Human actions are rapidly changing the world’s oceans, whether through overfishing, pollution or coastal development. But among the most intense pressures placed on the seas right now is humanity’s ongoing burning of fossil fuels, pumping dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which in turn has pushed sea temperatures to record levels.
The global ocean, which covers 70% of the planet’s surface, currently absorbs 90% of the solar heat trapped by humanity’s carbon emissions. This greatly moderates rising atmospheric temperatures and helps temper the intensity of the climate crisis. Put another way, the world would be a lot hotter by now if the ocean wasn’t taking in all this heat.
But the ocean’s absorption of this anthropogenic heat still has serious consequences.
[…] There is no question that the Arctic region is heating up rapidly. The obvious way to detect overheating is to use thermometers, and scientists have been tracking temperatures in the Arctic Circle for decades. What we now know is that the Arctic Circle is warming 4 times faster than Planet Earth as a whole is…
As the Arctic Circle warms up, what will the effects be? Let’s take a look at five facets of the approaching catastrophe.
Effect #1 – Distortions in the jet stream […]
Effect #2 – A blue ocean event (BOE) […]
Effect #3 – Collapse of the Arctic permafrost and carbon/methane release […]
Effect #4 – Rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet and sea level rise […]
Effect #5 – Collapse of the gulf stream and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) […]
If we review these five effects, it is easy to see why warming in the Arctic Circle has the potential to cause the collapse of civilization. The imminent disasters include:
Sea level rise from Greenland meltwater and AMOC collapse causing the destruction of coastal cities
Crop failures
Droughts and floods
Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels that accelerate global warming even more
Global weather pattern disruptions
Marine die offs
All these effects combined together, and interacting with each other, will be enough to cause the collapse.
The amount of ice on the Great Lakes has been incredibly low so far this winter. In looking at the ice concentration graphs and knowing the weather coming in the first two weeks of February, the Great Lakes may have already had the peak ice for this winter.
The graphs of whole-lake ice concentration this winter compared to the average ice concentration over the last 50 years show the story of not much ice. This isn’t a secret with the second-warmest December on record across most of the Great Lakes region. [...]
With the warm weather coming in the first two weeks of February, temperatures will be in the 30s, 40s and 50s around the Great Lakes region. Ice cover should continue to shrink. Even if we get a return to some normal cold in the second half of February it will be almost impossible for the Great Lakes to build ice back to a level higher than January.
The world’s main system for warning about heat stress on the planet’s coral reefs has been forced to add three new alert categories to represent ever-increasing temperature extremes.
The changes introduced by the US government’s Coral Reef Watch program come after reefs across the Americas were hit by unprecedented levels of heat stress last year that bleached and killed corals en masse.
“We are entering a new world in terms of heat stress where the impacts are becoming so pervasive that we had to rethink how we were doing things,” the Coral Reef Watch director, Dr Derek Manzello, told the Guardian.
This week, a climate and health researcher published a commentary in the journal Nature Medicine that takes the McMichael standard to its logical conclusion. By the end of this year, Colin Carlson, a global change biologist and assistant professor at Georgetown University, wrote in the commentary provided exclusively to Grist, climate change will have killed roughly 4 million people globally since the turn of the century. That’s more than the population of Los Angeles or Berlin, “more than every other non-COVID public health emergency the World Health Organization has ever declared combined,” said Carlson, who also runs an institute focused on predicting and preventing pandemics.
And 4 million lives lost due to climate change, a breathtakingly high number, is still an underestimate — probably a big one. The McMichael standard doesn’t include deaths linked to climate-driven surges of the many non-malarial diseases spread by mosquitoes, like dengue and West Nile virus. It doesn’t incorporate deaths caused by deadly bacteria, fungal spores, ticks, and other diseases or carriers of disease that are shifting in range and breadth as the planet warms. It doesn’t examine the impacts of wildfires and wildfire smoke on longevity. It doesn’t look at the mental health consequences of extreme heat and extreme weather and the related increase in suicides that have been documented in recent years.
The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.
A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.
Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.
I like to think the French physicist Joseph Fourier appreciated the irony that he, of all people, was the one who discovered the greenhouse effect. Here was a man who kept his Paris apartment tropically hot, who wrapped himself in blankets and wore an overcoat even in summer — a man who, in short, usually felt cold. Yet his calculations showed that Earth was in fact far warmer than it ought to be.
This image of our planet is the closest we get to a real-time view of how carbon dioxide builds up in our atmosphere. This is how CO2 accumulates over the course of 2021, the most recent year for which NASA makes the data available.
