[…] Consider a study published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which studied wet bulb temperatures (meaning the temperature measured by a wet thermometer in the shade as water evaporates off it). If wet bulb temperatures exceed 31°C (88°F), people cannot consistently perform physical labor without endangering their lives; in temperatures that exceed 35°C (95°F), a healthy human can die within a few hours without access to water or shelter. The authors of the PNAS study analyzed "wet-bulb temperature thresholds across a range of air temperatures and relative humidities" using bias-corrected climate change models. Their conclusions were sobering.
"Some of the most populated regions, typically lower-middle income countries in the moist tropics and subtropics, violate this threshold well before 3°C of [global] warming," the authors write. "Further global warming increases the extent of threshold crossing into drier regions, e.g., in North America and the Middle East. These differentiated patterns imply vastly different heat adaption strategies."
Put bluntly: If global temperatures increase by 1 degree Celsius or more above their current levels, billions of people will face wet-bulb temperatures every year so intense that their bodies will not be able to naturally cool themselves. Indeed, if global temperatures exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, 4 billion people will encounter intolerable heat and humidity on a yearly basis, often in regions where air conditioning and other forms of relief are not widely available. That could include more than 2 billion people in Pakistan and India, 1 billion in eastern China and 800 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Once global temperatures rise 3 degrees above pre-industrial levels, much of the U.S. Northeast, Southeast and Midwest will also regularly experience unlivable wet-bulb temperatures.
The Gulf Stream is almost certainly weakening, a new study has confirmed. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with grave implications for the world's climate.
The ocean current starts near Florida and threads a belt of warm water along the U.S. East Coast and Canada before crossing the Atlantic to Europe. The heat it transports is essential for maintaining temperate conditions and regulating sea levels.
But this stream is slowing down, researchers wrote in a study published Sept. 25 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
"This is the strongest, most definitive evidence we have of the weakening of this climatically-relevant ocean current," lead-author Christopher Piecuch, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said in a statement.
Two recent scientific studies led by Dr. Paul Wilcox from the Department of Geology at the University of Innsbruck provide new insights into Earth's climate dynamics, with a particular focus on the El Niño phenomenon. The results show how El Niño responds to natural factors over extended periods, while highlighting the increasing role of human activities in shaping this climatic phenomenon in the modern era. […]
The results of both studies reveal a shift in El Niño patterns, where human activities are now overprinting natural factors to shape its behaviour. “Climate change may have led to a climatic tipping point being crossed in the 1970s with the initiation of a more permanent El Niño pattern. Simultaneously, the introduction of the ‘Walker switch’ concept provides an alternative explanation for historical climate variations”, explains Paul Wilcox. Triggered by alterations in solar radiation, the ‘Walker switch‘ influences climate patterns across the globe, including high northern latitudes. These findings underscore the dynamic complexity of Earth's climate system, emphasizing the need for ongoing research to deepen the understanding of climate processes.
[…] Fire is a natural phenomenon; some species actually benefit from its effects and even those that don’t can be remarkably resilient in the face of flames. But as fires intensify, they are beginning to outstrip nature’s ability to bounce back. “Not all fires have the same impact,” said Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “These megafires are not good for ecosystems.”
Megafires, which dwarf typical wildfires in size, have an immediate ecological toll, killing individual plants and animals that might have survived more contained blazes. In the longer term, changing fire patterns could drive some species out of existence, transform landscapes and utterly remake ecosystems.
This incendiary age, which some scientists have called the Pyrocene, could lead to “a wholesale conversion of what habitats are where on the planet,” Dr. Hodges said. “Right now, everybody is talking about fires and smoke and who dies, because of the immediacy of this fire year. But really, truly, the long-term consequences are much more severe and sustained.”
It was supposed to be a good-news story out of the damaged Amazon rainforest: a project that replanted hundreds of thousands of trees in an illegally deforested nature reserve in Brazil. Then it went up in flames, allegedly torched by land-grabbers trying to reclaim the territory for cattle pasture. […]
Launched in 2019 by environmental research group Rioterra, the reforestation project took 270 hectares (665 acres) of forest that had been razed by cattle ranching on a protected nature reserve in the northern state of Rondonia and replanted it with 360,000 trees. […]
Then, just as the scarred brown land started returning to emerald-green forest -- its growing young trees absorbing an estimated 8,000 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere in three years -- the whole thing burned to the ground.
The Negro River, the Amazon’s second largest tributary, on Monday reached its lowest level since official measurements began near Manaus 121 years ago. The record confirms that this part of the world´s largest rainforest is suffering its worst drought, just a little over two years after its most significant flooding.
In the morning, the water level in the city´s port went as low as 13.5 meters (44.3 feet), down from 30.02 meters (98.5 feet) registered in June 2021 — its highest level on record. The Negro River drains about 10% of the Amazon basin and is the world’s sixth largest by water volume.
