The Megadrought is Coming: Climate Scientists Predict Decade Long Droughts For Much of America

Daily Kos

THU FEB 12, 2015 AT 01:31 PM PST

The Megadrought is Coming: Climate Scientists Predict Decade Long Droughts For Much of America

bySteven DFollow

Don't shoot the messenger, folks.  

A recent research article published in the online journal Science Advances by 2050 major portions of the Southwestern and Great Plains states will suffer from droughts much, much worse than the ones we have seen over the last 15 years.  If you think things are at a crisis point, now, just wait.  According to the researchers:

[A]n empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models to show that these models project significantly drier conditions in the later half of the 21st century compared to the 20th century and earlier paleoclimatic intervals. This desiccation is consistent across most of the models and moisture balance variables, indicating a coherent and robust drying response to warming despite the diversity of models and metrics analyzed. Notably, future drought risk will likely exceed even the driest centuries of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (1100–1300 CE) in both moderate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) future emissions scenarios, leading to unprecedented drought conditions during the last millennium.

Let's put that in non-specialist terms, shall we.  

The coming drought age – caused by higher temperatures under climate change – will make it nearly impossible to carry on with current life-as-normal conditions across a vast swathe of the country.

The droughts will be far worse than the one in California – or those seen in ancient times, such as the calamity that led to the decline of the Anasazi civilizations in the 13th century, the researchers said.

“The 21st-century projections make the [previous] mega-droughts seem like quaint walks through the garden of Eden,” said Jason Smerdon, a co-author and climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

When someone starts talking about mega droughts that would dwarf any ever experienced in the region in nearly a thousand years, I sit up and take notice.  And just to be clear, the droughts in the region during the Medieval era were significant, and likely were a major contributor to the end of one of the longest lasting Pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, the "Ancient Pueblo peoples" Anasazi.

For those of you unfamiliar with the "Ancient Pueblo peoples" Anasazi, its civilization in what is now the Southwestern United States lasted for over a thousand years, from at least 100 B.C.E. (some scholars place them in the area as early as 1500 B.C.E.) until roughly 1300 C.E. Their pueblo communities extended throughout the mountains, mesas and grasslands of Southwestern Colorado, Southeastern Utah, Northern New Mexico and Arizona. The most famous of their cliff dwelling sites are ruins found in Mesa Verde National Park.  

Their civilization, based on a mix of dry land farming, hunting and trade in pottery goods collapsed sometime around 1300 C.E. in part due to a series of severe droughts that hit the region following a large increase in their population between 700 B.C.E. and 1100 B.C.E. when rainfall patterns were above average for an extended period of time. The loss of water resources was a major factor in their abandonment of their pueblo communities, along with other stresses believed to include including competition from peoples migrating into their traditional range, and increased warfare among various groups of Ancient Pueblo peoples Anasazithemselves.  

Nonetheless, there is little doubt of the severity of the droughts the region endured during that time.  

New tree-ring records of ring-width from remnant preserved wood are analyzed to extend the record of reconstructed annual flows of the Colorado River at Lee Ferry into the Medieval Climate Anomaly, when epic droughts are hypothesized from other paleoclimatic evidence to have affected various parts of western North America. The most extreme low-frequency feature of the new reconstruction, covering A. D. 762-2005, is a hydrologic drought in the mid-1100s. The drought is characterized by a decrease of more than 15% in mean annual flow averaged over 25 years, and by the absence of high annual flows over a longer period of about six decades. The drought is consistent in timing with dry conditions inferred from tree-ring data in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau

So, how extreme will be these mega droughts that are being predicted for much of the Western United States, including the regions that provide most of the crops we produce?  Pretty damn severe, in the nature of apocalyptic severity.  That is not hyperbole from me.  It's what the scientists are saying about our future prospects:

Eugene Wahl, a paleoclimatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Co., called the results "stunning."

"It is clear that they are seeing drought, especially in the Southwest, as being greater than any time in the past," Wahl said. "It is also clear that it is the higher temperatures in the future that is driving it." [...]

According to the new research, droughts in the Southwest and Central Plains will only worsen during the second half of this century. The closest comparison is to the 1930s Dust Bowl or 1950s drought, but lasting 35 years instead of just a few.

"Our results point to a markedly drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation," the authors write.

