The Monthly Global Assessment: Surprise! Hot Again

As we do every month, we check in with NOAA's Centers For Environmental Information to get the regular update as they check the world's temperature.

As always, the Globe is running a fever.

June, 2020 was the worlds third hottest on record.

I suppose if you're looking for a bright side, at least June wasn't #1 or #2  on the heat scale like most months in the past year.

Overall, the places with the warmest temperatures, relative to average were most of the United States, southern Brazil, northern and eastern Europe, northern Russia, southern China and the North Pacific Ocean.

Even in a warming world, there are always places that trend cooler in a particular month. This time, those places were western and southeastern Russia, India, Greenland and parts of the North Atlantic Ocean.

It was good that Greenland was cool at the time of year when the sun angle is highest in the northern hemisphere. It probably cut down on the amount of melting Greenland has been seeing in recent years.

Of course, other parts of the Arctic were much warmer than average.

As of July 15, Arctic sea ice extent was the lowest on record for this time of year, beating the record low last set in 2011, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The sea ice is particularly pathetic north of Siberia, which has had months of far above normal temperatures this year.

IN VERMONT

Locally, as we know, it's been a hot summer so far in Vermont. We have another squirt of very hot weather coming up, but luckily, this one won't last super long.

You'll notice the humidity building today as showers taper off. (The showers, as I expected, were more lame than many forecasts).  Northwest Vermont in particular seems to have an anti-rain force field this summer.

Saturday will be humid and relatively  hot, with 90 readings likely in the warmer valleys.

I'm sure there will be some heat advisories Sunday as the humidity builds more and temperatures go well into the 90s.  Burlington at this point is expected to get up to 97 degrees Sunday, which would make it the hottest day of the year if it comes to pass.

Luckily,  cold front will come to the rescue late Sunday night and Monday. After the front passes, it won't exactly be cold, but temperatures next week look as if they'll be near, or just a little warmer than average.

If the cold front is later than expected, we might squeeze one more 90 degree afternoon Monday, but after that, I'm guessing no more 90-degree weather for the rest of next week.

Hurricane Dorian "Sharpiegate" Violated Integrity Rules

Last year's Sharpiegate scandal was a warning that "alternative facts"
over real science could have dangerous consequences. We certainly
learned that this year.

Yes, I'm back to Sharpiegate, that moment last year that seems so long ago when President Trump falsely said Hurricane Dorian would affect Alabama, and later showed a map altered with a Sharpie that falsely suggested the hurricane had been forecast to hit that area.

New reporting this week shows that NOAA officials violated science integrity rules when scrambling to incorrectly back up Donald Trump's wrong statement last year that Hurricane Dorian would blast Alabama, among other things.

In the grand scheme of things, Sharpiegate seems so insignificant now with the nation's botched Covid-19 response killing people and the Black Lives Matter movement highlighting the stain of racism and police brutality in the United States.

However, Sharpiegate is important in a way because it shows how Trump's sycophants prioritize the "need" to massage Trump's super needy ego at the expense of truth, sound policy, and in this case, science.  As we've learned since, ignoring science can be deadly.

This whole thing with what happened last year should have been a small forgettable gaffe that all presidents make.  In the run up to dangerous Hurricane Dorian, Trump included Alabama in a list of states that could be affected.

Very early forecasts had suggested just that, but in the days leading up to Trump's' words, Alabama was off the table. That state would escape Dorian scot-free.

Due to panicked messages they were receiving after Trump spoke, the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service issued a statement saying that Dorian would not affect the state.

A normal president would have then said, "Oopsie, I had bad information. Turns out Alabama's fine," then dropped the whole thing. From there, everybody would have moved on.

But no, not Trump. He always seems ready to waste lots of precious time, resources and reputation to claim he is always right, evidence be damned.

So we had Sharpiegate

The latest report, via Gizmodo and many other media outlets, is this:

"Internal documents supposedly showed that Tim Gallaudet, NOAA's deputy administrator, nor Neil Jacobs, the acting NOAA administrator, had authorized the press release backing Trump - instead, the order apparently came from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who issued threats to fire Jacobs and other top NOAA officials. Per the Washington Post, an inquiry conducted on NOAA's behalf by the nonprofit National Academy of Public Administration now finds Jacobs and NOAA deputy chief of staff/director of communications Julie Roberts committed at least two violations of scientific integrity rules in issuing the statement claiming NWS Birmingham was wrong. 