Madeira River, another main tributary of the Amazon, has also recorded historically low levels, causing the halt of the Santo Antonio hydroelectric dam, Brazil´s fourth largest.
A record-breaking number of wildfires are blanketing the Amazon with smoke, choking some Brazilian cities and further isolating many Indigenous villages. Over 2,700 wildfires have been reported in the region in the first 11 days of the month — the highest number for any October since 1998, when the record-keeping began.
Air quality became so poor last week in places like Manaus that officials had to postpone the city’s annual marathon, and major universities canceled classes. Philip Fearnside, research professor at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia, said hospitals in the city are full of people who are having respiratory issues. “That should be a wake up call to actually change government policies and individual behavior to actually contain global warming,” he said. […]
“It’s a very worrisome situation,” said Marcia Macedo, an associate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “We’ve seen large fish kills [an event in which numerous dead fish are suddenly observed in a body of water], water levels dropping way faster than normal — lake levels, river levels, like, six meters below what would be expected at this time of year — and definitely the potential for it to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”
Despite steps toward decreasing deforestation, uncontrolled wildfires are threatening environmental gains in Brazilian Amazonia, one of the world’s most critical carbon sinks and a region of high biological and cultural diversity.
An international team of scientists are raising the alarm in a letter published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. ‘Increasing wildfires threaten progress on halting deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia’ is co-authored by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the University of South Alabama, which led the study. Other contributors include Michigan State University, the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil and other institutions in North America, South America and Europe. […]
Dr Matthew Jones, a Reseach Fellow in UEA’s Tyndall Centre for Change Research, and a co-author of the letter, said: “Climate change has led to a rise in drought and extreme heat, priming forests to burn more often.On top of this, deforestation and the expansion of agriculture have damaged the integrity of the region’s forests and weakened their resilience to drought. As a result, wildfires have become far more common than they would be in a normally functioning rainforest.”
A season that roared to life in early May barely let up for months. By late June, this year had already seen a typical season’s worth of wildfires burning. Giant blazes raged through the heart of summer, leading to an international response to aid-weary firefighters. When the season should have been all but over, late September instead featured some of the season’s quickest growth in charred acreage.
But finally — though dozens of fires persist in various smoldering forms — the amount of newly charred land has slowed to a trickle, and near-future fire threats have vastly diminished as winter begins to settle in.
About 45.7 million acres (18.5 million hectares) have burned in 2023, surpassing the previous high of 17.5 million acres (7.1 million hectares) based on records dating back to 1983, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. […]
It is roughly equal to the annual totals from 2015 to 2022 combined.
Drought, forest fires and increasingly frequent storms. Climate change is destroying our forests. All over the world, people are looking for ways to keep them from dying out. Yet nature itself knows best what forests need to thrive.
While the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has been warming for decades, the annual extent of winter sea ice seemed relatively stable – compared to the Arctic. In some areas Antarctic sea ice was even increasing.
In 2018 the international scientific community agreed to produce the first marine ecosystem assessment for the Southern Ocean. We modelled the assessment process on a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). So the resulting “summary for policymakers” being released today is like an IPCC report for the Southern Ocean. […]
Southern Ocean habitats, from the ice at the surface to the bottom of the deep sea, are changing. The warming of the ocean, decline in sea ice, melting of glaciers, collapse of ice shelves, changes in acidity, and direct human activities such as fishing, are all impacting different parts of the ocean and their inhabitants.
From staple crops like potatoes and maize, to cash crops for wealthier customers like cocoa and coffee, climate change is having a widespread impact on global agricultural production.
Action on Hunger marked the recent World Food Day to highlight the growing consensus that climate change is already affecting crop yields and food security. “Not all crops are equally at risk,” explained the charity’s assistant director of communications at Action Against Hunger, Judith Escribano. While researchers warn that overall crop yields will decrease due to the warming climate, surprisingly changing rainfall patterns and severe weather may see some crop yields increase. For example, a 2019 study found that yields of crops like rice and wheat are already on the decline, while harvests of sorghum, which is more drought-resistant, rose during the same period.
“It’s not just weather that will impact crop yields,” continued Escribano. As the climate warms and changes, pests and diseases are spreading more widely – adding another layer of unpredictability to farming. Food storage may also become more challenging as rising temperatures make it more likely that insects or mould will destroy crops that are stored outdoors or in protected, but not cooled areas. […]
The charity has identified how climate change may impact eight key crops produced for the food industry: [1) Maize, 2) Wheat, 3) Rice, 4) Soy, 5) Potatoes, 6) Bananas and plantains, 7) Cocoa, and 8) Coffee.]
Climate change is expanding the amount of land suitable for farming in colder regions. While farming such areas could offset declines in crop yields elsewhere, it would also pose a threat to wild places once protected from cultivation by the cold.
