U.S. President Obama warns of ‘dangerous droughts and floods’

United States President Barack Obama suggested this week that without cutting carbon dioxide emissions, the world will experience rising oceans, worse heat waves, floods and droughts.

“The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe,” Obama said Tuesday in his State of the Union address.

President Obama was alluding to researchers at both the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Earlier this month, NOAA reported that in 2014, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 0.69 degrees Celsius warmer than the above the 20th century average and the highest since 1800. 2014 was 0.04 degrees warmer than the global average in 2005 and 2010, NOAA said at the time, citing data gathered by GISS.

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GISS, which is managed by the Earth Sciences Division of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York. 

See this 2014 Global Significant #Climate Events Map from @NOAANCDC #StateOfClimate report: http://t.co/hHhiuMTDNB pic.twitter.com/QTAXjFf14i

— NOAA (@NOAA) January 16, 2015

GISS “incorporates surface temperature measurements from 6,300 weather stations, ship- and buoy-based observations of sea surface temperatures, and temperature measurements from Antarctic research stations,” NASA said in a release Jan. 16. “This raw data is analyzed using an algorithm that takes into account the varied spacing of temperature stations around the globe and urban heating effects that could skew the calculation. The result is an estimate of the global average temperature difference from a baseline period of 1951 to 1980.”

NASA reported Jan. 16 that the 10 warmest years since 1880, with the exception of 1998, have occurred since 2000. NOAA reported at the time that 2014 was 0.04 degrees warmer than the global average in 2005 and 2010.

“Record warmth was spread around the world, including Far East Russia into western Alaska, the western United States, parts of interior South America, most of Europe stretching into northern Africa, parts of eastern and western coastal Australia, much of the northeastern Pacific around the Gulf of Alaska, the central to western equatorial Pacific, large swaths of northwestern and southeastern Atlantic, most of the Norwegian Sea, and parts of the central to southern Indian Ocean,” NOAA stated of temperatures in 2014. 

“Since 1880, Earth’s average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius), a trend that is largely driven by the increase in carbon dioxide and other human emissions into the planet’s atmosphere,” NASA stated. “The majority of that warming has occurred in the past three decades.”

President Obama noted Tuesday that the United States recently announced it would double the pace at which it cuts carbon pollution.

“No challenge – no challenge – poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” he said. “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.”

NOAA reported in January, 2014 that 2013 was tied with 2003 as the fourth warmest year globally since records began in 1880.

At the time, GISS and NCDC noted that 1976 was the most recent year in which the global average temperature had been below average.

NASA noted Jan. 16 that scientists “still expect to see year-to-year fluctuations in average global temperature caused by phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña.” Those phenomena, NASA added, “warm or cool the tropical Pacific and are thought to have played a role in the flattening of the long-term warming trend over the past 15 years.”