The report also concluded that neither official commited a violation when they issued media guidance that limited NOAA scientists from speaking openly to the media about the matter. But Jacobs and Roberts 'intentionally, knowingly or in reckless disregard,' violated conduct and ethics sections of the NOAA Scientific Integrity Policy twice: First by refusing to let scientists in Birmingham review the statement pre-publication, and then sending it out and "compromising NOAA's integrity and reputation as an independent scientific agency."

Of course, this won't matter very much for the people involved, since apparently nobody is facing consequences for these violations. Typical in this administration.  Everybody seems to do whatever they want, regardless of legality and ethics. No wonder there are howls of protest against this administration echoing across the United States.

When Sharpiegate first erupted last year, I said this would erode trust in science, facts and policy when more serious issues came along.  And sure enough, Covid came on the scene, and once again, people who should know better are creating "alternate facts" to appease Trump's little mind.

This time, though, unlike Sharpiegate, millions of lives are at stake and there have already probably been thousands of needless deaths.

Sharpiegate was a warning to the nation about how dangerous this administration is.  We should have listened.

No Surprise: Earth's Second Hottest February

The worldwide climate change heat rolls on.

Last Friday, NOAA's Centers for Environmental Information confirmed that February on Earth was hot: It was the second warmest February on record. Only February, 2016 was a little warmer.

The 2016 February record was set during an El Nino, when warmth from the eastern Pacific Ocean is released into the atmosphere, boosting global temperatures.

This year was a "neutral" El Nino year, which meant the eastern Pacific wasn't unusually hot nor cold, so there was no added heat boost to bring up global tempertures last month.

This, by the way, was the 44th consecutive warmer than normal February on Earth.  The United States, Vermont included, shared in the warm February.  Here in Vermont overall, it was the 15th warmest of thos 126 years of data.

The winter (December through February) as a whole on Earth was also the second warmest on record.

Europe was the episode of this past winter's warmth.  Russia had its toastiest winter on record, and the average temperature for the winter in Moscow was a bit above freezing, which is the first time on record that has happened.

Helsinki, Finland had no measureable snow in January and February, which is the first time on record that has happenened.

Here in Vermont, Burlington  had its eighth warmest winter on record.

The only cool winter spots were Alaska, far northwestern Canada, parts of India and a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean

July Was World's Hottest Month On Record, NOAA Says. Others Say It Was Close

Seeing red again. Most of the world was warmer than normal
in July, 2019, says NOAA. The agency says the
month was the world's hottest on record.

Much of the world endured some pretty big heat waves during July and now the official word is in from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information: July was the world's hottest month on record.

In keeping with climate change, this is part of a trend. All of the hottest Julys on record happened in the past five years, and nine out of the 10 hottest happened since 2005, says NOAA. This July was 1.71 degrees warmer than the 20th century average.

July is normally the warmest month of the year for Earth, despite it being winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Given that this July was so warm globally, that made the seventh month of 2019 the hottest.

The places that seemed to be the hottest this July were Alaska, central Europe, sections of southern Asia and southern Africa and parts of eastern North America. (Here in Vermont, in eastern North America, Burlington had its third hottest July on record. A couple New England cities had their hottest July.)

The only cool spots, at least relative to average were in parts of northeastern Europe, a bit of northeastern Siberia and central Canada.

NOAA says so far in 2019, we're tied with 2017 as the second hottest year on record out of the past 140.

Global July temperatures since around 1880. Notice a trend?

Oh, and by the way, sea ice extent in the Arctic was at a record low level in July, 2019, as NOAA continued to share this bad climate news.

Different climatalogical and meteorological organizations measure global temperatures slightly differently.

The Category 6 blog notes:

"The Japan Meteorological Agency rated July 2019 in a tie with July, 2016 for warmest month on record and NASA found that July 2019 was in a virtual tie with August, 2016.

