Showing posts with label Climate. Show all posts
Clear-Air Turbulence is fairly common, though usually relatively minor in its effect. Though scary as hell, sudden drops up to 150 feet pose no real threat to modern aircraft - 500-foot drops are far less common but also result in passenger injuries and survivable damage to the plane itself. More severe drops, however, have the potential to cause structural damage or other complications which make a crash inevitable. The last tend to be rare, but they do occur all over the world - primarily at the Horse latitudes with the most severe examples occurring over open water.
In short, the Bermuda Triangle is an ideal breeding ground for wind forces capable of causing an airplane to literally drop out of a clear blue sky but, while commonly turbulent, the formation of such an event - especially one which happens to coincide with the location of a plane in flight - are so rare as to be statistically insignificant.
Climate change is real, and it's coming. But we're all going to be affected in different ways. How will your country fare?
The folks at Eco Experts put together a great infographic based on data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation (ND-Gain) Index, an annual ranking of which countries are best poised to adapt to a warming world.
While the maps provide a great zoomed-out perspective of what's going to happen globally as the earth warms, there are a few caveats to keep in mind when checking it out:
First, these maps are based on country rankings, not comprehensive evaluations of each country. In other words, the best-ranked countries are only as great as they seem compared to the countries that are performing less well.
Additionally, the ranking looks only at the level of entire countries. All of the state-specific, region-specific, or city-specific data gets somewhat lost in this zoomed out perspective.
Take the United States, for example. It gets a green-light on this map. But what about specific parts of the US that aren’t as well-equipped to handle climate change as the country might be on average? Miami Beach, Florida, for instance, is poised to see sea levels rise between 6-7 feet by the end of the century; most of the city is less than 10 feet above sea level. Multiple parts of New York City are similarly vulnerable to climate change.
Thankfully, the US as a whole has the infrastructure to adapt; the government can force people in coastal cities like Miami Beach to move inland; we can also build new airports and transit hubs closer to the center of the country. And the map reflects countries' abilities to do just that.
Here's the graphic in its entirety:
The Eco Experts
