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Are we all doomed? How to cope with the daunting uncertainties of climate change
Nature
How doomed are we? It’s a question I have been asked as a climate scientist many times over the years, sometimes with “doomed” replaced by less printable synonyms. […]
The global increase in temperature is the simplest and most predictable dimension of climate change. It is also the one that scares me the most, partly because the direction of change is so certain and partly because heat is such a persistent and widespread hazard. For the large proportion of the world where it’s already hot during some or all of the year, just a couple of degrees of warming will cause great societal harm. In places with cooler climates, such as much of Europe, severe heatwaves can sometimes be even more deadly, because people there are less accustomed to heat. […]
But “what should we do?” is not a scientific question any more than “how doomed are we?” is. It depends on our values, and on the unscientific question of how to effect social change. Again, I don’t claim to have authoritative answers. […]
The important thing is to remain engaged. That means recognizing that doom is a state of mind, and that uncertainty about the planet’s future is now just part of the human condition. It means doing our best to keep both the climate crisis and the many other dimensions of human and planetary well-being in our view at the same time, both in their global and local dimensions. It means trying to live our values in ways consistent with those realities, as well as we can understand them.
‘How long before climate change will destroy the Earth?’: research reveals what Australian kids want to know about our warming world
The Conversation
Every day, more children discover they are living in a climate crisis. This makes many children feel sad, anxious, angry, powerless, confused and frightened about what the future holds.
The climate change burden facing young people is inherently unfair. But they have the potential to be the most powerful generation when it comes to creating change.
Research and public debate so far has largely failed to engage with the voices and opinions of children – instead, focusing on the views of adults. Our research set out to change this. […]
Our analysis indicates children are very concerned about how climate change affects the things and places they care about. Children also want to know how to contribute to solutions – either through their own actions or influencing adults, industries and governments. Children asked fewer questions about the scientific evidence for climate change.
The World Meteorological Organization's State of the Global Climate report confirms 2023 broke every single climate indicator
ABC News (Australia)
There's an ominous new significance to the phrase 'off the charts', according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), with 2023 breaking every single climate indicator.
The UN agency's annual State of the Global Climate report confirmed it wasn't just the hottest year on record, ocean heat reached its highest level since records began, global mean sea level also reached a record high and Antarctic sea ice reached a record low.
The impacts of extreme weather and climate events up-ended life for millions of people across the world and inflicted billions of dollars in economic losses, according to the WMO.
"Extreme climate conditions exacerbated humanitarian crises, with millions experiencing acute food insecurity and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes," WMO Secretary General Professor Celeste Saulo said.
Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory
Nature
When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.
For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.
Petrochemicals Are Killing Us, a New Report Warns in the New England Journal of Medicine
Inside Climate News
Use of petroleum-based chemicals skyrocketed during the postwar era, most of them entering the market with little concern for safety. Now, mounting evidence links petrochemicals to the rapidly rising prevalence of a slew of chronic and deadly conditions, a review published in the New England Journal of Medicine warned earlier this month.
Petrochemical production is 15 times higher today than it was in the 1950s, with about 350,000 chemicals now approved for use globally. Yet only 5 percent of these compounds have undergone rigorous safety tests—even as the rates of numerous ailments they’re linked to continue to rise.
“You can feel the effects of climate change, and know they’re connected to fossil fuels,” said author Tracey Woodruff, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco who directs the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment. “But the idea that fossil fuels are also connected to these chemicals we’re exposed to, and are impacting our health, I thought, wow, there’s a really important link here.”
The Case for Prosecuting Fossil Fuel Companies for Homicide
The New Republic
“Climate change is not a tragedy, it’s a crime.” This refrain, increasingly common among climate activists, encapsulates rising moral outrage at major fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP as more information has come to light about their knowledge and conduct regarding global warming. The essential fact pattern is this: Fossil fuel companies have long understood—with shocking accuracy—that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate change. Instead of shifting their business model or at least alerting the public to this threat, the companies concealed what they knew and executed a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign to spread doubt about climate science. They did this while privately acting on the predictions of climate science to protect their own business operations, for example by raising the height of offshore platforms in anticipation of sea-level rise. Internal documents show that their goal in deceiving the public was to delay or block policy or market responses that would curb their lethal but highly profitable conduct. They achieved this goal spectacularly, making trillions of dollars from their deception while most of humanity pays an increasingly devastating price.