"Minor differences in rankings between NASA, NOAA and JMA can arise because of how they handle data-sparse regions such as the Arctic, where few surface weather stations exist."

El Nino patterns tend to make the world a bit warmer, on top of the underlying global warming. In July a weak El Nino was fading into oblivion. I'm not sure if the dead/dying El Nino will have a noticeable effect on global temperatures for the remainder of the year.

Hot Times Continue: January 2019 Was Tied For Third Hottest

Once again in January, 2019 most of the world was seeing red.
The month was tied for the third warmest on record. 

If new data from NOAA is any indication, a cold snap in the Midwest during January was NOT a sign that climate change is a hoax, contrary to our Fearless Leader's assessement. 

For the world as a whole, data released today indicates January, 2019 was tied for the third warmest on record. Only 2016 and 2017 were warmer. The tie was with the January, 2007.

This latest monthly report from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information also said the ten warmest Januaries on Earth have all happened since 2002. Reliable records started around 1880.

The last time the world had a cooler than normal January was in 1976. This January, the only notably colder than normal area was central Canada.

Many areas experienced record or near record heat, including Australia, parts of South America, parts of northwestern and northeastern Asia, central Russia and much of Alaska.

Notably, President Trump tweeted in January suggesting that a brief, intense cold wave in the Midwest "proved" climate change doesn't exist. For the record, temperatures were overall near average for region during January.

True, the western half of the Lower 48 has been brutally cold in February so far, most of the world is trending warmer than average this month. Western Europe, much of Alaska and parts of the southeastern United States, in particular has been extremely warm for this time of year.

Despite the cold in parts of North America, I anticipate February will probably score in the Top 5 hottest on record. We'll find out when NOAA releases its next report in about a month.

Globally, This Year On Pace To Be Second Hottest Year On Record, Surprising Scientists

Most of the world was much warmer than normal,
again, in June. 

The first half of 2017 proved to be the second hottest on record for the globe as a whole, which has surprised a number of scientists.

This news comes after, according to NOAA,  the world had its third warmest June on record, which also is a bit stunning.

I say this because the world was supposed to temporarily cool a bit after a very strong El Nino helped boost worldwide temperatures to record high levels in 2015 and 2016.

El Nino tends to make worldwide temperatures hotter. Combined with global warming, a strong El Nino caused those record high temperatures.

El Nino is long gone, but global warming continues on. The consensus was this year would cool off. This year would still be very warm compared to historical averages, but not really that close to record territory.

So much for that idea.

Think Progress quoted noted climatologist Michael Mann thusly:

"As if it wasn't shocking enough to see three consecutive record-breaking years, in 2014, 2015 and 2016, for the first time on record..... we're now seeing near-record temperatures even in the absence of the El Nino 'assist' that previous record year benefitted from."

Mann said this latest NOAA report "is a reminder that climate change has not, despite the insistence of climate contrarians, 'paused' or even slowed down."

I guess Donald Trump got it wrong, then. Climate change is not a hoax perpetrated by China to demolish the U.S economy.

World's Hot Times Got Even Hotter In September

Most of the Earth's surface was definitely running
 a fever in September, 2015.  

The latest monthly global temperature assessment is out from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, and it shows September was pretty much off the charts temperature wise.

It was the world's hottest September since record keeping got serious in the 1880s.  Temperatures were also above normal by the widest margin of any month since records began 136 years ago.

Yeah, 1.62 degrees above normal doesn't sound like much, but it's HUGE when you're talking about global average temperatures for a month.

Most months in 2015 have broken records for the hottest on record, so it's pretty much a sure bet that this year will easily be the hottest year on record. Probably by a large margin.

We're in the throes of a strong El Nino, and El Ninos always boost global temperatures, so it's no surprise that temperatures were above normal globally.

However, there have been other El Ninos about as strong as this one, and 2015 is still running way above normal. I think we're definitely seeing the hand of global warming here.

I've noticed we're no longer hearing about the "pause" in global warming that many climate change deniers were talking about when global temperatures seemed to be increasing a little more slowly back a few years ago.