We are talking about extreme drought conditions that will extend from the Mississippi River to California that will last for thirty, forty or more years, literally leave our highly populated, water dependent society in uncharted territory, threatening our civilization's ability to adapt to what will be  a radically altered future environment.

No one knows what megadroughts, which can last from 30-50 years, look like. So researchers from NASA and Columbia and Cornell Universities went back 1,000 years to peer confidently into our drier future.

“Our results show it’s very likely, if we continue on our current trajectory of greenhouse gas emission and warming, that regions in the west will be drier at the end of the 21st century than the driest centuries during the Medieval era,” Cook told Quartz.

But just how likely is very likely? The study puts the chances of a megadrought in the central plains and southwest sometime between 2050-2099 at above 80%. That’s compared with just a 5-10% risk from 1950-2000. Even the milder emissions scenario predicts drying comparable to a Medieval-style megadrought in many locations. “This really represents a fundamental shift in the climate in western North America forced by these greenhouse gases—it’s a shift towards a much drier baseline than anything that anyone alive today has experienced,” said Cook. [...]

When asked how a megadrought, if it started today, would affect in the West, Famiglietti said that public water, aquifers, agriculture, rangelands, wildlife and forests would all be at risk. He added: “In California, we’re already in deep trouble. Imagine what the water situation will look like in 2075?  Depleted groundwater, decimated agriculture, irreparable damage to ecological habitat. Think apocalypse.”

He’s recently written about the water crisis in California, where he imagined the state as a “disaster movie waiting to happen.” After reading the new study, he told Quartz that it “presents a real doomsday scenario and a situation that is far worse than anything that I had been thinking about.”

That is a very frightening thought, particularly since our political and business leaders seemed to be doing their best to ignore or deny the existence of this threat. If we want our children and grandchildren to have any kind of hope for a sustainable future, one that does not risk total societal collapse, we need to change the way in which our nation currently functions at all levels.  Political goals, economic policy and cultural valuers all must change, and that change cannot come soon enough.  The current devastation and economic disruption caused by the droughts out West are just a taste of what is to come.

“We need to be thinking about intensifying drought and bringing it into our planning, but I think there are also a lot of opportunities, but it’s going to take more cooperation and more coordination to face the uncertainty of the future,” he told Quartz. “We can’t continue the status quo.”

10 Things You Need to Know About the U.S.-China Climate Deal

10 Things You Need to Know About the U.S.-China Climate Deal

Bill McKibben | Nove

Last night, just weeks after the largest climate mobilization ever, the world’s two biggest polluters—the U.S. and China—announced their most ambitious climate action yet. That is not a coincidence: it’s a sign that our pressure is working, and that we need to apply much more.

The announcement today is an achievement for everyone who’s held a banner, signed a petition and gone to jail—and a call for many more to join us going forward!

Here’s my take on what the just-announced plan from President Obama and Premier Xi is, and isn’t:

1. It is historic. John Kerry was right to use the phrase in his New York Times oped announcing the deal: for the first time a developing nation has agreed to eventually limit its emissions. This is a necessity for advancing international climate negotiations.

2. It isn’t binding in any way. In effect President Obama is writing an IOU to be cashed by future presidents and Congresses (and Xi is doing the same for future Politburos). If they take the actions to meet the targets, then it’s meaningful, but for now it’s a paper promise. And since physics is uninterested in spin, all the hard work lies ahead.

3. It is proof—if any more was needed—that renewable energy is ready to go. The Chinese say they’ll be using clean sources to get 20 percent of their energy by 2030—which is not just possible, it should be easy. Which they know because they’ve revolutionized the production of solar energy, driving down the cost of panels by 90 percent or more in the last decade.

4. It is not remotely enough to keep us out of climate trouble. We’ve increased the temperature less than a degree and that’s been enough to melt enormous quantities of ice, not to mention set the weather on berserk. So this plan to let the increase more than double is folly—though it is good to see that the two sides have at least agreed not to undermine the 2 degrees Celsius warming target, the one tiny achievement of the 2009 Copenhagen conference fiasco.

5. It is a good way to put pressure on other nations. I’ve just come back from India, which has worked hard to avoid any targets of any sort. But the lesson from this pact is, actual world leaders at least need to demonstrate they’re talking about climate; it makes the lead-up to the global negotiations in Paris next year more interesting.