A growing movement wants to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for this deception. The reality that polluters knew about climate change, lied about it, and should face meaningful consequences is an effective political narrative, and climate liability litigation is an increasingly promising strategy. More than 40 states, municipalities, and tribal nations are currently suing fossil fuel companies to make them pay for the damage they’ve caused. After years of frustration, climate litigants are now making meaningful procedural progress and have even notched a first win.
The atlas of unburnable oil: A study warns of the oil resources that should not be exploited
University of Barcelona
In order to limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5°C, it is essential to drastically reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in the atmosphere. This would mean not exploiting most of the existing coal, conventional gas and oil energy resources in regions around the world, according to research led by the University of Barcelona and published in the journal Nature Communications. The new article presents the atlas of unburnable oil in the world, a world map designed with environmental and social criteria that warns which oil resources should not be exploited to meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 to mitigate the effects of climate change.
The article is led by Professor Martí Orta-Martínez, from the UB’s Faculty of Biology and the UB Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio), and co-authored by Gorka Muñoa and Guillem Rius-Taberner (UB-IRBio), Lorenzo Pellegrini and Murat Arsel, from the Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands), and Carlos Mena, from the University of San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador).
The unburnable oil atlas reveals that to limit global warming to 1.5°C, it is essential to avoid the exploitation of oil resources in the most socio-environmentally sensitive areas of the planet, such as natural protected areas, priority areas for biodiversity conservation, areas of high endemic species richness, urban areas and the territories of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. It also warns that not extracting oil resources in these most sensitive areas would not be enough to keep global warming below 1.5°C as indicated in the Paris Agreement.
Capitalism Can’t Solve Climate Change
TIME
Amidst the gathering gloom about climate change and continuing growth in global greenhouse-gas emissions, the one bright spot appears to be clean energy development. 2023 saw another, much-trumpeted record for renewables installations worldwide, with an estimated 507 GW of new generating capacity being nearly 50 percent higher than 2022’s figure.
The positivity is misplaced. Even on the transition from dirty to clean power, the world is still failing. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that both electricity generation from coal and gas, and total power-sector CO2 emissions, continued to grow in 2023, to all-time highs of 17,252 TWh and 13,575 Mt CO2, respectively. In other words, even as renewables are growing fast, they are not yet growing fast enough to displace dirty power generation, which remains the single largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Worse still, the world is failing on the energy transition for reasons that strike at the heart of capitalist economies, and which will therefore be very difficult to surmount. The core issue here is easy to state. Most countries are relying predominantly on the private sector to drive faster renewables investment; private firms invest on the basis of expected profits; but profitability in renewables is rarely attractive.
Stick with an approach to climate change mitigation in which the private sector continues to be seen as the savior, and we are setting ourselves up to continue to fail.
Nations Are Undercounting Emissions, Putting UN Goals at Risk
Yale Environment 360
They are supposed to be the climate-savers’ gold standard — the key data on which the world relies in its efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions and hold global warming in check. But the national inventories of emissions supplied to the United Nations climate convention (UNFCCC) by most countries are anything but reliable, according to a growing body of research.
The data supplied to the UNFCCC, and published on its website, are typically out of date, inconsistent, and incomplete. For most countries, “I would not put much value, if any, on the submissions,” says Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate Research in Norway, a longtime analyst of emissions trends.
The data from large emitters is as much open to questions as that from smaller and less industrialised nations. In China, the uncertainties around its carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal are larger than the total emissions of many major industrial countries. And companies preparing data for its carbon-trading system have been accused of widespread data fraud.
Hypoxia is widespread and increasing in the ocean off the Pacific Northwest coast
Scientific Frontline
Low oxygen conditions that pose a significant threat to marine life are widespread and increasing in coastal Pacific Northwest ocean waters as the climate warms, a new study shows.
Researchers found that in 2021, more than half the continental shelf off the Pacific Northwest coast experienced the low-oxygen condition known as hypoxia, said the study’s lead author, Jack Barth of Oregon State University.