I'm sure we'll hear that "global warming is over" when El Nino fades and we get some months and probably a few years that are not hottest on record like this one.

Don't buy it. This warming trend is entrenched and the world will keep getting hotter, even if it does come at an uneven pace.

That means keep looking out for more weather extremes to come, too. Drought, floods, heat waves, oh joy!

Broken Record Post on Broken Heat Records Again Around The World

The heat is on. August was the hottest on record
for the Earth. 2015 will be, too.  

I'm basically cutting and pasting posts that I seem to be filing once a month here in this weather blog thingy, but it's important.

Like I said after worldwide data temperature came in after February, March, May, June and July, August, 2015 turns out to be hottest August on record for the world, according to NOAA's Center for Environmental Information.

The Japan Meteorological Society and Britain's Met Office came to similar conclusions about August.

We are in uncharted territory as far as global heat goes. I don't think there's ever been seven months in one year that set new records for global high temperatures.

Scientists say there's a 97 percent chance - a near certainty - that 2015 will be the hottest year on record for the globe. That would beat the record set just last year. And the British Met Office predicted that 2016 could be even hotter. 

So much for the "pause" in global warming people talked about earlier this decade. It was really a faux pause anyway, since warming did continue during that period.

El Nino, that periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, has gotten stronger. El Ninos pump massive amounts of heat into the atmosphere, which boosts global temperature. That, and the fact that greenhouse gases are raising the Earth's temperature, explain the 2015 heat.

Of course, El Nino will eventually wane. Not every year going forward will be the hottest ever. Perhaps 2017 and 2018 will not quite score as Number One for global heat.  But overall, El Nino or no El Nino, the trend in temperatures across the globe is ever and ever higher. Get used to it.

NOAA's report is a global analysis released monthly that examines the Earth's temperature and precipitation patterns.

This months' report, released yesterday. also said that this summer, June through August, was obviously the hottest on record. Arctic sea ice was at its fourth lowest level on record. Antarctic sea ice, which has actually showing a slow expanding trend in recent decades, reversed course at least temporarily and was a bit below normal.

Another trend continued in August that we've seen all year. While most of the world was hot, a patch of the North Atlantic, and parts of the American Midwest, were a little cooler than normal.

So far this year, no fewer than a dozen nations and territories have recorded their hottest temperatures on record. The locations pan the globe and include the U.S. Virgin Islands, Germany, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Venezuela and Ghana.

This Winter Was The Hottest On Record. Seriously!

With the glaring exception of eastern North America
the world was wicked warm in February, 2015
says a new report from NOAA.  

My fellow Vermonters and my neighbors in New England will surely throw big, heavy but inexpensive things at me for saying this, but this now-concluding winter was the warmest on record.

Before the debris flies, I'm talking about the world as a whole having the warmest on record. New England and southeastern Canada were the glaring exception to this.  

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center released its closely watched monthly analysis of the global climate today said the period December 1 through February 28 marked the warmest winter on record for the globe. Their data goes back to about the late 1880s.

Overall, February itself was the second warmest on record for the entire Earth. Here where I live in little tiny Vermont, we endured our second coldest February on record.

For the United States as a whole, it was the 19th warmest winter on record. While New England froze, large swaths of the western United States had a very warm winter.

From the Climate Data Center report:

"In February, 2015, cooler to much cooler than average conditions overtoook the entire eastern half of the United States and the eastern third of Canada, with some record cold pockets seen around the Great Lakes region and parts of northeastern Canada near Hudson Bay. 

The majority of the world's land surfaces, however, were warmer than average, with much warmer than average temperatures widespread across Central America, northern and central South America, Australia, most of Africa and much of Eurasia, including a broad swath that covered most of Russia. 

In stark contrast to the eastern United States, the western United States was encompassed by record warmth. The warm-cold pattern over the country has been observed over much of the past two years."

By the way, that warm-cold pattern seems to be in a continual stuck position. March has been behaving much of the same way, and this pattern should hold at least through the first week in April, and probably beyond that.

I don't know what it will take to get it unstuck.

The NOAA report also said that February Arctic sea ice extent was the third lowest on record.