6. It is a reason projects like Keystone XL and fracking make even less sense than ever. If President Obama is serious about meeting these kinds of targets, then we need serious steps; the surest way to undermine this commitment would be to approve new pipelines or authorize other new fossil fuel developments like fracking. If you pledge sobriety and then buy a keg of beer, people are going to wonder.

7. It is another reminder that it is past time to divest from fossil fuels. The burgeoning divestment movement has been arguing not just on moral grounds, but also making the point that the future will inevitably lead to a downsloping curve for the old energies. This is another warning—for anyone who looks more than a few quarters out, the writing is on the wall that the fossil fuel era is on its way out.

8. It’s not, in any way, a stretch goal. These numbers are easy—if you were really being cynical, you could say they’re trying to carefully manage a slow retreat from fossil fuels instead of really putting carbon on the run. The Germans, for instance, will be moving in on 60 percent of their energy from clean sources by the mid-2020s, when we’ll still be cutting carbon emissions by small increments.

9. It is—and this is the real key—a reminder that movements work. President Obama first endorsed the 80 percent by 2050 goal he enshrined in this pact when he was running for president in 2007, a week after 1,400 demonstrations around the nation demanded that goal. This comes seven weeks after by far the largest global climate demonstrations in history, and amidst ongoing unrest in China about the filthy air in its cities.

10. It isn’t, in other words, a reason to slack off one bit in the ongoing fight for a livable climate, a fight we must continue at all cost. If we want this to be a start, and not a finish, we’ve got to build even bigger and more powerful movements that push the successors of these gentlemen to meet what science demands.

Today is an achievement for everyone who’s held a banner, signed a petition and gone to jail—and a call for many more to join us going forward!

The U.N. Just Released Its Final Report on Climate Change—and It’s Terrifying

The U.N. Just Released Its Final Report on Climate Change—and It’s Terrifying

The IPCC says we need to stop burning fossil fuels by 2100.

(Photo: Hans-Peter Merten/Getty Images)

November 02, 2014  

 

By Kristina Bravo

Kristina Bravo is Assistant Editor at TakePart. 

 

Science has spoken: Fossil fuels should be phased out by the end of the century.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Sunday released the final installment of its four-part assessment, published over the past 13 months. The report, which draws on the analysis of 800 scientists, will serve as a guideline for government officials to come up with a global treaty on climate by 2015.

According to the grim conclusion, the planet will face “severe, pervasive and irreversible” damage if we don’t switch to zero- and low-carbon sources of electricity by 2100. Humans and ecosystems could suffer unprecedented losses from more severe and frequent weather events.

What can we do? The report suggests that we grow our use of renewable energy from its current 30 percent share of the power sector to 80 percent by 2050. Combined with technological and structural change, “behavior, lifestyle and culture” could have a considerable impact.

“We have the means to limit climate change,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said at the launch of the report in Copenhagen. “All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change.”

In the United States, President Obama has pledged to battle climate change and has proposed cutting carbon emissions from power plants by 30 percent by 2013. But the results of the midterm election could hamper similar efforts. The GOP, notorious for challenging climate science, is expected to take control of the Senate.

“If Republicans take back the Senate, I don’t see there being a lot of willingness to allow the administration to cede any authority to the U.N. on climate policies or elsewhere, and I don’t really think that kind of a position will hurt us politically going into 2016,” a Senate GOP aide told the Washington Examiner.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in his comment on the IPCC’s report, said that government officials need to act beyond politics.

“We can’t prevent a large-scale disaster if we don’t heed this kind of hard science,” he said in a statement. “The longer we are stuck in a debate over ideology and politics, the more the costs of inaction grow and grow. Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science so clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids.”

 

Why Climate Scientists Receive Death Threats

Why Climate Scientists Receive Death Threats

 

 

Tim Radford, Climate New Network | November 10, 2014 9:19 am |

 

 

If you don’t like the message on climate change, it seems that the answer is to shot the messenger.

According to a new book by veteran environmentalist George Marshall, thousands of abusive emails—including demands that he commit suicide or be “shot, quartered and fed to the pigs, along with your family”—were received by climate scientist Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre, who drew and published the “hockey stick graph” that charts a steep rise in global average temperatures.





Glenn Beck, a commentator on Fox TV, called on climate scientists to commit suicide. A climate denial blogger called Marc Morano claimed that one group of climate scientists deserved “to be publicly flogged.” And the late Stephen Schneider found his name and that of other Jewish climate scientists on a “death list” maintained by an American neo-Nazi website.