“We’ve known that low oxygen conditions are increasing based on single points of study in the past, but this confirms that these conditions are occurring across Pacific Northwest coastal waters,” said Barth, an oceanography professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “The 2021 season was unusually strong compared to past years but with climate change, we are headed in a direction where this may be the norm.”
The new study, published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, is based on data collected by an unprecedented number of research vessels and autonomous underwater gliders that were collecting measurements in the ocean during summer 2021.
Rampant Wildfires Are Threatening a Collapse of the Amazon Rainforest
Wired
The Amazon Rainforest is on fire. Or much of it, at least. On February 28, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research announced that 2,940 fires had burned in the Brazilian Amazon over the course of that month—a record-breaking number for a February. Many of them are still blazing.
Real-time satellite monitoring shows that so far in 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have ripped across 11,000 square kilometers of the Amazon, across multiple countries. Never have this many fires burned so much of the forest this early in the year. Scientists worry this is pushing the region closer and closer to a tipping point, where widespread degradation and repeated burning of the forest will become unstoppable.
“Fire is a contagious process,” says Bernando Flores, a researcher at Brazil’s Federal University of Santa Catarina, who studies changes in the Amazon. “If nothing is done to prevent fire from penetrating remote areas of the Amazon, the system may eventually collapse from megafires and become trapped in a persistently flammable, open-vegetation state.”
The Uphill Battle to Save the Amazon Rainforest
The New Republic
A scraping sound reverberated from the hull as our tiny wooden boat once again juddered to a halt, sending us lurching forward. One of our two-man Indigenous crew jumped from the stern into the shin-deep brown water and began to push the boat sideways in time to sudden bursts from the 10 horsepower motor. Eventually, with more grinding noises and much shouting, the boat swung around 90 degrees and floated free.
For more than 14 hours, from before dawn until after dusk, this scene repeated itself again and again as I traveled on a reporting trip up the remote Tahuamanu River near Peru’s border with Brazil, late last year. As the endless jungle fell away, we continually ran aground in water that was, at times, just inches deep or found our path blocked by a maze of decaying tree trunks poking out of the shallows. A journey that should have taken six hours stretched into two days, with a forced impromptu overnight encampment on the banks.
Greenland Cascading 30 Million Tons Per Hour
CounterPunch
Facing Future.tv recently conducted an interview about spooky new developments in Greenland. The ice sheet is cascading/gushing at unheard of rates never dreamed possible at this stage of global warming, or at any stage for that matter.
The video opens with a statement by Peter Wadhams, professor emeritus Ocean Physics, Cambridge University, a leading authority on Arctic sea ice (A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic, Oxford University Press, 256 pgs): “Greenland’s rate of melt in summer was something that we knew about, and it was gradually increasing, then suddenly it’s multiplied itself by about 8 times; this is 30,000,000 tons an hour. When I was last up there it was more like 30,000,000 tons per day. That’s just something unheard of and so we’re really worried about what’s going on with Greenland.”
As it happens, Dr. Wadhams’ expression “worried about what’s going on with Greenland” is a very strong candidate for ‘understatement of the year’ or maybe of the century. The rate of melt he discussed is 720,000,000 tons per day versus previous analyses of 30,000,000 tons per day.
Why Is the Sea So Hot?
The New Yorker
In early 2023, climate scientists—and anyone else paying attention to the data—started to notice something strange. At the beginning of March, sea-surface temperatures began to rise. By April, they’d set a new record: the average temperature at the surface of the world’s oceans, excluding those at the poles, was just a shade under seventy degrees. Typically, the highest sea-surface temperatures of the year are observed in March, toward the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. Last year, temperatures remained abnormally high through the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn and beyond, breaking the monthly records for May, June, July, and other months. The North Atlantic was particularly bathtub-like; in the words of Copernicus, an arm of the European Union’s space service, temperatures in the basin were “off the charts.”
