As we like to say at Adapt Ready, “the past is no longer a predictor of the future.” That’s certainly becoming the case given the recurring record-breaking news coming from the world’s leading institutions.
On January 20, 2016, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both announced that 2015 was the warmest year “by widest margin on record.” Much of 2015’s strange weather, from a snowless December on the U.S. East Coast to more than a decade’s worth of rain in 24 hours in Chile’s Atacama Desert (while record temperatures were recorded on the Antarctic peninsula), can be attributed to the periodic El Niño. However, climate change drove record temperatures likely independent of El Niño.
With 2016 predicted to be another record setter, will continued record-breaking galvanize further action to halt accelerating climate change or be perceived as a commonplace occurrence?
Regardless, climatic changes and extreme weather will continue to change in frequency and intensity over the coming years. And, what ultimately matters to communities, organizations and decision-makers are the smaller-scale impacts from these larger global macro trends.
Communicating how and when these increasingly hard to predict climate impacts will affect our customers is Adapt Ready’s core mission.
Watch this space.