Balkan Flooding Due to Climate Change; More Deadly Avalanches Coming; Worry About Antarctica's Collapsing Ice Sheet

The Balkans’ flooding is linked to climate change. And here’s how. The worst flooding in southeastern Europe in more than a century has killed at least 35 people, destroyed as many as 100,000 homes and left entire towns and villages underwater in Serbia and Bosnia. The reason for this trend is basic physics: warmer water leads to more evaporation, and warmer air can hold more water. The oceans are roughly .6 degrees Celsius warmer than they were in the 1970s. Air temperatures have increased as well, and air holds about 7 percent more moisture for every 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature. Moisture gets concentrated through fronts, which then dump much of their water when they encounter a disturbance in the air or on the ground, such as land or a mountain range. The result is that small differences in atmospheric moisture can be naturally concentrated into intense, local weather events like the deluge in the Balkans, recent torrential rains in Florida and a mudslide that buried thousands of villagers after flooding in Afghanistan.

Global warming threatens more deadly Everest-like avalanches: Report.Mountaineering tourism in Nepal faces a threat from global warming as melting glaciers feed the risk of more deadly disasters such as the avalanche on Mount Everest that killed 16 people last month, scientists said on Tuesday.

How worried should you be about Antarctica’s ‘collapsing’ ice sheet? Once viewed as a stable area of ice at least two miles thick in some places, recent research makes Antarctica seem more like a ticking sea-level-rise time bomb. Mashable reached out to several top climate scientists, including co-authors of the newest findings, to help put the news into perspective.

Source: Daily Climate.

Paul Brown is a retired neuroscience professor whose primary interests are human rights, overpopulation, mass extinction, global warming, and the military-industrial complex. Links to all his Before It’s News articles are at /contributor/pages/189/210/stories.html.