Greenland's "Dark Ice" This Summer Is Ominous

Dark colored ice in Greenland crisscrossed with
crevices. Melt water goes into the crevices
and can accelerate deterioration of the ice sheet.
Photo by Jason Box.  

If you've ever stepped outside into the winter sunshine after a snowstorm you know how blindingly bright it is out there.

The white snow reflects light, so it's glaring. The white snow reflects heat from the sun, too, and that helps keep things cold in the middle of January.

Greenland is a big ice sheet. Almost all of it is covered in thick, thick, thick ice all year.

That ice, although never pristinely white in the summer, reflects away the summer sun's heat, rather than absorbing it because the ice is very light colored.

At least it was. The ice sheet has been getting dirtier and darker in recent years and decades, and according to Eric Holthaus in Slate, this year the Greenland ice sheet is the darkest color it's ever been. Pictures of the ice sheet look like it's a giant version of a rotting snowbank at the last gasp of winter.

Dark, light, who cares? Well, YOU should. And everybody else, too. The dark ice in Greenland absorbs the sun's heat, a lot like a blacktop is a lot hotter in the summer than a patio painted white.

That means the ice up there was melting a lot faster than usual over this summer.  Fast melting is bad in Greenland. Unlike the Arctic Ocean, it's not floating ice. If ice floating on the ocean melts, the sea level won't rise, just like if the ice in your glass of gin and tonic melts. The glass won't get any fuller.

But if Greenland's ice melts, it runs off into the ocean, and contributes to sea level rise, perhaps the biggest threat from global warming. Since so much of the world's population lives in big cities on the coasts, it'll be tricky when the sea levels rise and flooding gets worse and worse.

Dark ice and a big crevice in Greenland
this past summer. Photo by Jason Box.  n

Do you move entire cities? Build multi-billion dollar sea walls and hope for the best? There's really no good options.

Already, American cities like Miami, Fla. and Norfolk, Va. are seeing the effects, and it might no be long before places like New York, Washington and Boston start to go under.

You want to keep Greenland's ice sheets bright and white, to slow the melting a bit.

A white Greenland won't solve the problem of rising sea levels, but anything to slow the process down helps.

Now what, though?  As I said, Greenland's ice was dark and yucky over the summer. There's a lot of theories why. The boreal forests of the Arctic way up north in Canada, Alaska and Siberia had more forest fires than ever before this summer, and in recent summers. 

(The Arctic is warming up, the snow is melting sooner the summers are hotter, so forest fires, in general are becoming more likely, and bigger. Arctic forest fires are burning at roughly twice the rate they were about a decade ago.)

Some of the soot from this year's northern forest fires landed on the Greenland ice sheet, so that helped make it darker.

You also get summer snowstorms in parts of Greenland to freshen up the ice and snow cover, and that didn't happen as much as usual this year. The dark stuff might also be partly composed of pollution and dust from places like here, and China, and God knows where else in the Northern Hemisphere. Maybe microbes are contributing.

A scientist named Jason Box is the main source for Slate's material on Dark Greenland. He's pretty strident in his public alarm over global warming. He's the guy who found himself in a bit of controversy in July when he Tweeted: "If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd." 

So OK, Jason Box is blunt, and he probably pisses off people who aren't particularly concerned about global warming.  But from everything I read, his science is totally sound, so he's got cred.

It's not clear how to fix this, other than cooling the Earth, so we don't have so many Arctic forest fires, so Arctic summers are not hot, which would limit melting.

NOAA Says May, 2014 Was World's Warmest On Record

On a global basis, May, 2014 was the
warmest on record says NOAA.  

Backing up earlier measurements, NOAA National Climatic Data Center confirms that May, 2014, on a global basis, was the warmest on record in data dating back to the 1880s.

Both the ocean and land temperatures across the globe set new record highs in May, 2014, according to the report, released today.

So far, 2014 is the fifth warmest on record, based on data from the first five months of the year.

An El Nino pattern, which brings warm water to the eastern Pacific Ocean and tends to boost worldwide temperatures, seems to be getting started.

