Atmospheric rivers are meteorological phenomenon that we humans only discovered in 1998 and which supply about 30-to-50 percent of California's annual precipitation. In the NOAA satellite image above, the atmospheric river is visible as a thin yellow arm, reaching out from the Pacific to touch California. Or, more evocatively, reaching out to slap California silly with a gushing downpour.

An atmospheric river is a narrow conveyor belt of vapor about a mile high that extends thousands of miles from out at sea and can carry as much water as 15 Mississippi Rivers. It strikes as a series of storms that arrive for days or weeks on end. Each storm can dump inches of rain or feet of snow.

The real scare, however, is that truly massive atmospheric rivers that cause catastrophic flooding seem to hit the state about once every 200 years, according to evidence recently pieced together (and described in the article noted above). The last megaflood was in 1861; rains arrived for 43 days, obliterating Sacramento and bankrupting the state.

As you might guess, climate change is also involved. Evidence suggests that warming global temperatures could increase the frequency of atmospheric rivers. That, combined with the 200-year event expected soon and the fact we're learning so much much more about these storms, means that you should expect to hear the phrase "atmospheric river" more often.

Scientific American has two interesting stories on the phenomenon right now. The first, which I quote from above, is a blog post by Mark Fischetti. The second is a much longer feature story that gets into the forces that cause these storms and the climate change connection. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/30/the-wild-rivers-above.html/feed 14 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/29/occupy-sandy-doc-screened-at-s.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/29/occupy-sandy-doc-screened-at-s.html#comments Thu, 29 Nov 2012 20:00:46 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=197146

A documentary about Occupy Sandy was screened at a secret location in NYC last night; it made the connection between Sandy and climate change. People wanting to see the movie were directed to a building whose wall was used as a screen for the premiere.

Now, in what may be the quickest turnaround for a movie in recent memory, the group, Occupy Sandy, will show a documentary Wednesday about its efforts and the contention that the storm was tied to climate change and the fossil fuel industry. In classic Occupy fashion, the screening will not be in a traditional theater, but rather on the side of a yet-to-be-disclosed building in the East Village.

The screening of the film, “Occupy Sandy: A Human Response to the New Realities of Climate Change” (see trailer above or click here), will be at 6:30 p.m.

‘Occupy’ Movement’s Next Guerrilla Effort: A Film Screening [NYT]

OCCUPY SANDY TRAILER IS UP! WORLD PREMIERE NEW SHORT FILM! NYC. NOV. 28th. [Vimeo]

#climatecrime [Twitter] ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/29/occupy-sandy-doc-screened-at-s.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/19/the-climate-change-generation.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/19/the-climate-change-generation.html#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:33:17 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=195110 If you are younger than 28, then you have never experienced a colder-than-average month. In your entire life. (Via Chris Tackett)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/19/the-climate-change-generation.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/03/deconstructing-sandy.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/03/deconstructing-sandy.html#comments Sat, 03 Nov 2012 21:37:52 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=191842 The Daily Circuit. Host Tom Webber and I spent a good 45 minutes talking about Hurricane Sandy, climate change, and why it's so hard to talk about the connections between the two in an easily digestible, sound-bite format. In the meantime, he might have gotten some good sound bites out of me. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/03/deconstructing-sandy.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/30/chat-about-climate-science-and.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/30/chat-about-climate-science-and.html#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:56:03 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=190894 I told you that the relationship between Hurricane Sandy and climate change can be summed up with "It's Complicated". If you want a referendum on climate change, the data is in and we know it's happening. But if you're curious about this specific storm, what scientists know about hurricane systems, and how weather and climate interact, Scientific American has a live chat starting at 1:00 pm Eastern with Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. Check it out!]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/30/chat-about-climate-science-and.html/feed 2 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/29/did-climate-change-cause-hurri.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/29/did-climate-change-cause-hurri.html#comments Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:12:11 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=190510 Image: Oct. 28, NASA/NOAA polar orbiting satellite. Detail above, full below.

