucous to gentle, when it comes to telling Americans about warming. But I came away from that piece with a thought that initially seemed banal, but ended up feeling profound: niceness works. — John Schwartz
Local Responses to a Changing Global Climate
A house with solar panels in Ashton Hayes, England. CREDIT ELIZABETH DALZIEL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Most people who think that climate change is really happening also acknowledge that humans have caused it. But getting people to actually do something about it may be the next phase in the battle to prevent catastrophic warming.
Over the course of the last year, I’ve spoken with people in different communities around the world who are trying to do what they can to make a difference, even if they can’t see the effects.
In a small village in the English countryside, residents have been working for 10 years to make their community carbon neutral — they’ve insulated their homes, hung laundry out to dry and installed solar panels. Part of their success has been in their approach: This should be fun, and it should involve all of us, because all of us stand to benefit from staving off the worst effects of climate change.
They have tried to connect the global problem of climate change to normal life, because it’s not always about the melting polar ice caps or apocalyptic drought. Yes, climate change is about those things, but it is also about the ways that life in the 21st century makes most people, especially those in the developed world, part of the problem.
How are your own habits connected to larger environmental problems? How much power are you still using even when you’ve switched off your devices? How many plastic bottles of water do you drink every week, and how does that affect the environment and other people around you?
In the wake of the Paris agreement, most countries are involved in the fight against climate change. And while governments and power companies may make the most difference, what the rest of us — all seven billion of us — are doing matters, too. — Tatiana Schlossberg