It was the 1820s. Fourier, in his fifties and already a renowned scientist, decided to estimate the Earth’s temperature purely from scientific principles. He took the amount of sunlight that warms the Earth and then subtracted off the amount of energy the planet radiates back to space. He came up with a temperature some 30 degrees Celsius — more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit — colder than our actual planet.
Fourier knew the Earth was retaining extra heat, but he didn’t knowhow. It fell to later generations of scientists to reveal that certain gases, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, block some of the infrared light that the planet radiates back to space. When these gases build up in the atmosphere, Earth temporarily emits less energy than it absorbs from the sun. To restore the energy balance, the planet warms.
Some of the world’s biggest automakers are still “grossly under-reporting” greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report, despite improvements in their estimates.
The research, undertaken by consultancy firms Carbon Tracker and Nomisma, was released on Wednesday and found car manufacturers ranked among the world’s highest carbon producers and needed to improve the way they declared their environmental impacts.
The report comes after Toyota suspended shipments of 10 diesel vehicles following an investigation into the accuracy of their emissions testing, and just months after the first “real-world” car emission tests began in Australia.
Climate change fueled the remarkable 2023 drought that drained major rivers, fueled huge wildfires and threatened the livelihoods of millions of people in the Amazon rainforest, scientists said on Wednesday.
Deforestation of the Amazon, the world’s largest and most biodiverse rainforest, has decreased rainfall and weakened the ability of trees and soil to retain moisture, researchers found. That made drought more acute and caused the forest to be less resilient to environmental destruction and events like wildfires. […]
The study is further evidence that global warming caused by human activity is accelerating the devastation of the world’s largest and most biodiverse rainforest. Parts of the Amazon have started to transform from rainforest that stores huge amounts of heat-trapping gases into drier regions that are releasing the gases into the atmosphere. The result is a double blow to the global struggle to fight climate change and biodiversity loss.
[…] “This summer across Canada has been absolutely astounding,” Lori Daniels, a professor in the department of forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “The word ‘unprecedented’ doesn’t do justice to the severity of the wildfires,” Yan Boulanger, a research scientist at Natural Resources Canada, said.
As bad as Canada’s 2023 wildfire season was—Europe, too, saw its largest wildfire on record, a blaze that consumed more than three hundred square miles in northeastern Greece—the conflagrations are predicted to keep growing. A paper that appeared last summer in the journal Fire Ecology warned that “increasing warming and drying trends” will make wildfires “more frequent and severe,” and a recent report from the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, a body established by Congress, predicted a future “defined by wildfires that are increasingly extreme, vast in scale, and devastating.” Another recent report, from the Federation of American Scientists, observed that the world is warming so fast that the models firefighters rely on to predict how blazes will behave have become obsolete. “Climate change is drying fuels and making forests more flammable,” the report said. “As a result, no matter how much money we spend on wildfire suppression, we will not be able to stop increasingly extreme wildfires.” […]
Once the U.S. government had pushed Native Americans onto reservations and seized their land, controlled burning ceased across much of the country. Then the U.S. Forest Service moved to eliminate wildfires entirely. Gifford Pinchot, who became the agency’s first director, in 1905, considered flames to be the enemy of the trees.
Trees are struggling to sequester heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) in warmer, drier climates, meaning that they may no longer serve as a solution for offsetting humanity’s carbon footprint as the planet continues to warm, according to a new study led by Penn State researchers.
“We found that trees in warmer, drier climates are essentially coughing instead of breathing,” said Max Lloyd, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and lead author on the study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “They are sending CO2 right back into the atmosphere far more than trees in cooler, wetter conditions.”
Through the process of photosynthesis, trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere to produce new growth. Yet, under stressful conditions, trees release CO2 back to the atmosphere, a process called photorespiration. With an analysis of a global dataset of tree tissue, the research team demonstrated that the rate of photorespiration is up to two times higher in warmer climates, especially when water is limited. They found the threshold for this response in subtropical climates begins to be crossed when average daytime temperatures exceed roughly 68 degrees Fahrenheit and worsens as temperatures rise further.
Climate change poses a threat to yields and food security worldwide, with plant diseases as one of the main risks. An international team of researchers surrounding Prof. Senthold Asseng from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now shown that further spread of the fungal disease wheat blast could reduce global wheat production by 13% until 2050. The result is dramatic for global food security.
Wheat is an essential food crop. Like all plant species, it is also struggling with diseases that are spreading more rapidly compared to a few years ago because of climate change. One of these is wheat blast. In warm and humid regions, the fungus "Magnaporthe oryzae" has become a serious threat to wheat production since it was first observed in 1985. It initially spread from Brazil to neighboring countries. The first cases outside of South America occurred in Bangladesh in 2016 and in Zambia in 2018. Researchers from Germany, Mexico, Bangladesh, the USA and Brazil have now modeled for the first time how wheat blast will spread in the future.
According to the researchers, South America, southern Africa and Asia will be the regions most affected by the future spread of the disease. Up to 75% of the area under wheat cultivation in Africa and South America could be at risk in the future.
[…] Convinced that the species is teetering on the brink of extinction, tens of thousands of monarch lovers have taken the butterfly’s fate into their own hands… Since the 1990s, when the overwintering colonies began a steep decline that lasted 20 years, people have been rearing eggs and caterpillars in mesh enclosures on their porches and kitchen tables and releasing the adult butterflies. […]
But a handful of recent studies have rocked the small and disputatious world of monarch science, suggesting, in the words of University of Georgia ecologist Andy Davis, “that everything we thought we knew about the monarch population is wrong” and that the butterfly does not need our help. In fact, scientists say that home rearing and commercial breeding of monarchs — and the release of them at weddings, funerals, and other events — is one of biggest threats the butterfly now faces. […]
Monarch scientists are split into two camps, with one group continuing to maintain that the loss of milkweed is threatening the butterfly in its summer breeding grounds and therefore fewer butterflies are reaching Mexico. For this reason, they insist, the species must be protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
The other camp... contends that it is problems encountered during the return trip to Mexico that have resulted in the diminished winter colonies, but not in the butterfly’s summer range in the U.S. and Canada, where the population has been able to bounce back.
The first known outbreak of a particular deadly fungus has hit Washington state, King County public health officials confirmed Tuesday.
The fungus, called Candida auris or C. auris, first emerged in the state in July, when a Pierce County resident tested positive for the fungus at Kindred Hospital, a long-term acute care hospital in Seattle, according to Public Health – Seattle & King County. No further cases were found at the time.
This month, another C. auris infection was confirmed in a patient who was recently admitted to Kindred, the public health agency said in a blog post. The patient was tested through a state Department of Health screening program that encourages early detection of multidrug resistant organisms, or organisms that can be resistant to treatment, like C. auris, the post said.
More than a week later, three other cases were confirmed at the hospital, all in patients who had tested negative for the fungus when they were first admitted — meaning the infection had started to spread in the state’s first known C. auris outbreak.
Microplastics, or plastic particles five millimeters or less across or in length, are so prevalent that they have been spotted all over the world. Tiny plastic flecks and specks have been spotted from the ocean's deepest point, the Mariana Trench, to the pristine reef area of the tiny, remote island republic of Palau. Now a recent study in the journal PLOS One reveals yet another location where microplastics have been identified — inside the bodies of Galápagos penguins (Spheniscus mendiculus), which are endangered birds.
[…] The research, led by scientists from the University of British Columbia, employed sophisticated computer models using data from both islands near populated areas and islands in areas where penguins tend to reside, tracing the evolution of microplastic particles as they make their way through the penguin's native environment. In doing so, they found that there is a rapid increase in microplastic accumulation and contamination throughout the Galápagos Islands food web until roughly the fifth year of an organism's life; then the uptake began to increase more gradually before finally plateauing.
A collaborative team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which runs the world’s largest field conservation program, has conducted first-of-its kind research into how global climate change affects African elephants. The work, published recently in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, shows that older elephants will have markedly decreased chances of survival…
[…] To get a clearer picture of what the elephants’ future might look like and what we can do to best ensure their survival, lead author Simon Nampindo, who completed this research as part of his Ph.D. in environmental conservation for UMass Amherst and who is now country director for WCS Uganda, and Timothy Randhir, professor of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst, built a systems dynamic model. “This model,” says Nampindo, “can look at all the different environmental and population dynamics within a system. For the first time, we’re able to get a comprehensive vision of what the future might look like for African elephants in the face of climate change.” […]
“We found that the older elephants will be massively affected by warming under every scenario,” says Nampindo. “Elephants are matriarchal—their leaders are the older cows, and the herds depend on their wisdom, long memories and ability to outsmart prey, and if they are lost to changing climate, it will wreak havoc on the surviving, younger herds, as well as change the genetic profiles and structures of the herd. There will also be ripple effects through the [Greater Virunga Landscape] GVL’s landscape.”
The return of sea otters and their voracious appetites has helped rescue a section of California marshland, a new study shows.