El Nino, combined with the effects of global warming, might be responsible for the record setting global heat in May.

Four of the five warmest Mays have occured in the past five years, according to the NOAA report.

The last time the world experienced a cooler than normal month was 29 years ago in February, 1985. The last cooler than normal May was in 1976, according to the report.

NASA and the Japanese Meteorological Agency each said last week that their measurements also indicated May, 2014 was the warmest on record.

First Impressions: Obama Climate Report Moving The Issue Forward?

On Tuesday, the Obama administration's big fat report on climate change landed, THUNK! on all us media scribes and blogs.  

Feeling the heat: Obama's latest climate change
report and action plan might actually drive
the debate on what to do about the crisis forward.  

Actually, at first glance at the thing, I'm kinda impressed.

I haven't had a chance to go through the whole thing yet, and I know the devil is in the details.  But Obama and his climate guys and gals got some things right.

First of all, the report seems to emphasize how climate change is affecting you, me, Joe Blow from Idaho and Polly From Peoria.

The report tries to avoid abstraction and emphasizes that climate change isn't a distant worry and maybe some day it will flood some island somewhere so who cares?

The emphasis from this is we're living it now, here's the proof and it's going to get worse.

Also, unlike the UN reports climate reports that come out every year or so, this one seems to be written in plain, everyday language. The parts I've seen are written in something of a conversational tone. I like that.

When you're talking about something the public needs to pay attention to, you can't blind them with science. Yes, it has to be scientifically based, but not many people have the patience to wade through academic abstracts. The people who wrote this report understand that.

I also like that the well-orchestrated release of the report, done on what turned out to be a slow-ish news day, meaning the major, mainstream media ran with this.

There are signs the media might be moving past the false debate rut it's been in, where every time they do something on climate change, they have to give a skeptic equal time to prove how "balanced" they are.

Kind of like having one scientist on saying the Earth is round and another saying it's flat, for the sake of balance.

The Obama report from Tuesday might push things along in the media a bit.

Now, can we please move the debate on how best to respond to climate change? There are signs the debate is starting. It's going to be a complicated one.  How best to respond to the myriad of threats posed by climate change?

What basic philosophy should underly these debates? Free market solutions? Grass roots?  Government programs?  International efforts?  Some complex mix of all of the above?

This will be difficult, to say the least, but I'm beginning to hope we are finally moving beyond the "maybe it's happening, maybe it's not" stupidity.  

I also like the fact that Obama summoned several TV meteorologists to the White House to discuss the climate report.

It's interesting that television meteorologists have been among the most skeptical groups regarding global warming.  The theory goes that computer models that forecast day to day weather are often wrong, so some television meteorologists assume the computer models that predict global climate change could be REALLY wrong.

Getting meteorologists into the thick of the climate change discussion is a wise move. Because people are familiar with TV meteorologists. We tend to like them. So they could become a good way of informing the public about climate change, whether something that happened locally is just normal weather, or could be tied to a changing climate.

Of course, the ever reliable Fox News had their own take on all this, as they always do. Fox's Dana Perino tried to goad the meteorologists to ask Obama about Benghazi rather than climate change.

(In Perino's defense, she said she was only joking, so we needn't get too exercised about this.)

In Fox world, the only thing happening is Benghazi. Like the Obama administration is the only one that may or may not have tried to do a political spin on an international crisis or problem.

However, I'm guessing Fox News will become a self-parody in the world of global warming. They will either ignore it, or mock it and Fox News fans will love it.

But they're a minority, and the rest of us, with the help of Obama's climate report, will roll up our sleeves and get to work on dealing with this big threat.

Report: Climate Change To Bring More Worldwide Havoc

According to a recently leaked report from the International Panel on Climate Change, poverty,  starvation, disease and economic disruptions will increase worldwide as a result of a warming world.

Will drought and other disasters made stronger
by global warming contribute to war, disease and
economy suffering?  

Oh joy!

Interestingly, the leaked report turned up on a climate skeptic's website. The report wasn't supposed to come out until March.