Very Strange

As Marshall points out in his absorbing, all-embracing, immensely readable book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, something very strange is going on.

Louis Pasteur’s revolutionary microbiology work on disease prevention never resulted in him having to think about how to use a gun. Jonas Salk never needed to fortify his house as result of working on the development of a polio vaccine.
Other scientists are trusted and respected. But the way climate scientists are now treated, Marshall argues, is without parallel in the history of science: “They have been set up to play that role in a climate storyline that, it would seem, cannot refute climate change without demonising the people who warn us about it.”

Forget, if you can, the people who seem to be whipping up these furious responses. Climate change can only be met or mitigated by action—and there are plenty of reasons why a very large number of people nod in agreement about what must be done and then fail to insist that it is done.

Dan Gilbert, a psychologist who won the Royal Society’s science book prize in 2007 with an examination of the puzzles of happiness, says that climate change is something unlikely to strike fear in the human heart anyway. It is impersonal, it is gradual, it is amoral and it isn’t—or doesn’t seem to be—happening now.
Other researchers have pointed out the alarming tendency, shared by all humans, to believe what they want to believe. Furthermore, climate change is not (death threats and public flogging fantasies aside) an immediate or an emotional issue. “A distant, abstract, and disputed threat just doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilising public opinion,” says the Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman.

There are other difficulties. When, for instance, will the awful things start to happen? How do you mobilise public opinion on an argument with uncertain timescales, imprecise outcomes and real puzzles about the costs and benefits of any actions? No one, Marshall says, is ever going to march under a banner of that says “100 months before the Odds Shift into a Greater Likelihood of Feedbacks.”

Marshall founded the Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), based in Oxford, England. He is a veteran of Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation, and there isn’t much doubt about what he thinks and knows to be true.

But the appeal of this book is that he lets others talk. He examines the political doublethink that seems to infect some legislatures in the U.S. He listens to the skeptics, the worriers, the oil giants, the conspiracy theorists, the celebrity environmental campaigners and the other ones who invoke imagery of death, fever and smoking ruin.

And he refers to the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which polled academic experts on global risk, and found an estimate of a “19 percent probability that the human species will go extinct before the end of the century”.

Altruistic Behavior

The title, direction and burden of this book seem to augur almost apocalyptic failure to confront the coming crisis. But, of course, Marshall pulls out an ace near the end.

He concludes that while human brains may be hard-wired to not worry about what may or may not happen in two generations, they also have an immense capacity for pro-social, supportive and altruistic behavior.
“Climate change is entirely within our capacity for change,” he says, “It is challenging, but far from impossible.”

That is good to know. And the book ends with some serious advice about how to make the case for action—and instead of capital punishment, we get generously shouty advice in capital letters. CLIMATE CHANGE IS HAPPENING HERE AND NOW, he reminds us. And he urges campaigners to DROP THE ECO-STUFF, especially the polar bears.

Marshall suggests that we really do try to contain global average warming to 2°C. He quotes John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who told the Australians: “The difference between two and four degrees is human civilization.” And, yes, do think about it.

"It Is Not Hopeless," says World's Chief Climate Scientist

Published on Tuesday, October 28, 2014 by Common Dreams

"It Is Not Hopeless," says World's Chief Climate Scientist

 

As Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change opens meeting to finalize latest report to the world, head of agency says meeting challenge of global warming will not be easy, but that it can be done

 

by Jon Queally, staff writer

'May I humbly suggest that policymakers avoid being overcome by the seeming hopelessness of addressing climate change,' said Rajendra Pachauri, chairperson of the IPCC, on Monday. (Photo: NASA)

"It is not hopeless."

That was the key message delivered in Copenhagen on Monday by Rajendra Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as the agency met to finalize the findings and language of its pending Synthesis Report, the last installment of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), designed to provide the world's policymakers with a comprehensive scientific assessment of the risks of human-caused global warming and climate change.

"We still have time to build a better, more sustainable world. We still have time to avoid the most serious impacts of climate change... But we have precious little of that time." —Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chair

"The Synthesis Report will provide the roadmap by which policymakers will hopefully find their way to a global agreement to finally reverse course on climate change," said Pachauri. "It gives us the knowledge to make informed choices, the knowledge to build a brighter, more sustainable future. It enhances our vital understanding of the rationale for action—and the serious implications for inaction."


