1 Making Sense of Climate Change, Part 2: Warming, sea level rise and extreme weather Bert G Drake Senior Scientist, Emeritus Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Photo courtesy of the Chesapeake Bay Program

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4 Washington Post, August 10, 20162016 hottest year on record!! Temperature in Baghdad at the international airport hit 109 or higher nearly every day since June 19. Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, all-time high of nearly 126 degrees. Basra 129! Heat index 140 across Uniteed Arab Emirates. Washington Post, August 10, 2016 Persian Gulf may be too hot for human survival by 2090. Washington Post, October 2015

5 Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globeImage: NASA

6 Arctic sea ice surrounded by land Antarctic sea ice surrounded by water Photo: Andreas Weith, Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

7 Albedo: relative “whiteness”Photo: Sam Carana/Arctic-News.Blogspot.com

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9 Declining snow cover Credit: Robert Simmon, NASA Earth Observatory

10 Rhone Glacier (Gletch Valley, Switzerland) shrunk dramatically since 1850 Photograph courtesy of bigfoto.com, inset courtesy Library of Congress

11 Boulder Glacier, Montana, Glacier National Park.Why glaciers matter Drinking water for hundreds of millions of people Irrigation for crops and water for animals during drought Electric power from dams on glacier rivers

12 Scientific and Technical Working Group Maryland Climate Change Commission

13 River deltas where rising sea level threatens communitiesProfiling risk and sustainability in coastal deltas of the world Tessler et al. Science 7 August 2015

14 http://www. climatecentralKopp et al (PNAS)

15 Spanger-Siegfried, E. , M. F. Fitzpatrick, and K. Dahl. 2014Spanger-Siegfried, E., M.F. Fitzpatrick, and K. Dahl Encroaching tides: How sea level rise and tidal flooding threaten U.S. East and Gulf Coast communities over the next 30 years. Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists.

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18 Largest hurricane in the Atlantic…over 1,000 miles wide Superstorm Sandy, October 2012 Largest hurricane in the Atlantic…over 1,000 miles wide Caused $75 billion in damage Killed 233 people Credit: NASA

19 Adaptive …”measures fall into three categories: defending against the sea, accommodating rising water, and retreating from the immediate shoreline” Spanger-Siegfried, E., M.F. Fitzpatrick, and K. Dahl Encroaching tides: How sea level rise and tidal flooding threaten U.S. East and Gulf Coast communities over the next 30 years. Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists.