Top climate stories of this week: Hurricane Ian death toll crosses 100, Australia to see heavy rains, and more

Rotting fish and garbage lie scattered in Sanibel Island’s streets. On the mainland, debris from washed-away homes is heaped in a canal-like matchsticks. Huge shrimp boats sit perched amid the remains of a mobile home park.
“Think of a snow globe. Pick it up and shake it — that’s what happened,” said Fred Szott. For the past three days, he and his wife Joyce have been making trips to their damaged mobile home in Fort Myers, cleaning up after Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast. (Read more)
More heavy rains forecast for flood-weary Australia’s east
Australia’s two most populous states are preparing for heavy rains over the weekend as authorities on Friday urged residents in flood-prone regions to avoid unnecessary travel.

Starting late Friday, an intense weather system will bring widespread rain over eastern New South Wales (NSW) and northern Victoria likely resulting in riverine flooding, the latest warnings from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology showed. Some areas could receive up to 100 mm (4 inches), about a quarter of Australia’s annual average rainfall.
Many rural NSW towns are already inundated with television footage showing residents moving livestock on boats. Sandbags are being offered to help protect property, emergency crews said. The wild weather system is also likely to affect parts of Queensland and Tasmania before clearing out on Monday. (Reuters)
Climate change made summer hotter and drier worldwide, study finds
Human-caused global warming has made severe droughts like the ones this summer in Europe, North America and China at least 20 times as likely to occur as they would have been more than a century ago, scients said Wednesday. It’s the latest evidence of how climate change caused the burning of fossil fuels is imperiling food, water and electricity supplies.
The main driver of this year’s droughts was searing heat throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere, the researchers reported in a new study. Such high average temperatures, over such a large area, would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of greenhouse gas emissions, the scients said. (Read more)
Extreme hurricanes show time of climate change denial is over, says Vatican
Recent extreme weather events, such as the hurricane that devastated parts of Florida, show that the time for climate change denial and scepticism is over, a senior Vatican official said on Tuesday.

Cardinal Michael Czerny, a Canadian who heads the Vatican’s development office, made his comments at a news conference presenting The Letter, a new film on the climate crisis two-time Emmy award winner Nicolas Brown. The film takes its title from Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si (Praised Be) on the defence of the environment. It premiered at the Vatican on Tuesday and will be available free on YouTube Originals. Tuesday is the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, patron of the environment.
“The time is over for speculation, for skepticism and denial, for irresponsible populism,” Czerny said. “Apocalyptic floods, mega droughts, disastrous heatwaves, and catastrophic cyclones and hurricanes have become the new normal in recent years; they continue today; tomorrow, they will get worse,” he said. (Reuters)

Fast-melting Arctic ice is turning the ocean acidic, threatening life
A team of researchers has flagged the changing chemry of the western region of the Arctic Ocean after discovering acidity levels increasing three to four times faster than ocean waters elsewhere.

The team also identified a strong correlation between the accelerated rate of melting ice and the rate of ocean acidification. The study, published on Thursday in ‘Science’, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the first analysis of Arctic acidification that includes data from 1994 to 2020.
Scients have predicted that 2050, Arctic sea ice in this region will no longer survive the increasingly warm summers. As a result, the ocean’s chemry will grow more acidic, creating life-threatening problems for the diverse population of sea creatures, plants and other living things that depend on a healthy ocean. (Read more)