As the planet warms, researchers expect farmers will have to adapt to achieve crop yields sufficient to feed a growing global population. “I would say that’s inevitable,” says Alexandra Gardner at the University of Exeter in the UK. […]
While that shift could help offset climate-related declines in yields nearer to the equator, it could also pose a threat to vast wilderness areas and the intact ecosystems they host. […]
“This is a real threat that vast areas in northern latitudes – very important for biodiversity, carbon balance, hydrological cycle, etc – will be under pressure for food production,” says Matti Kummu at Aalto University in Finland, who wasn’t involved with the research.
[…] Frigid temperatures and short growing seasons have long limited the decomposition of dead plants and organic matter in northern ecosystems. Because of this, nearly 50% of global soil organic carbon is stored in these frozen soils.
The abrupt transitions we’re seeing today – lakes becoming drained basins, shrub tundra turning into ponds, lowland boreal forests becoming wetlands – will not only hasten the decomposition of buried permafrost carbon, but also the decomposition of above-ground vegetation as it collapses into water-saturated environments.
Climate models suggest the impacts of such transitions could be dire. For example, a recent modeling study published in Nature Communications suggested permafrost degradation and associated landscape collapse could result in a 12-fold increase in carbon losses in a scenario of strong warming by the end of the century.
[…] Offsets were once the default way airlines cleaned up their greenhouse gas emissions. Some even let you check a box and pay an extra fee to offset your emissions when you booked your flight. But they’ve found out the hard way that trying to negate their emissions by simply paying someone else to plant trees or install solar panels doesn’t deliver results. […]
Now the new hot ticket is sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF. The aim is to develop a fuel that can easily swap in for conventional hydrocarbons, but that is produced with sources like crop waste that emit little to no carbon dioxide on balance… The Inflation Reduction Act is giving SAF a boost with nearly $250 million in competitive grants and tax credits. […]
However, demand is high and supplies are minuscule, making SAF upward of four times as expensive as conventional fuel. For most airlines, fuel is already their biggest or second-biggest expense.
So airlines are stuck in a holding pattern where their cheapest and easiest option for decarbonization doesn’t really work while their best bet is still wildly expensive. The consulting firm McKinsey estimated that decarbonizing aviation would require $175 billion in investments each year until 2050, almost $5 trillion in total. At the same time, demand for flights is poised to climb, and the window for keeping warming in check across the planet is sliding shut.
The upcoming winter season could be warmer than usual for much of the continental United States, with rain and snowfall estimates departing from average in both directions depending on the location, forecasters announced on Thursday. An updated U.S. winter outlook released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows how weather patterns may shape up across the country in the coming months — and how El Niño may impact the forecast.
"These outlooks provide critical guidance on the upcoming season for many industries and sectors of our economy, from energy producers to commodities markets to agricultural interests to tourism," said NOAA chief scientist Sarah Kapnick in a statement, noting that the months ahead could bring "a strengthening El Niño and more potential climate extremes in an already record-breaking year."
Tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin may now be more than twice as likely to strengthen from a weak hurricane or tropical storm into a major hurricane in just 24 hours due to climate change and warming waters, a new study suggests.
Hurricanes are also now more likely to strengthen more rapidly along the East Coast of the U.S. than they were between 1971 and 1990, the paper, published Thursday in Scientific Reports found.
Oceans have been warming rapidly in the last five decades, with about 90% of the excess heat from climate change being absorbed by oceans, Andra Garner, a climate scientist at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, and lead author of the study, told ABC News.
The vast ice sheet that covers most of Greenland has waxed and waned over hundreds of thousands of years. Today, it is up to 2 miles thick and so packed with ice global sea levels would rise 20 feet if it all melted. But scientists now know that at times deep in the past, the ice sheet shrank back so far that it was almost nonexistent.
For years, scientists have worried and warned that such a full- or near-full collapse of the Greenland ice sheet could once again happen if global temperatures rose too high. That would push sea levels up worldwide, further impacting coastal communities. Exactly how warm it would have to get to cross that threshold has been fuzzy.
The window of concern hovered about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels (Earth has already warmed about 2F, or 1.1C). If the ice sheet started down the path toward destruction, scientists warned, it would probably not return.
A new study published in Nature suggests there may be more wiggle room left for the ice sheet before it sets on an irreversible decline. Even if human-driven climate change pushes global temperatures above that 2C threshold, an increasingly likely possibility, the Greenland ice sheet could avoid full collapse if temperatures come back down relatively quickly, the study says.
[…] For decades, the Midwest has been a region left behind as manufacturing and other jobs dried up. […]
But some Midwestern leaders see their resilience to climate change as one means of reversing this decline. They’re putting their immunity from severe weather front and center, investing in making their cities more sustainable, and not shying away from the idea they can attract new residents… who are concerned about the climate.
