Earth’s climate is changing. As it does, extraordinary weather events – storms and floods, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves and deep freezes – are becoming more common and extreme. Climate chaos is mounting.
One striking example reported by NOAA is coastal high-tide flooding. Inundations along the U.S. seacoast have jumped 300% to 900% in the last 50 years. Since 1880, the mean global sea level has risen 8-9 inches (21-24 cm). It will rise another 7.2 feet (2.2 m) by the end of the century and 13 feet (3.9 m) by 2150 if nothing is done.
Daniel Swain – who Stanford Magazine called “the Carl Sagan of weather” – has spent his career studying the connection between global climate change and extreme weather. The self-proclaimed climate communicator will join EarthSky’s Dave Adalian on Monday (July 29, 2024) at 12:15 p.m. CDT (17:15 UTC) for a live chat. He’ll explain how a hotter climate drives harsher weather and what we can do to slow the problem down.
Daniel Swain is a climate scientist focused on the dynamics and impacts of extreme events – including droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires – on a warming planet. He researches “hydroclimate volatility” and wildfire dynamics at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a research fellow at the Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and at the Nature Conservancy. His recent work identifies climate-related causes for increasingly frequent and severe wildfires and how to mitigate their impact. Used with permission.
Click here – Weather West – to view his YouTube channel.
Bottom line: Climatologist Daniel Swain will discuss climate change and extreme weather LIVE with EarthSky at 12:15 p.m. (17:15 UTC) on Monday, July 29. Join us!
Award-winning reporter and editor Dave Adalian's love affair with the cosmos began during a long-ago summer school trip to the storied and venerable Lick Observatory atop California's Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose in the foggy Diablos Mountain Range and far above Monterey Bay at the edge of the endless blue Pacific Ocean. That field trip goes on today, as Dave still pursues his nocturnal adventures, perched in the darkness at his telescope's eyepiece or chasing wandering stars through the fields of night with the unaided eye.
A lifelong resident of California's Tulare County - an agricultural paradise where the Great San Joaquin Valley meets the Sierra Nevada in endless miles of grass-covered foothills - Dave grew up in a wilderness larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined, one choked with the greatest diversity of flora and fauna in the US, one which passes its nights beneath pitch black skies rising over the some of highest mountain peaks and greatest roadless areas on the North American continent.
Dave studied English, American literature and mass communications at the College of the Sequoias and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has worked as a reporter and editor for a number of news publications on- and offline during a career spanning nearly 30 years so far. His fondest literary hope is to share his passion for astronomy and all things cosmic with anyone who wants to join in the adventure and explore the universe's past, present and future.
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