Last year, I wrote a piece for BoingBoing about destructive storm systems and why it's so difficult to say, in concise sound-bite form, what relationship that destruction has to climate change. In that case, we were talking about tornadoes. But over the last couple of days, lots of people have been having roughly the same conversations about Hurricane Sandy. When the clouds have passed and everybody is done sleeping in airports, people are going to want answers. Was this an unavoidable act of nature? Or was this something caused directly by changes to Earth's climate that have happened because we burn fossil fuels which increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Again, there's not an easy answer. And, again, part of the problem here is that we're expecting science to operate on the scale of American media news cycles, which doesn't really work. We want to talk about this while the storm is raging or, barring that, at least immediately afterwards. But scientists aren't really going to have anything particularly deep to say about this specific storm for months, if not years. During that time, data will be analyzed and compared, and other events will happen, and that's really the stuff that we need in order to say much of anything other than, "We don't know for certain." In some ways, expecting anything else means forcing scientists to speculate and extrapolate in ways they aren't usually comfortable with and that aren't a terribly great way to understand the big picture.

But there's also something new, that I kind of didn't really think about when I was writing that post on the tornadoes. The answer to these questions also really depends on the motivations behind why you asked, and what it is that you really want to know.

First off, you should know that this kind of extreme (and extremely weird) storm system happening in fall or winter is a trend that some scientists had already been predicting. Those predictions stem from the steep reduction in quantities of sea ice in the North Atlantic and what we know (and think we know) about how that change affects climate patterns and storm formation as a whole.

Remember the times that we've talked about how climate change can, seemingly paradoxically, lead to heavier snowfall in winter? This is connected to that. Here's how Kate Spinner with The Herald Tribune explained it:

A big bubble of high pressure, with sinking air that moves clockwise, is interrupting the typical steering patterns in the atmosphere. That high pressure creates a blockage, backing up the jet stream so that it bends south, eventually looping north again, instead of flowing toward the east as usual.

The blocking pattern, centered just south of Greenland, will significantly slow the eastward-moving cold front once it reaches the coast. And it will steer Sandy into the U.S. rather than allowing it to turn east.

Blocking events are the force behind a lot of crazy weather anomalies, not just hurricanes. And there's evidence suggesting that, as the ice in the Arctic melts, the frequency and/or intensity of the blocking events may be increasing. The Climate Crocks blog did a nice interview about this a few months ago with Jennifer Francis, who studies marine and coastal sciences at Rutgers.

There's more on this from Francis, and other scientists, at Andy Revkin's DotEarth blog.

Another thing worth taking into account: Weather is a lot more complicated than you think it is. If it rains today — or if it doesn't rain — there are lots of different, interacting factors that influenced that outcome. A good way to think about it is like a plane crash. It is very, very rare for a plane crash to be caused by a single mistake. Instead, when you're reading the final report, you find that lots of things have to go wrong all at the same time. Even then, you still might not get an accident if the mix of mistakes that happen don't interact with each other in such a way as to make them all worse than the sum of their parts.

Plane crashes are complicated. And so is weather. That matters, because it means that Hurricane Sandy could be both a completely natural occurrence and a product of climate change. Simultaneously. Some of the factors that caused this storm might be nature-made. Others might be man-made. And teasing apart which factors were responsible for which aspect of the storm's damage is incredibly hard.

Greg Laden, an anthropologist who does some very good blogging on climate science, had a lot to say on this topic — particularly, the fact that even though we can't say "Hurricane Sandy was caused solely by climate change", we can say that climate change is probably affecting several factors that probably influence the development, growth, and movement of hurricanes.

It is often said that storms are going to happen anyway, but global warming ramps up the probability, which is akin to saying that there is always going to be variation in temperature or some other weather related factor but global warming raises the baseline. That’s true. But the corollary to that is NOT that you can’t link climate change to a given storm. All storms are weather, all weather is the immediate manifestation of climate, climate change is about climate. Before we started talking about global warming, storms were caused by … things. Climate things. Did we ever say, back in the 1950s when a hurricane hit Florida, “Oh, ya, that was some hurricane, but the thing is, you can’t really attribute a given hurricane to the Intertropical Convergence Zone’s relationship to warm Mid Atlantic currents. The former is a weather event and the latter is a climate system.” Why did we not ever say that? Because it would have been irrelevant, even dumb.

The truth is, we experience more Atlantic severe storms because of global warming, though we are still working out the details of which features of which kinds of storms are affected most. Beyond this, it may well also be possible that something I hinted at above is true: We may be experiencing kinds of storms today that were very rare in recent centuries, because of global warming.

