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New normal?

“The difference between 2 percent growth and 3 percent growth is of major importance and has major implications for the entire economy, for financial markets, for the budget,” he says.

And the heart of the problem is job creation. Crescenzi and his colleagues argue that the U.S. economy could actually grow 2 percent a year without adding any new jobs. That's because the productivity of current workers is rising at about 2 percent a year.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, thinks some new jobs would be added in an economy growing 2 percent a year, but far fewer than one growing 3 percent.

“In a 3 percent world we'd create roughly 1.6 million jobs a year,” he says.

- What The ‘New Normal' Means For Americans, NPR.org, July 12, 2011.

2. Extreme weather is fast becoming the new normal. Canada and much of the United States experienced summer temperatures during winter this year, confirming the findings of a new report on extreme weather.

For two weeks this March most of North America baked under extraordinarily warm temperatures that melted all the snow and ice and broke 150-year-old temperature records by large margins.

Last year the U.S. endured 14 separate billion-dollar-plus weather disasters including flooding, hurricanes and tornados.

A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released Mar. 28, provides solid evidence that record-breaking weather events are increasing in number and becoming more extreme. And if current rates of greenhouse gas emissions are maintained, these events will reach dangerous new levels over the coming century.