HOW CLIMATE HAS CHANGED LIFE

Hotter, weirder: How climate change has changed Earth

December 2, 2014 (CBS News)

“In the more than two decades since world leaders first got together to try to solve global warming, life on Earth has…gotten hotter, more polluted with heat-trapping gases, more crowded and just downright wilder…The numbers are stark. Carbon dioxide emissions: up 60 percent. Global temperature: up six-tenths of a degree. Population: up 1.7 billion people. Sea level: up 3 inches. U.S. extreme weather: up 30 percent. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica: down 4.9 trillion tons of ice…To see how much the globe has changed since…[Since] the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992…there have been more than 6,600 major climate, weather and water disasters worldwide, causing more than $1.6 trillion in damage and killing more than 600,000 people…

“While climate-related, not all can be blamed on man-made warming or climate change. Still, extreme weather has noticeably increased…From 1983 to 1992 the world averaged 147 climate, water and weather disasters each year. Over the past 10 years, that number has jumped to an average 306 a year…[In the U.S., since] 1992, there have been 136 such billion-dollar events…Worldwide, the 10-year average for weather-related losses adjusted for inflation was $30 billion a year from 1983-92, according to insurance giant Swiss Re. From 2004 to 2013, the cost was more than three times that on average, or $131 billion a year…It's almost a sure thing that 2014 will go down as the hottest year in 135 years of record keeping…The globe has broken six monthly heat records in 2014 and 47 since 1992…The world's oceans have risen by about 3 inches since 1992…” click here for more

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