According to the Associated Press, the report has what it calls the following "key risks"

• People dying from warming and sea-rise related flooding, especially in big cities (Lower Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy, anyone?_
• Famine because of temperature and rain chanes, especially in poorer nations. 
• Farmers going broke for lack of water.
• Infrastructure failures due to extreme weather
• Increasingly dangerous and deadly heat waves
• Some failing land and marine ecosystems.   

Here's the problem for everyone with these issues: Clearly, policymakers, people in charge, basically, need to figure out how to deal with all these potential crises.

But the risks are broad brush. We don't have specifics. How bad will they get? Where? Can they be prevented? 

And then if you do manage to come up with a plan, you've got to sell the blueprint to everybody.

People naturally react when the problem is clear and you know how to respond.  If you're unaware a bus is about to run you over, and somebody warns you, it's pretty clear what the problem is, the person warning you is (hopefully) easy to understand, and it's very obvious what you need to do to avert disaster.

Climate change, by contrast,  is still something of an abstraction, even if we have experienced hotter weather or more extreme storms.

That's because it's hard for anyone, including climate scientists, to tease apart how much of a particular weather disaster would have happened anyway, and how much of it was worsened by climate change.

Let's take relatively safe Vermont, where I live as a small example.

Here in Vermont, Tropical Storm Irene struck in August, 2011 and the resulting flood was one of the worst disasters in the state's history.

Vermont has always had tropical storms and destructive floods, so the fact we had another disaster wasn't that surprising. But was Tropical Storm Irene wetter than a "normal" storm because a warmer atmosphere holds more water?

And there was a summer's worth of very unusually heavy rain that preceded Irene, that soaked the soil and primed the state for big time flooding from the tropical storm. Was part of that heavy rain due to climate change? How much of it? And how much of all this was just bad luck?

What of the high frequency of wind storms and floods that maybe weren't as bad as Irene, but still destructive, that have hit Vermont repeatedly since 2011?  How much of that was influenced by climate change, and how much of it was just bad luck?

Clearly something odd is going on. The weather and climate in Vermont surely is different than it was decades ago. So you know you have to adapt.  But again, how much of this weird weather is just a fluke, and how much is climate change? The balance influences how you react.

As you can see, the nature of the risk is not nearly as plain and obvious as that speeding bus bearing down on you.

Now look at your utility bill. It's gone up some. Part of the reason might be because electric utilities like Green Mountain Power are constantly fixing storm-damaged transmission lines.  That costs money.

GMP and other utilities are looking for ways to make their systems more resilient. In the long run, adapting to climate change like that is cheaper than constantly going out and fixing storm damage. But the adaption still costs money. Which will no doubt show up in your electric bill.

That's what the leaked IPCC report is getting at. Climate change will affect us one way or another. Probably through sticker shock.

In more vulnerable parts of the world, the consequences are a lot more dire than trying to figure out how to pay your electric bill.

If disruptions such as crop failures, giant heat waves, droughts and massive storms hit areas of the globe already teetering on the edge, that's where you get the wars, diseases, economic  chaos and death the IPCC is warning about.

We have examples. The terrible civil war in Syria has a variety of causes and plenty of bad players doing ugly things. But there's tantilizing evidence an unprecedented drought in Syria between 2006 and 2011 caused many farms to fail, and those farmers to participate in a mass migration to cities to find ways to earn a living.

That caused some social instability. Even if the drought was caused by climate change, the drought wasn't the cause of the civil war, but it set up conditions that made the war that much more possible, 

Again, you can see how complicated this is. There is no obvious, straight line cause and effect here. All we have is indications, and it's hard to make policy decisions based on murky cause and effect.

In addition to making it harder to make decisions on how to respond to climate change, the iffiness of the whole issue makes things easier for people who don't think climate change is real or a threat, to convince us to not do anything.

After all, why respond to something so shadowy and full of questions. You know there are going to be effects from climate change, but pinning down exactly what those effects are is tricky.

So, with every weather disaster, every war, every economic calamity in the near future anyway, we'll always wonder. How much, if any of this, was due to climate change? And how do we respond?

I'm sure we'll get more recommendations from the experts, but the leaked report shows that we, meaning all of us on earth, might have a pretty rough road ahead of us