Adam Frank at NPR also wrote a good post on this subject. In it, he explains another issue that muddies the waters. When we say that weather is complicated and that a storm is caused by the interaction of lots of different factors, what we are really saying is that weather is a system. Just like climate is a system. Currently, there are some systems that science understands better than others. Hurricanes are, unfortunately, pretty far down on the list.

There is a hierarchy of weather events which scientists feel they understand well enough for establishing climate change links. Global temperature rises and extreme heat rank high on that list, but Hurricanes rank low. As the IPCC special report on extreme events put it "There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities."

The reasons for "low confidence" are manifold. Some part of the caution comes from the complexity of the problem, and some part comes from the lack of good data before the satellite era (about 1970). Thus, many climate scientists will not want to go out on a limb for hurricanes. They just don't have the tools to make strong inferences.

This is not to say progress isn't being made. One thing that does seem clear is that warmer oceans (a la global warming) mean more evaporation, and that likely leads to storms with more and more dangerous rainfall of the kind we saw with Hurricane Irene last year. In addition, a paper published just last month, used records of storm surges going back to 1923 as a measure of hurricane activity. A strong correlation between warm years and strong hurricanes was seen. Thus if you warm the planet, you can expect more dangerous storms.

Basically, we know that the effects of climate change probably has an impact on factors that cause massively destructive storms — even if we don't know exactly how much of an impact; even if we can't really use that information to exactly predict what's going to happen with massive storms in the future; and even if we can't tell you whether Sandy, specifically, was caused by climate change.

So, really, the answer to the question, "What is the relationship between Hurricane Sandy and climate change", depends primarily on why you're asking the question.

If you're just kind of curious and/or looking for something to blame, we don't have great answers on that yet. I'm sorry. Nobody is really going to be able to tell you one way or the other.

But if you're using that question as a proxy to really ask, "Is climate change real and do I have to care about it?", well, good news! We have enough information to answer your question. And the answer is, emphatically, yes.

Read More:
Besides the links I included in the story, I want to point you towards a couple more Hurricane Sandy-related things:
• NOAA's Storm Central has all the maps, satellite images, and projections of Sandy that a concerned citizen (or giant nerd) could want
• The director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness would like you to know that we are seriously, seriously NOT prepared for big disasters
• Atlantic City is totally flooded
• Marketplace Tech Report has a really fascinating piece on the future of weather forecasting
• If you're in Sandy's path and aren't really clear what to do with your pets, read this
• The NASA Satellite video will haunt your nightmares
• Meanwhile, the news that the satellites we rely on for forecasts of hurricanes are aging rapidly (and there aren't great plans to replace them) will create your nightmares
• Use this handy slider to compare Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/29/did-climate-change-cause-hurri.html/feed 36 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/26/scientific-american-goes-insid.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/26/scientific-american-goes-insid.html#comments Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:24:19 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=190268 Recently, news broke that a scientist had unilaterally launched a geo-engineering experiment — dumping iron sulfate and iron oxide into the Pacific Ocean. There were two goals to the project: First, grow a massive plankton bloom which would store atmospheric carbon the same way that trees take in and store atmospheric carbon; second, use that plankton as a food source to restore salmon populations in the northern Pacific. If it sounds like those two goals are kind of fundamentally contradictory — if the salmon eat the plankton, then the stored carbon is going to end up back in the atmosphere, not indefinitely stored — well, you're right.

But the project showed that it's relatively easy for a small group of people to experiment on Earth's ecosystem without any oversight or approval from the global community at large. That's why the story made headlines. And it's why Scientific American's David Biello did a two-part feature on the experiment, writing about the background and interviewing Russ George, the scientist who launched the project.

George's ideas do have a basis in science. In essence, he's trying to replicate the effects of a volcanic eruption, which are associated with plankton blooms. George believes that the blooms are caused by large depositions of the nutrient iron. And, although other scientists think his goal of feeding salmon would defeat his goal of storing carbon, George thinks their findings are wrong. And he thinks this study will prove it. As a bonus, he's also hoping that the effect on salmon will reinvigorate the economy of a nearby Haida fishing village.

