The recently released Fourth National Climate Assessment sends an urgent message to communities across the nation. Extreme weather events will intensify and become more frequent. The increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events will pose serious threats to communities, especially low-income and other marginalized communities. Although many local communities have displayed growing interest in elevating their resilience to the ever changing climatic conditions, much less interest has been shown in mitigating carbon emission as we have seen in the failures to pass carbon tax in even liberal states. Understandably, climate change being the ultimate tragedy of the commons, the benefit of reducing carbon emission is trivial compared to that of taking actions to adapt to climate change at the local level. However, this level of urgency and impact does demand regional and national cooperative framework.
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Glacier melting not only adds more water to the ocean, which directly contributes to sea level rise, but also releases large amounts of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere. Now it is found that great amounts of this powerful gas being released from Icelandic glacier. This wild card is likely to add another layer of uncertainty to the future climatic condition.
It is disheartening to see the horrific devastation created by wild fires in California. The human society, despite being armed with advanced technology, can feel extremely humbled when confronting the mother nature. Climate change, despite being questioned and denied by some, has certainly played a role in worsening the dry and hot condition in the west, which contributes to an upward trend of big wild fires.
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湖边的风
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