In the Northern Hemisphere in 2017 and 2018 brought several destructive hurricanes to the shores of North America, the Caribbean, and throughout the Pacific rim. Such extreme weather events are predicted to get more common and more severe with increasing climate change.
Several participating classes in the ISCFC were or are in the path of these storms and we hope for the best for them, their families and communities.
We would love to hear from students affected directly and indirectly by extreme weather events, and also any students who have been following the news this summer.
What are your thoughts about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events? Has this hurricane season increased your concern about climate change or not? Do you think that US citizens and residents (and others in the region) will take climate change more seriously now?
Extreme Weather >
How is the Snow in Greenland Black?
In the last forum that I posted ( you can see that by clicking on my icon), I talked about how fires have been growing increasingly larger over the past few decades. Because of all of these fires, ash clouds are created and float in the sky. Greenland is covered in snow, but in recent years, the snow has been getting darker because of the ash clouds settling on it. When the snow gets darker, it takes in more heat, therefore causing it to melt faster. Also, since the overall temperature of the Earth is getting hotter since there is more carbon in the atmosphere trapping in the infrared heat, the snow melts at an alarming rate. In the article “The Great Greenland Meltdown”, it says, “the balance tipped dramatically between 2011 and 2014, when satellite data and modeling suggested that 70% of the annual 269 billion tons of snow and ice shed by Greenland was lost through surface melt.” This is a very horrifying fact, but people do not know that this is even happening. This all ties back to climate change, the wildfires in the US, and the consumption of carbon in our day and age. Climate change is a thing that is being passed by many politicians or denied when it is causing very major things like melting more than half of Greenland’s snow and causing major fires in the US.