As for the legality of the project, here's what George told Scientific American:

This is Canada so it's British law, not American law. In British law, if you want to do something and you're not sure whether it's legal or not, you commission officers of the court to do an analysis and produce an official document, a legal opinion as to whether it breaks the law or not. This was done. The opinion was that with comparative studies and international laws we were absolutely in the clear. The claim that this is illegal is the design of the people who want to burn the books. This is the life of the village that they're trying to kill.

Read David Biello's interview with Russ George

Read David Biello's story about the geo-engineering experiment

If you haven't seen the Skeptical Science website yet, you're missing out.

Barring a seriously crazy shift that plunges us quickly into an especially cold winter, 2012 will likely go down as the hottest year on record in the United States. More importantly, this broken record is part of a larger pattern that affects the whole world—record-breaking high temperatures are becoming, themselves, a bit of a broken record. On a global scale, counting average land and water temperatures, 2012 is (so far) the 11th warmest year on record—almost a full degree hotter than the 20th century average. Of the 12 warmest years on record, all of them have happened since 1998 (and the top 20 is made up of years since 1987).

Over time, that kind of long-term trend takes a toll. But for those of us who are lucky enough to live with relatively high levels of wealth, air conditioning, supermarkets, and all the luxuries of modern life, that toll is not always obvious. Sometimes, you have to look a little deeper to see how climate change is already affecting the American way of life.

So, what's climate change ruining today? How about electricity generation? Juliet Eilperin at The Washington Post has a story about how a consistent trend of high temperatures and drought has affected water reserves, and how those diminished reserves affect our ability to produce electricity.

Electric generation accounts for 40 percent of water use in this country, and that's not just talking about hydroelectric power plants.

... low water levels affect coal-fired and nuclear power plants’ operations and impede the passage of coal barges along the Mississippi River.

Warmer and drier summers mean less water is available to cool nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants. The Millstone nuclear plant in Waterford, Conn., had to shut down one of its reactors in mid-August because the water it drew from the Long Island Sound was too warm to cool critical equipment outside the core. A twin-unit nuclear plant in Braidwood, Ill., needed to get special permission to continue operating this summer because the temperature in its cooling-water pond rose to 102 degrees, four degrees above its normal limit; another Midwestern plant stopped operating temporarily because its water-intake pipes ended up on dry ground from the prolonged drought.

Read the rest of Juliet Eilperin's story at The Washington Post

Read More About Warming Trends
• 2012 set to be the hottest year on record in the United States
NOAA's State of the Climate report, updated monthly.
The global warmest years on record.

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• Climate change ruins high school football and chocolate
• Climate change ruins beachfront vacations

Image: Coal power plant, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 48722974@N07's photostream

The other day, a reader asked why I call climate change "climate change", instead of "global warming". The short answer is that, from my perspective, climate change does a much better job of giving people an accurate mental picture of what is going on. Global warming sounds like the world is just going to get hotter, and while that's technically true on a global-average-temperature-basis, it doesn't really reflect what's happening locally.

And, frankly, what most people care about is the stuff that happens locally.

Today, Treehugger posted this NOAA video, which does a really good job of explaining one reason why a rising global average temperature can end up creating different climate change outcomes in different places. It's a great 4-minute primer on why "global warming" is more than just warming.

Via Chris Tackett

Science Debate is a group that's working to get political candidates in the United States actually talking publicly about issues of science and technology policy. In 2008, they tried (and failed) to get Barak Obama and John McCain to agree to a live, televised science debate. But they did get both candidates to send in written answers to 14 key questions.

This election cycle, Science Debate sent out a new set of 14 questions—all chosen from a crowdsourced list. Today, they announced that they'd gotten answers back from both Obama and Mitt Romney. You can compare the candidates side-by-side at the Science Debate website. I have to say that, while I disagree with a lot of Romney's conclusions, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of thought and time his staff clearly put into writing some very long and detailed responses.

Perhaps most surprising was his response to a question about climate change. Instead of attempting to flatly deny the evidence, Mitt Romney has apparently moved on to acknowledging that climate change is happening—while simultaneously overplaying the uncertainty surrounding specific risks, and claiming that even if climate change is a big problem there's nothing we can really do about it anyway ... because China.