Since the start of 2024, sea-surface temperatures have continued to climb; in February, they set yet another record. In a warming world, ocean temperatures are expected to rise and keep on rising. But, for the last twelve months, the seas have been so feverish that scientists are starting to worry about not just the physical impacts of all that heat but the theoretical implications. Can the past year be explained by what’s already known about climate change, or are there forces at work that haven’t been accounted for? And, if it’s the latter, does this mean that projections of warming, already decidedly grim, are underestimating the dangers?
“We don’t really know what’s going on,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told me. “And we haven’t really known what’s going on since about March of last year.” He called the situation “disquieting.”
Scientists fear planetary shift as record ocean heat enters second year
The Washington Post
At this time last year, scientists watched in disbelief as the world’s oceans surged to record levels of warmth and wondered what could have triggered it. The jump in sea surface temperatures was more dramatic than anything seen before.
The scientists explored a link to El Niño, the climate pattern known for warming up the Pacific Ocean, and potential warming influences from diminished shipping liner pollution and a major volcanic eruption. But nothing explained the influx of warmth as it held up for months on end and spread heat waves across nearly all of the oceans’ surfaces.
Now, the unprecedented streak of ocean heat is entering a second year. Scientists say it could represent a major change to Earth systems that cannot be reversed on any human time scale.
This Overlooked Feedback Loop Is Accelerating Climate Change
SciTechDaily
Scientists at Tufts University state that soil, which contains 80 percent of the Earth’s carbon, emits more greenhouse gases as droughts cause soils to crack due to drying.
The precision of climate models is influenced by numerous elements, including greenhouse gas emissions stemming from industrial operations and transportation, emissions from farm animals, the expansion of urban areas and the reduction of forests, as well as the reflection of solar rays off snow and other ground surfaces. Additionally, natural occurrences such as volcanic eruptions play a role and are factored into these models.
However, some other natural processes have been overlooked. Farshid Vahedifard, professor and Louis Berger Chair in civil and environmental engineering, points to an important one that lies directly beneath our feet and covers most of our planet above water.
In a study published in Environmental Research Letters, Vahedifard notes that soil stores 80 percent of carbon on Earth, and with increasing cycles and severity of droughts in several regions, that crucial reservoir is cracking and breaking down, releasing even more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In fact, it may be creating an amplified feedback loop that could accelerate climate change well beyond current predictions.
Restoring Ontario’s lost grasslands is as important as planting trees
The Narhwal
Most of the grasslands that once dotted Ontario have been lost to development and agriculture. Bringing back these carbon-rich landscapes would be good for birds, bees, butterflies and people.
Many old farm fields in southern Ontario look a lot like this one, which last November was a vast expanse of waist-high grasses the colour of washed-out gold, rippling in the breeze.On a sunny, mild late fall day, a few green leaves persisted close to the not-yet frozen ground. Dried-out stems crunched underfoot. Birds called out from the trees surrounding the field while grazing horses looked on from the property next door. Over the fence and down the road were more fields, rolling on and on in the distance. But something made this particular meadow different from the others — the line of people walking through it with bright orange buckets in hand, lifting out handfuls of seeds and allowing the wind to waft them away.
The people scattering seeds were part of a push to transform this former farm field into a tallgrass prairie, a type of habitat that has all but disappeared from southern Ontario.
Food prices could increase further due to climate change's effect on inflation around the world: Study
ABC News
The strain that rising global temperatures could have on on the agriculture industry and inflation around the world will likely cause food prices to increase even more, according to new research. Changes in average monthly temperatures have the strongest and most consistent correlation to productivity and inflation figures, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday.
Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany looked at historical food prices in different categories of food goods across countries around the world to explore how fluctuations in different climatic conditions have historically impacted food inflation as well as the implications of future climate change, Max Kotz, lead author of the study, told ABC News.
The higher food prices predicted in the future are tied to extreme weather events that could disrupt a sensitive global economy. "Shocks" to agricultural productivity is the main channel that underlies the impact of climate change to food inflation, Kotz said.
Climate change is bringing earlier springs, but it's wreaking havoc on animals
CBC News
[…] Climate change is altering the way animals, insects and plants behave, and has cascading effects in delicately balanced ecosystems.
With longer springs, ticks are moving northward, bringing the chance of disease in animals and humans alike.