Sea otters eat constantly and one of their favorite snacks is the striped shore crab. These crabs dig burrows and also nibble away roots of the marsh grass pickleweed that holds dirt in place.
Left unchecked, the crabs turn the marsh banks “into Swiss cheese,” which can collapse when big waves or storms hit, said Brent Hughes, a Sonoma State University marine ecologist and co-author of the new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Researchers found that the return of the crab-eating sea otters to a tidal estuary near Monterey, California, helped curb erosion.
When two bison belonging to the Blackfeet Nation of Montana attempted to enter Canada in September, rangers from Parks Canada, the country’s national park agency, met them before they could cross the border and gently steered them home.
It’s not that American bison, or buffalo, haven’t been welcome in Canada. When bison were on the brink of extinction in 1907, the Canadian government moved nearly 700 of them by train from Montana’s Flathead Valley to Alberta to ensure the keystone species’ survival. The Canadian program was so successful that the animals had to be moved again, to what is now Elk Island National Park. There, for more than 80 years, genetically pure stock has served as the base for an ambitious program reintroducing bison across Canada, into the United States, and around the world.
White House adviser and veteran Democratic strategist John Podesta will assume John Kerry’s international climate portfolio when Kerry steps down later this spring. […]
Podesta will assume the title of senior adviser to the president for international climate policy. He will also remain in his current White House role overseeing the implementation of the massive climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act.
“We need to keep meeting the gravity of this moment, and there is no one better than John Podesta to make sure we do. John has – and will continue to be – at the helm of driving the implementation of the most significant climate law in history,” Zients said.
A report from the Texas Oil and Gas Association shows that the state’s energy industry is showing no signs of waning, boasting record levels of crude oil production as the federal government introduced further environmental regulations that industry leaders said are designed to hinder production.
The latest version of the group’s annual report said that oil and gas companies paid $26.3 billion in state and local taxes in 2023, $1.5 billion more than last year, due in part to record fossil fuel extraction throughout the state. The report also said the oil and gas industry employed more than 480,000 Texans who make an average of $124,000 a year.
Todd Staples, the association’s president, said the industry "has achieved these record-breaking milestones in spite of our federal government using every opportunity to thwart growth by delaying permits, canceling pipelines and introducing regulatory uncertainty.”
The lake that allows the Panama Canal to function recorded the lowest water level ever for the start of a dry season this year, which means that vastly fewer ships can pass through the canal. The extreme drought, exacerbated by an ongoing El Niño that is affecting Gatún Lake and the whole region appears likely to last into May.
The Panama Canal Authority has reduced daily traffic through the narrow corridor by nearly 40 percent compared with last year. Many ships have already diverted to longer ocean routes, which increases both costs and carbon emissions, while the global shipping company Maersk recently announced they will shift some of their cargo to rail. […]
Panama typically sees a dry season from January to May, but climate change has made rainfall patterns much less predictable. The result is that the increasingly severe droughts and extreme deluges can push canal infrastructure past its operational limits. Rising temperatures also evaporate a significant amount of moisture from the reservoir and its watershed.
India will start operating new coal-fired power plants with a combined capacity of 13.9 gigawatts (GW) this year, its power ministry said in a statement to Reuters, the highest annual increase in at least six years.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has cited energy security concerns amid surging power demand and low per-capita emissions to defend India's high dependence on coal. Power generation in 2023 increased by 11.3%, the fastest pace in at least five years. […]
Coal-fired output surged 14.7% during the year, outpacing renewable energy output growth for the first time since at least 2019. Green energy output rose 12.2% in 2023, an analysis of daily load dispatch data from the federal grid regulator showed.
Private equity giant Blackstone is constructing a colossal $25 billion empire of data centers in Arizona. The linchpin of this venture is the $10 billion takeover of data center operator QTS in 2021, marking one of the most significant investments in Blackstone's history. […]
Power shortages in important areas are a problem, and some sites may need new power lines, possibly causing higher costs for others on the grid. […]
The [Financial Review] report further says that QTS has had a tough time getting approval for its big projects, as seen in a recent clash in Manassas, Virginia.
Local residents and conservationists strongly opposed a proposed multibillion-dollar development, sparking a prolonged battle over an 850-hectare data center corridor.
Throughout history, philosophers have told us that in order to best prepare for the future, we should look to the past. Wisdom, knowledge and new perspectives can often emerge out of a greater understanding of what went before. And it’s no different when it comes to predicting how nature will respond to projected climate change.