What was critical for world leaders, policymakers and the global public at large to understand, he said, was that though it won't be easy to avert the worse impacts of the world's changing climate, it is possible.

"A great deal of work and tall hurdles lie ahead. But it can be done. We still have time to build a better, more sustainable world. We still have time to avoid the most serious impacts of climate change," he said.  "But we have precious little of that time."

The series of recent IPCC reports that have come out over the last twelve months and make up the AR5 assessment have shared the common theme of urgency and the Synthesis Report, once finalized, will be the official word from the world's top climate scientists as national government's send their delegates to next year's meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in Paris. Alongside the most thorough review of the available climate research ever conducted, the report will offer specific guidance on both mitigation and solutions to address the dangerous levels of greenhouse gases that are increasingly warming the planet's atmosphere and oceans.

"Much has been made of the growing peril of delaying the hard choices that need to be made to adapt to and mitigate climate change," said Pauchari. "I do not discount those challenges. But the Synthesis Report shows that solutions are at hand."

At the last high-level UNFCC talks, known as Conferences of Parties meetings or (COP), world leaders agreed to the goal of limiting global temperature increases this century to 2°C, but so far no binding commitments have been made, either at the national or international level, that scientists say would such a target.

Watch the IPCC's opening session:

Climate records are breaking so often now, we’ve stopped paying attention

The Washington Post

Wonkblog

Climate records are breaking so often now, we’ve stopped paying attention

By Chris Mooney 

October 21, 2014

 

Land and ocean temperature departure from average for September 2014. NOAA

 

On Monday, we learned from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that last September was the hottest of them all, out of 135 Septembers going back to 1880.The same was true for August 2014. And June of 2014. And May of 2014. What that means is that for each of these months, the combined average global land and ocean surface temperature has never been higher, at least since we started recording these temperatures back in the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.

These kinds of records are becoming so regular that they're starting to seem a lot less impressive. They're shrug-inducing. But to think of them in that way is a mistake. A little context shows just how dramatic the warming of the globe, on a month-by-month basis, has actually been.

You see, for 355 months now (up through September), "every month on this planet has been warmer than the 20th century average," according to Jessica Blunden, a scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. The Post's own Philip Bump, then writing at Grist, pointed out numbers like these back in November 2012, when the streak was only 332 consecutive months--but since then, every month has just added to the total. And now, we're just shy of 30 years of unbroken warmer-than-average months. The last month that actually was not warmer than the 20th century average, according to Blunden, was February of 1985. (It was merely average, she says.)

If you took out a 30-year mortgage that February, and never refinanced or sold--but just kept paying the unchanged payment--you'd have just a few months to go now. And during that entire period of the mortgage, the globe never saw a cooler-than-average month.

Or consider the human lifespan. Right now, in the US, it's 78.7 years. That's just over 944 months. In other words, for more than a third of an average US human lifespan, warmer-than-average months have been the unbroken rule. So will we ever have a colder-than-average month again? Blunden doesn't see it as very likely. "It can happen, but we just haven’t seen it in a long time, and we don’t really expect to see it any time soon," she says. A colder than average year is even less likely.

Granted, it is not as if most Americans actually feel these steady above-average temperatures, certainly not in a constant way. Nobody actually experiences a global average temperature. Less than a year ago, many of us were freezing amid the descent of the “polar vortex” into the continental US. But that’s local weather. There are constant cold and warm fluctuations in individual places. But warmth has predominated overall.

In its analysis of 2014 and its amazingly warm temperatures, NOAA also presents this figure, which takes a bit of interpreting—but once you figure out the punchline, it’s pretty stunning.

Source: NOAA

The gist here is that 2014 appears reasonably likely to wind up the hottest year on record, in NOAA's accounting. In fact, to tie that record, the remainder of the year merely has to be average for the 21^st century.

In climate science circles, there’s already much discussion of the likelihood of 2014 setting a new record. Climate researchers are particularly struck by the fact that prior record years, like 1998 (now the 3^rd warmest overall, according to NOAA)  have often been El Nino years, which are hotter than average. But so far an official El Nino has not yet been proclaimed.

Thus, a new global average temperature record in 2014 would be all the more extraordinary. So will it happen? "As we watch daily temperature results come in, it’s becoming ever more likely," says John Abraham, a climate scientist at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota who studies ocean warming and climate change. Abraham emphasizes, though, that there are several other global agencies besides NOAA (including our own NASA) that also track temperatures and they don't always perfectly agree on the ranking of record years.