Likewise, mosquitoes — another disease carrier — are coming out earlier and are able to breed more often, thanks to warmer and sometimes wetter weather conditions. Already mosquito-borne diseases have increased by 10 per cent in Canada.
And while people may think of the iconic polar bear, floating on a lone floe in the Arctic with nowhere to go, as a symbol of the effects of climate change, there's not a species of bear that isn't affected.
Biden's softer climate regulation shows big US bet on subsidies to decarbonize
Reuters
The Biden administration says its recent decision to scale back new climate regulations meant to force emissions cuts from cars and power plants will have a negligible impact on its overarching goal to halve greenhouse gas pollution this decade.
But whether that is true hinges on whether the U.S. succeeds in its parallel strategy - to use lucrative taxpayer subsidies to fuel a massive deployment of solar, wind and other renewable energy installations that Biden hopes will ultimately power America’s fleet of electric vehicles, along with its homes and businesses, according to researchers. […]
The United States is the world’s biggest historical emitter of carbon dioxide and President Joe Biden has promised the international community that it will push hard to decarbonize as part of global efforts to fight climate change, using a combination of regulation and subsidies.
But the recent decisions by his administration to ease auto emissions standards and to remove existing natural gas-fired power plants from CO2 curbs show how Biden’s administration is under industry pressure over the plans ahead of the November election. The transport and power sectors together account for half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, but the perception of heavy-handed regulation of those industries risks hurting Biden's reelection bid against … Donald Trump
Biden Administration Announces Rule Aimed at Expanding Electric Vehicles
The New York Times
The Biden administration on Wednesday issued one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, a rule designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.
Nearly three years in the making, the new tailpipe pollution limits from the Environmental Protection Agency would transform the American automobile market. A record 1.2 million electric vehicles rolled off dealers’ lots last year, but they made up just 7.6 percent of total U.S. car sales, far from the 56 percent target under the new regulation. An additional 16 percent of new cars sold would be hybrids.
Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history. Electric vehicles are central to President Biden’s strategy to confront global warming, which calls for cutting the nation’s emissions in half by the end of this decade. But E.V.s have also become politicized and are a flashpoint in the 2024 presidential campaign.
A warm, dry spring has U.S. forecasters worried about the upcoming wildfire season
NPR News
Most of the United States is expected to see warmer-than-average temperatures this spring, federal forecasters say, with dry conditions likely in the West.
That's raising concerns about wildfires, especially in parts of the Southwest, Great Plains, and the Upper Mississippi River Valley, said Jon Gottschalck, operations branch chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center.
The southern High Plains, in particular, which includes Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, is going to be "quite vulnerable to high wildfire risk, especially during high wind events," Gottschalck said Thursday on a call with reporters.
Opinion: Too Many Homes Rest on a Slab of Climate Delusion
Bloomberg
[…] Today’s climate bubble is one in which millions of houses across the country are overvalued or possibly worthless because they lack adequate insurance against the large and growing risks of natural disasters. Bloomberg Green recently offered a harrowing introduction to the issue with its first article in a series about how parts of the world are becoming uninsurable as the planet warms.
That piece focuses on the 36 state-run “insurers of last resort” that are stepping into the breach as private insurers abandon neighborhoods prone to wildfires, floods and other climate-fueled catastrophes. These rickety lifeboats are becoming overcrowded and springing leaks. […]
At the root of this problem is a widespread refusal to acknowledge the true price of the risks involved as an increasingly hot and chaotic atmosphere supercharges disasters. It’s a mad collective delusion…
US falls out of world’s top 20 happiest countries list for the first time ever
The Guardian
The US has fallen out of the top 20 happiest countries to live in for the first time ever, according to a new report.
In findings released on Wednesday, the World Happiness Report revealed that the US has slid from its 15th place last year to 23rd place this year.
The report, created via a partnership involving Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the World Happiness Report’s editorial board, pointed to happiness decreasing in all age groups for the US. It also found a significant decline among young people, who are now the least happy age group.
“This is a big change from 2006-10, when the young were happier than those in the midlife groups, and about as happy as those aged 60 and over. For the young, the happiness drop was about three-quarters of a point, and greater for females than males,” the report said.