Satellite data shows up climate forecasts

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More than 100 scientists and policy makers have warned world leaders that urgent action is needed to prevent climate change fuelling the spread of infectious diseases across the world.

The research consortium studying the epidemiological fallout of climate change said severe recent flare-ups of cholera and dengue showed the threat posed by warmer temperatures.

Existing infections are becoming more prevalent and spreading beyond their traditional regions of transmission, as warmer conditions extend the range of disease-carriers like mosquitoes.

Extreme weather like storms and floods are also overwhelming sanitation and health infrastructure in some of the world’s poorest countries, leading to more disease.

Summer 2023 was the hottest summer on record.

When United Nations (UN) Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the world in September that summer 2023 had been the hottest summer in recorded history, he did so in unmistakably vivid and dramatic language.

"Our planet has just endured a season of simmering — the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun," Guterres declared, later adding that "the dog days of summer are not just barking, they are biting."

Indeed, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the period of June through August 2023 had an average global temperature of roughly 16.77°C (62.19°F), which was an increase of 0.66°C (1.19°F) from the normal average.

This extreme heat isn't just miserable, it can be very deadly, triggering what are essentially mass casualty events, while also worsening wildfires, wracking up health care costs and damaging critical infrastructure at a time when people need their AC running at full blast, if they even have it. What's more, an estimated 90 percent of the human population is expected to suffer through more extreme heat in the coming years.

The world is expected to hit 1.4ºC of warming in 2023

Last month the WMO came out with another dire statistic: The planet's temperature is scheduled to hit 1.4º Celsius (2.5º Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Additionally the organization's provisional State of the Global Climate confirms that 2023 will be the hottest year on record (taking the place of 2016).

"Greenhouse gas levels are record high. Global temperatures are record high. Sea level rise is record high. Antarctic sea ice record low," WMO Secretary General Peterri Taalas said when discussing the report.

This figure is particularly troubling because experts believe that once the Earth warms by 1.5º degrees Celsius, a series of irreversible feedback loops will ensue, including the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean's Gulf Stream current and rapid melting from the Arctic and Antarctic to Greenland.

For the first time, a team of researchers has simulated what would happen if trapped greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere trigger a snowball effect, causing a dramatic rise in the planet's temperature.

And the results are ugly: "an almost-unstoppable and very complicated to reverse runaway greenhouse effect," according to a statement, which would quickly make our home "as inhospitable as Venus," with temperatures shooting up by hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of a few hundred years.

1. Hottest month on record
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2. Hottest ocean temperatures
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3. Lowest Antarctic ice cover
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5. Highest CO2 emissions
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6. Warmest year on record
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Next year is likely to surpass 2023 as the hottest ever, according to the U.K. Met Office, which projects that 2024 will likely measure 1.46 degrees C warmer than preindustrial times, but could conclude up to 1.58 degrees C warmer. The Paris Agreement aims to keep long-term warming below 1.5 degrees C.

“It’s important to recognize that a temporary exceedance of 1.5 degrees C won’t mean a breach of the Paris Agreement,” said Adam Scaife, a climate scientist with the Met Office. “But the first year above 1.5 degrees C would certainly be a milestone in climate history.”

The Goldbergs, however, don’t sound particularly happy with that explanation and have reportedly filed a complaint with Honda corporate. Unfortunately for them, while a quick search for “melting Honda” turns up a number of forum results, if you dig a little deeper, Honda owners aren’t the only ones dealing with similar issues. Still, considering how many complaints there are about melting Hondas, you have to wonder if it could change the type of exterior plastics it uses to make melting less likely to happen.

In November 2023, the United Nations released a report that analyzed nearly 200 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are non-binding national plans for climate mitigation.

Under the current NDCs, planet-heating pollution would fall just 2% below 2019 levels by 2030 — far short of the 43% reduction that would, per the U.N., be needed to stay within the targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement, Reuters reports. The agreement aimed to hold the global temperature increase to “well below 2°C [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit] above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] above pre-industrial levels.”

“Global ambition stagnated over the past year, and national climate plans are strikingly misaligned with the science,” U.N. secretary-general António Guterres said, per Reuters. “The chasm between need and action is more menacing than ever.”

For millions of Americans, summers are getting longer, winters are getting warmer and the impacts are showing up in their front yards.

A recent analysis by federal scientists shows that half of the country has seen its average lowest winter temperature rise by as much as 5 degrees in some areas over the past 30 years, altering what can grow where, particularly in areas normally prone to frost or freezing temperatures.

The data, reflected in the updated Plant Hardiness Zone Map in November, helps gardeners, farmers, insurers and other officials decide what to plant, how much to charge farmers for crop insurance and whether to expect insects like ticks carrying Lyme disease to continue migrating north. This was the first map update in 10 years.

Last year saw climate records “tumbling like dominoes” as scientists confirm 2023 the hottest on record so far.

Its average temperature was 14.98C which beats the previous hottest year set in 2016 by 0.17C, according to the EU’s climate change service Copernicus.

Met Office scientists believe this record could be short-lived however – their forecasts suggest 2024 could be even hotter and may rise more than 1.5C above the period between 1850-1900.
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July 2023 was likely the hottest month in the last 120,000 years – almost as long as modern humans have existed – while Antarctic sea ice has been at an historic low.

Each month from June through to December was hotter than any other corresponding month in a previous year, while every continent except Australia and many ocean areas saw record-breaking annual air temperatures for the year.

Planet-warming pollution in the US decreased nearly 2% in 2023 even as the economy grew, according to new data from the nonpartisan Rhodium Group.