"We may break the all-time temperature record without having an El Nino," adds Abraham. "Which means that the Earth shouldn’t be warm this year."

Global warming has often been likened to the situation of a frog in slowly boiling water. We’ve been the frog for almost 30 years.

Giant, Diverse Climate March Makes History, with Protests on Tap for Monday

  Environment  

AlterNet / By Cliff Weathers

Giant, Diverse Climate March Makes History, with Protests on Tap for Monday

Organizers say some 300,000 marchers made the climate action the largest in history, by far.

Photo Credit: Climate Action International, Flickr; Additional photos: Jeff Fox, StateoftheNet.net

September 21, 2014  |  

 

 

Organizers claim that more than 310,000 people attended the People’s Climate March in New York City on Sunday. And while it might not have been that big, it certainly was immense and easily the largest climate action in world history with people attending from across the United States and around the world, with 2,808 other climate rallies held today in more than 150 countries.

The New York march was attended by notable figures in politics, entertainment, science and the environmental movement, including Former Vice President Al Gore, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, primatologist Jane Goodall, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Rep. Keith Ellision (D-MN), Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), actors Mark Ruffalo, Ed Norton, Evangeline Lily, and Leonardo DiCaprio, rock icon Sting, and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“I'm here primarily for my children,” said Ruffalo to the media, “I want to see the leaders of the world hear the will of the people and begin to implement 100% renewable energy for 100% of the people.” Ruffalo heads the environmental organization Water Defense, and he marched alongside indigenous people.

Rep. Ellison gave an impassioned speech, where he called for a Robin Hood Tax — a tax on Wall Street also known as a financial transaction tax — as a key solution to addressing the climate crisis. The congressman said it would be a relatively tiny tax on trades of stocks, bonds and other financial instruments that would generate hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue.

Ellison says that the tax “would raise funds to help communities deal with the devastating effects of a rapidly changing climate and curb harmful high frequency trading.”

Thousands of environmental groups, labor, social justice and civic organizations from across the U.S. were represented from as far away as Alaska. Groups also attended from Canada, Mexico, China, India, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Turkey and South Africa.

Before the parade began, indigenous leaders hosted a prayer ceremony at sunrise. Later in the morning, various labor, faith, and environmental groups held their individual rallies along the route before joining the route along Central Park West and south of Columbus Circle on Broadway.

Marchers carried some imaginative and ​humorous signs, reminiscent of the artwork carried during the Occupy Wall Street movement. They included: "There is No Planet B," "Treat The Earth like UrAnus, Keep it Clean," and "I Couldn't Afford a Politician, so I bought this sign."

The parade itself began at 11:30 A.M., and there was a moment of silence at 1 P.M. to recognize those who have been adversely affected by climate change. The moment of silence was followed by boisterous cheering and music making from the attendees and marching bands along the route. However, not everything went smoothly. The unexpected high turnout made it less of a march and more of a "stand" north of Columbus Circle. At 79th St. and Central Park West, marchers stood and waited until 1:45 p.m. to move south along the route.  At times, the parade stretched more than 4 miles.

The front of the march arrived at a Climate Block Party on 11th Avenue near the Jacob K. Javitz Convention Center after 2:30 p.m. Marchers used the "block party" to plan for future climate actions and to view some of the artwork, signs, floats and banners used during the march. 

The rally comes just two days before the United Nations hosts many of the world's leaders at its Climate Summit in New York. Leaders of India and China, however, will not be attending.

The Obama Administration addressed the climate action and Tuesday’s Summit with a statement:

"We are taking this summit seriously, both to show the world that the United States is committed to leading the fight about climate change and to call on the other leaders to step up to the plate and to raise their level of ambition to take on climate change," said Counselor to the President John Podesta.

Many of the marchers—including those visiting from out-of-state—indicated that they would likely take part in the Flood Wall Street protest, which begins at Battery Park tomorrow and ends with an early-afternoon sit-in on the streets in the financial district in lower Manhattan.

Cliff Weathers is a senior editor at AlterNet, covering environmental and consumer issues. He is a former deputy editor at Consumer Reports. His work has also appeared in Salon, Car and Driver, Playboy, and Detroit Monthly among other publications. Follow him on Twitter @cliffweathers and on Facebook.