Personally, I think that's pretty interesting. Climate scientists, and the journalists who write about them, have been talking, anecdotally, about seeing this exact rhetorical shift happening in conservative circles. It seems that the Republican presidential nominee is now one of the people who acknowledge climate change exists, but would still rather not take any decisive steps to deal with it.

I happen to think that's a dumb position. After all, even if the United States can't stop climate change alone, the kinds of policies that would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels would also help us adapt and thrive despite climate shifts and fossil fuel depletion. But this is still a step in the right direction. As several climate scientists I've spoken with have said, we can disagree on the policy. But it's high time we stop pretending that we can't see the changes happening all around us.

Mitt Romney: I am not a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming, and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences. However, there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the issue — on the extent of the warming, the extent of the human contribution, and the severity of the risk — and I believe we must support continued debate and investigation within the scientific community.

Ultimately, the science is an input to the public policy decision; it does not dictate a particular policy response.

President Obama has taken the view that if global warming is occurring, the American response must be to slash carbon dioxide emissions by imposing enormous costs on the U.S. economy. First he tried a massive cap-and-trade bill that would have devastated U.S. industry. When that approach was rejected by Congress, he declared his intention to pursue the same course on his own and proceeded through his EPA to impose rules that will bankrupt the coal industry.

Nowhere along the way has the President indicated what actual results his approach would achieve — and with good reason. The reality is that the problem is called Global Warming, not America Warming. China long ago passed America as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases. Developed world emissions have leveled off while developing world emissions continue to grow rapidly, and developing nations have no interest in accepting economic constraints to change that dynamic. In this context, the primary effect of unilateral action by the U.S. to impose costs on its own emissions will be to shift industrial activity overseas to nations whose industrial processes are more emissions-intensive and less environmentally friendly. That result may make environmentalists feel better, but it will not better the environment. So I oppose steps like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system that would handicap the American economy and drive manufacturing jobs away, all without actually addressing the underlying problem. Economic growth and technological innovation, not economy-suppressing regulation, is the key to environmental protection in the long run. So I believe we should pursue what I call a “No Regrets” policy — steps that will lead to lower emissions, but that will benefit America regardless of whether the risks of global warming materialize and regardless of whether other nations take effective action.

For instance, I support robust government funding for research on efficient, low-emissions technologies that will maintain American leadership in emerging industries. And I believe the federal government must significantly streamline the regulatory framework for the deployment of new energy technologies, including a new wave of investment in nuclear power. These steps will strengthen American industry, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and produce the economically-attractive technologies that developing nations must have access to if they are to achieve the reductions in their own emissions that will be necessary to address what is a global issue.

Also, it's worth noting that we've used a cap and trade system in the United States before. When we did, it not only worked well, it did the job way more cheaply than anyone had guessed.

Remember acid rain? That's caused by sulfur dioxide emissions, produced largely by burning coal. We drastically reduced those emissions (making our air cleaner, people healthier, and ecosystems safer) through a cap and trade system that went into effect in 1995. At the time, according to management consulting firm McKinsey and Company, analysts thought it would cost between $3 and $25 billion to clean up America's skies. Instead, it cost about $1.4 billion.

That's because things like cap and trade aren't really about the government choosing winners and losers. Instead, it's about letting government do what it does best—i.e., setting national priorities that allow us to take long-term action on issues that affect all Americans—and then letting industry do what it does best. When government sets the priorities, industries will find ways to meet those priorities cheaply.

The three-man crew of the 31-foot Belzebub II, a fiberglass sailboat "with a living space the size of a bathroom," told the world today how they sailed through the M’Clure Strait in northern Canada, a "decreasingly ice-packed route through the famed Northwest Passage." Warming global temperatures and melting polar ice caps made it possible. The crew's original blog post is here. (LAT)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/04/climate-change-allows-3-explor.html/feed 9 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/whats-climate-change-ruining.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/whats-climate-change-ruining.html#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:06:10 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=178498 Read more Daily Climate. (Via Brendon Slotterback)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/whats-climate-change-ruining.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/how-smokey-bear-creates-forest.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/how-smokey-bear-creates-forest.html#comments Thu, 23 Aug 2012 17:26:43 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=177849

By now, many of you are probably aware that human behavior is one of the key factors behind some of the massive forest fires we've seen in recent years. The basic story goes like this: Under a natural cycle, periodic small fires sweep through forests, burning through small trees and dry brush. But if you prevent those fires from happening—as humans have done for around a century at this point—all that highly flammable stuff builds up. In the end, you're left with a giant tinderbox of a forest. The next time a fire does happen there, it's almost guaranteed to be much, much bigger and more destructive than the natural fires that forest is adapted to.