The falling emissions, driven largely by retirements of dirty, coal-fired power plants, put US climate pollution at its lowest level since 1991, Rhodium analyst Ben King told CNN. But the numbers also show the nation is nowhere near hitting the aggressive climate targets laid out by President Joe Biden at the start of his first term.

In order to achieve Biden’s goal of cutting emissions in half by the end of the decade, King said the current reductions would have to triple to around 7% reductions per year. That would take much more wind, solar, nuclear and other zero-emissions energy providing electricity to the grid, more vehicles on the road powered by electricity or zero-emission fuels, and heavy industry like steel, cement and chemical manufacturers slashing their emissions.

For years, the fight against climate change has been symbolized by one number: 1.5.

Ever since countries agreed in 2015 to an ambition of restricting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the number has become synonymous with staving off catastrophic climate change.

But what if the battle to keep global warming from overshooting this limit has already been lost?

Scientists in Peru are using their knowledge of the changing climate to better understand its link to the growing cases of diseases spread through rodents and mosquitoes, as reported by The Washington Post, which noted “a perfect storm of illness is brewing.”

The relationship between climate and public health has been studied for ages. As our climate changes, so do those links.

In Peru, the number of cases of dengue, malaria, and leptospirosis hit an all-time high in 2023, according to the Post. In the capital city of Lima alone, cases of dengue rose to 30,000 in 2023, compared to fewer than 1,000 in 2022, according to Peru’s Ministry of Health.

Peru isn’t alone in seeing disease outbreaks increase in part because of the impacts of climate change.

In the American West, cases of the fungus known as valley fever have spiked because of the extreme drought the region has experienced for years. Bangladesh is another example of a country with an uptick in dengue cases; increased rainfall and temperatures were included in this World Health Organization report as contributing factors because wetter and warmer conditions offer favorable environments for disease-carrying mosquitoes to breed.

They found that the maximum daytime temperature during the warmer months from May to October had decreased by around 0.040 °C per year over the last 15 years.

Was it a mistake? The researchers cross-checked the data with other weather stations around the southernmost stations of the Tibetan plateau. They realized that the cooling trend wasn't just limited to the glaciers around Mt. Everest; it was across the entire Himalayas.

But how could this be? After all, a report published last year found that Himalayan glaciers melted faster between 2010 and 2019 than in the previous decade, suggesting the glaciers were getting warmer along with the rest of the world.

Researchers think that this cooling trend is the result of a well-understood phenomenon called katabatic winds.

On warm days, as sunlight heats the glaciers, the air just above the glacier's surface warms and rises. This creates a vacuum causing the cold air around the snowy peaks to rush down due to gravity.

As the phenomenon intensifies, it creates local katabatic winds which typically peak in the afternoon and can reach speeds of over 100 mph.

As average global temperatures rise worldwide, due to climate change, katabatic winds are growing more intense because the more heat that's warming and rising from the mountain's surface, the more it forces cold air down. That's what's causing the cooling trend over the last 15 years, the researchers reported.

Moreover, the researchers think the chilly winds may have partly helped in slowing the melting of these glaciers which otherwise could have been even worse.

But there is a catch.

We are at the throw-the-kitchen-sink stage of our climate change crisis as researchers, backed by big money, are increasingly researching drastic, large-scale geoengineering methods that were once considered taboo because they involve tinkering with natural processes and their consequences are largely unknown, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Are you frightened by climate change? Do you worry about what sort of world we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren? In the words of science writer and author of “The Uninhabitable Earth” David Wallace-Wells, “No matter how well informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.”

I would put it even more strongly.

If the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it. The reality is that, as far as we know, and in the natural course of events, our world has never — in its entire history — heated up as rapidly as it is doing now. Nor have greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere ever seen such a precipitous hike.

Think about that for a moment. We’re experiencing, in our lifetimes, a heating episode that is probably unique in the last 4.6 billion years.

Ocean heat sets the stage for more ferocious hurricanes. “The warmer the ocean, the more energy to fuel storms is available,” said Karina von Schuckmann, an oceanographer at Mercator Ocean International in France.

One day in the next couple of years, everyone in the world will lose a second of their time. Exactly when that will happen is being influenced by humans, according to a new study, as melting polar ice alters the Earth’s rotation and changes time itself.

The hours and minutes that dictate our days are determined by Earth’s rotation. But that rotation is not constant; it can change ever so slightly, depending on what’s happening on Earth’s surface and in its molten core.

These nearly imperceptible changes occasionally mean the world’s clocks need to be adjusted by a “leap second,” which may sound tiny but can have a big impact on computing systems.

Plenty of seconds have been added over the years. But after a long trend of slowing, the Earth’s rotation is now speeding up because of changes in its core. For the first time ever, a second will need to be taken off.

“A negative leap second has never been added or tested, so the problems it could create are without precedent,” Patrizia Tavella, a member of the Time Department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, wrote in an article accompanying the study.

But exactly when this will happen is being influenced by global warming, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Melting polar ice is delaying the leap second by three years, pushing it from 2026 to 2029, the report found.

Last year was marked by extreme weather events, with more billion-dollar disasters in the United States than any other year, according to NOAA. Among them were the Lahaina wildfire in Hawaii in August; Hurricane Idalia in Florida that same month; and severe flooding in New York in September.

Already this year, January and February have continued the global hot streak, marking nine consecutive months of a record-breaking temperatures.

In his Nature article, Schmidt said the inexplicable elements of the recent warming have revealed an "unprecedented knowledge gap" in today's climate monitoring, which drives home the need for more nimble data collection that can keep up with the pace of change.

He noted it may take researchers months or even years to unpack all the factors that could have played a part in the sizzling conditions.

"We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years," he wrote. "And we need them quickly."