A new paleoecological study based on environmental records going as far back as 119,000 years ago suggests that Southeast Asia’s forests could be more resilient to climate shifts than previously thought, provided a diversity of ecosystems is maintained. […]
The new insights back up calls from conservationists to preserve a diverse mix of forest types in well-connected networks across Southeast Asia to afford the region the best chances of adapting to climate change impacts.
Catalonia, home to Spain's second-largest regional economy and popular tourist destination Barcelona, has a plan to live without rain by the end of this decade.
The multi-billion-euro strategy — which includes investing in desalination plants — has gained urgency as the region looks likely to soon declare a state of emergency for water, and global warming makes droughts in the future more common.
Government officials said levels in multiple reservoirs across the region have dropped below 16% — a critical point — following 39 consecutive months of below-average rain and two years of record heat. The announcement has raised concerns that Barcelona is approaching Day Zero, the moment when it will have to bring in water by tanker ships.
Harmful emissions from the industrial sector could be reduced by up to 85% across the world, according to new research.
The sector, which includes iron and steel, chemicals, cement, and food and drink, emits around a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions - planet-warming gases that result in climate change and extreme weather. […]
This new research, published in the journal Joule, looked at ways this could be achieved for industry. It found that established “medium to high maturity” technologies that involve carbon capture and storage, or fuel switching to hydrogen or biomass, can save on average nearly 85% of emissions in most industrial sectors.
[…] One of the biggest obstacles that the United States faces in its fight against climate change is getting renewable energy to the places that need the most electricity. Many of the best locations for wind and solar farms are, by their very nature, remote. And moving that energy elsewhere requires navigating a byzantine permitting process for transmission lines and winning over landowners—or, if they can’t be won over, then deciding whether and when the need for a given project outweighs their concerns. “The scale of the undertaking and the speed at which it needs to occur are incredibly daunting,” Romany Webb, the deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, at Columbia Law School, told me. “We’re talking about a massive build-out of new, large-scale infrastructure across the country, and we need to do it, like, yesterday.” […]
Thousands of proposed wind and solar farms are waiting for permission to connect to electric grids across the country. Whether those projects survive depends in part on how quickly new transmission lines are built.
Building the lines is, in many ways, the easy part. It’s getting them through the permitting process, from federal environmental reviews to local road-use agreements, that’s difficult. (The Grain Belt Express could require approval from more than twenty federal and state authorities.) In September of last year, Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., published a report from the consulting firm Grid Strategies that identified thirty-six planned high-capacity lines, from the New England Clean Power Link, in Vermont, to the TransWest Express, which will run from Wyoming to cities in the Southwest. All told, the report estimates, these ten thousand miles of “shovel ready” lines could increase wind and solar generation in the U.S. by eighty-seven per cent. Only ten have broken ground. “We really don’t have time to waste,” Christina Hayes, the executive director of A.C.E.G., told me. “We have about a lost decade on this.”
Global warming has caused widespread surface lowering of mountain glaciers, revealing that they are no longer appropriate for a climate archive.
As part of the Ice Memory initiative, Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) researchers analyzed ice cores drilled in 2018 and 2020 from the Corbassière glacier at Grand Combin in the canton of Valais, along with colleagues from the University of Fribourg and Ca' Foscari University of Venice, as well as the Italian National Research Council's Institute of Polar Sciences (CNR).
A comparison of the two sets of ice cores, published in Nature Geoscience, reveals that global warming has made at least this glacier unsuitable as a climate record.
Within two years, melting obliterated the soluble impurity records. The glacier has now been irreversibly destroyed as an archive for recreating important atmospheric aerosol components.
[…] Whether it's climate activist Greta Thunberg being prosecuted in the United Kingdom for allegedly breaching the Public Order Act or opponents of the Mountain Valley Pipeline being sued by the company in ways seemingly geared toward silencing their protests, those who speak out against the fossil fuel status quo tend to face massive legal consequences.
Burning fossil fuels is the primary catalyst of climate change, a development that currently risks plunging the planet into a future of apocalyptic weather conditions. So it might seem unreasonable to punish the people aiming to bring attention to problem as existential as nuclear war or a deadly pandemic. Yet as some activists explained to Salon, this is not a bug in our current legal system — it's a feature.
"If any of us are to survive the climate crisis, things need to change," Alex De Koning, a 25-year-old Just Stop Oil spokesperson and climate scientist told Salon in an email. "However, fossil fuel companies and those in power who thrived out of the broken system that has got us into this mess refuse to [change.] They are fighting to keep themselves on top and using their considerable wealth and influence to repress any who take them on."