NPR has a very nice story about the science and history behind this problem, which forest fire experts call "The Smokey Bear Effect", after the cartoon Ursus the U.S. Forest Service has long used as part of its fire prevention campaign.

Its ill-advised fire prevention campaign.

And it was the experts who approved the all-out ban on fires in the Southwest. They got it wrong. That's the view of fire historian Stephen Pyne.

"The irony here is that the argument for setting these areas aside as national forests and parks was, to a large extent, to protect them from fire," Pyne says. "Instead, over time they became the major habitat for free-burning fire."

So instead of a few dozen trees per acre, the Southwestern mountains of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah are now choked with trees of all sizes, and grass and shrubs. Essentially, it's fuel.

Over the past several years, even as fewer fires have struck the Southwest, they've burned more land. The U.S. Forest Service now spends about half its budget on firefighting.

It's worth noting that this is also a great example of why it's difficult to attribute specific events to global climate change. Increasingly hot, dry summers have certainly been a factor in creating the forest fires we've seen over the last few years. The last decade has been the hottest on record, and that has consequences. But it's not the only thing going on here. Climate change doesn't happen in a vacuum. Its effects interact with the effects of other decisions we make (and other natural events that happen to be taking place). So it's not enough to say what climate change will do. In order to make accurate predictions of risk, we have to think about the bigger picture and how climate change fits into it.

Read (or listen to) the rest of the story at NPR's website

Image: Forest Fire, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from wandrus's photostream

This photo, taken by Kulvir Gil, shows a pair of houses in Dawson City, Yukon Territories, Canada.

Dawson City exists in a subarctic climate, the sort of place with a lot of permafrost—soil that remains frozen year round. In order for permafrost to happen, the mean annual temperature has to be colder than 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). But, in Dawson City, as in other parts of the Arctic, climate change has brought with it warmer mean temperatures. That means melting permafrost, a problem that affects the structural integrity of buildings built on the once-solid ground.

Evidence of melting permafrost in the central Yukon comes from Ottawa's Carleton University. The school's geography department has been studying the issue for 20 years. Its research shows the ground temperature in and around Dawson is increasing dramatically. That melts the permafrost and destabilizes the ground supporting the critical infrastructure.

Northern Climate Exchange co-ordinator John Streiker says things will probably get worse for Dawson before they get better. "All of your infrastructure, anything that's buried – foundations of buildings, even road beds, things like that – they all push up and down," says Streiker.

Read the rest of this CBC radio transcript about permafrost melting in Dawson City.

The photo above comes from Canada's Climate Change, a Facebook page highlighting real-world examples of Canada's changing climate.

When we lose our access to electricity, there's usually more than one thing that went wrong. But, one of the common things that does go wrong, especially in recent years, is extreme weather. The way the grid was built, and the way we manage it, was set up with predictable weather and climate norms in mind. When those things start to drastically shift—as we've seen over the last 10 years—the grid becomes vulnerable.

And electricity isn't the only infrastructure affected.

On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,” leading to “horrendous cracking,” said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,” creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps.

The frequency of extreme weather is up over the past few years, and people who deal with infrastructure expect that to continue. Leading climate models suggest that weather-sensitive parts of the infrastructure will be seeing many more extreme episodes, along with shifts in weather patterns and rising maximum (and minimum) temperatures.

“We’ve got the ‘storm of the century’ every year now,” said Bill Gausman, a senior vice president and a 38-year veteran at the Potomac Electric Power Company, which took eight days to recover from the June 29 “derecho” storm that raced from the Midwest to the Eastern Seaboard and knocked out power for 4.3 million people in 10 states and the District of Columbia.

This story, by Matthew L. Wald and John Schwartz, will give you a great overview of the risks we're facing—and the high prices we're paying—as "the norm" becomes an old-fashioned concept.

Read the rest of Wald and Schwartz's story in the New York Times