“As the climate continues to change and people make decisions about where they will move as individuals or where they will relocate or start businesses, folks will consider—do we want do it in a place that’s more likely to see intense hurricanes and storms year over year, a place that has earthquakes constantly, a place where it is unbearable to go outside for weeks or months?” Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson says. “Or do they want to do it in a place that’s more insulated from these things, like Milwaukee.”
Large parts of the world, including China and the Midwest US, are on track to become too hot for humans to handle as accelerating global temperatures expose billions to heat and humidity so extreme their bodies will no longer be able to cope, according to a new study.
Researchers used temperature and humidity data along with climate models to analyze humanity’s exposure to potentially lethal heat as the world warms, looking at a range of temperature increases from 1.5 degrees Celsius to 4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
They found that above 2 degrees Celsius of warming, a significant portion of the world’s population will be vulnerable to “moist heat stress” with devastating consequences for human health, according to the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The world has already warmed around 1.2 degrees Celsius.
A project to develop a facility described as the United States’ “first commercial-scale offshore wind project” continues to move forward after its first turbine was installed in waters off Martha’s Vineyard.
In an announcement Wednesday, Avangrid — which is part of the Iberdrola Group — and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners said the Vineyard Wind 1 project would eventually have more than 60 turbines. It’s hoped that it will start delivering its first power this year.
“The project will consist of 62 wind turbines to generate 806 Megawatts, enough to power more than 400,000 homes and businesses in Massachusetts,” Wednesday’s announcement said.
[…] Europe's call to stop burning CO2-emitting fuels will run into the arguments of the world's biggest fossil fuel producers, consumers, as well as poorer nations that say they cannot cut CO2 emissions fast enough without significantly more financial support from wealthy nations.
Tensions are building. In a document submitted to the U.N.'s climate secretariat (UNFCCC) last month, Russia said it would oppose a phase-out.
"We oppose any provisions or outcomes that somehow discriminate or call for phase-out of any specific energy source or fossil fuel type," the document said.
Another submission, by Saudi Arabia, did not explicitly mention a fossil fuel phase-out. Saudi Arabia was among those to resist a proposal to phase down fossil fuels during last year's U.N. climate talks.
The resistance shows how hard it will be to strike an ambitious climate deal at COP28.
"I am not very hopeful," Carlos Fuller, U.N. climate negotiator for Belize, said of the fossil fuels phase-out - which Belize supports.
Last month, we heard yet again about the need to stop global warming at about 1.5 degrees centigrade above preindustrial levels. The International Energy Agency outlined a plan to meet that goal, and the United Nations secretary-general implored nations to get serious about cutting emissions to make it a reality.
The reality of rapid warming requires that every country create an adaptation strategy to become more resilient to the effects of climate change. Adaptation means lessening the harm caused by storm surges, floods, heat waves, fires and other weather-related perils. It requires new infrastructure, early warning systems and better awareness of how changes in the climate will harm things we value. The best adaptation strategies go further to pursue resilience — the ability to bounce back from destructive changes.
[…] Almost as scary as the temperature, however, has been the reaction — or, more precisely, the lack of it in Washington. But now an enormous opportunity looms for the Biden administration: Its chance to prove to the world that it takes the supply side of the climate challenge as seriously as the demand side.
Having begun to credibly cut demand for fossil fuels by boosting electric vehicles, heat pumps and solar panels with the the Inflation Reduction Act, the White House needs to start turning down the supply by stanching the spiking exports of fossil fuels.
The place where that change should begin is along the Louisiana coast, where a massive fossil fuel build-out is underway, with a vast and growing array of export terminals and pipelines. If the oil and gas industry has its way, America will expand its production more than any other country in the next decade (far more than China). LNG gas shipments — LNG stands for “liquefied natural gas” — from the Gulf of Mexico are by far the biggest source of that growth.
On Tuesday, the US National Academies of Science released a report entitled "Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States." The report follows up on a 2021 analysis entitled, "Accelerating Decarbonization in the US Energy System." When the earlier report was prepared, the US didn't have a decarbonization policy, although the growth of natural gas and renewables was dropping the emissions involved in producing electricity. Within the following year, the US passed an infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), all of which contained provisions intended to help cut the US's emissions in half by 2030. The Environmental Protection Agency has also formulated policies that should radically reduce the emissions of generating electricity.
In other words, shortly after the report's release, the US formulated a plan to accelerate decarbonization and a target of a 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030.
Rather than pat themselves on the back, however, the experts who prepared the original report recognized that the US's climate goals require it to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, and that will require lots of policy changes beyond the ones already in place. The new report is largely a call for people to start thinking of what we need to implement to ensure emissions keep dropping after 2030.