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The Washington Post
Record warmth is sweeping through multiple continents this week after 2023 made history as the world’s hottest year on record. Temperature records are falling on nearly every continent and could put 2024 on pace to challenge 2023′s exceptional heat.
Where it’s winter, the unusually warm temperatures are making it feel more like June than January. Where it’s summer, historic heat has surged well past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Putting it all together, the global average temperature is at its highest level on record for late January.
The exceptional warmth — 20 to 30 degrees above normal in some places — stretches as far south as Australia and South Africa, and as far north as northern Asia. It’s being driven by a combination of weather and climate factors, including El Niño.
The Atlantic
The next climate extremes are both predictable and unprecedented, and they’re coming on fast.
From a climate perspective, 2024 is beginning in uncharted territory. Temperatures last year broke records not by small intervals but by big leaps; 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded, and each month in the second half of the year was the hottest—the hottest June, the hottest July, all the way through to December. July was in fact the hottest month in recorded history. Already, experts predict that 2024 is likely to be even hotter. But these heat records, although important milestones, won’t hold their title for long. “Getting too excited about any given year is a bit of a fool’s game, because we’re on an escalator that’s going up,” Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at the Columbia Climate School, told me. “We’re going to be doing this every year.”
Instead, the way to think about climate change now is through two interlinked concepts. The first is nonlinearity, the idea that change will happen by factors of multiplication, rather than addition. The second is the idea of “gray swan” events, which are both predictable and unprecedented. Together, these two ideas explain how we will face a rush of extremes, all scientifically imaginable but utterly new to human experience.
CBC News
Alberta's oilsands operations produce far more potentially harmful air pollutants than are officially reported, with the daily output on par with those from gridlocked megacities like Los Angeles, new research suggests.
The study, published today in the academic journal Science, measured concentrations of organic carbon emissions in the air by flying overhead and taking samples. Those numbers were compared to estimated amounts, prepared using ground-based data, reported by oilsands operations.
The researchers from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and Yale University found levels that were between 20 and 64 times higher than those reported by industry, depending on the oilsands facility.
Reuters
Exxon Mobil Corp… filed a complaint in a Texas court seeking to prevent a climate proposal by activist investors from going to a vote during the company's shareholder meeting in May.
This is the first time Exxon is seeking to exclude a shareholder proposal by filing a complaint in court. The case was assigned to a judge with a track record of ruling in favor of conservative causes.
Exxon says the investors are "driven by an extreme agenda" and that their repeated proposals do not serve investors' interests or promote long-term shareholder value.
Investors led by U.S. activist investment firm Arjuna Capital and shareholder activist group Follow This are asking Exxon and other oil majors to adopt tighter climate targets. They want Exxon to set so-called Scope 3 targets to reduce emissions produced by users of its products. Exxon is the only of the five Western oil majors which does not have such targets.
Texas Observer
Two consecutive summers of brutal heat and drought have left some parts of Texas with notably low water supplies going into 2024.
A wet year or a well-placed hurricane could quickly pull these regions back from the brink. But winter rains have disappointed so far. Monday’s downpours are the first in weeks for parts of the state and they won’t hit the watersheds that need them most.
Looking ahead, forecasters increasingly expect another scorching summer here this year.
That’s bad news for places like far South Texas, where big reservoirs on the Lower Rio Grande fell from 33 percent to 23 percent full over the last 12 months. A repeat of similar conditions would leave the reservoirs far lower than they’ve ever been, triggering an emergency response and an international crisis.
CNN
The West’s recent heat-driven megadroughts are unprecedented in at least 500 years, new research shows.
“Hot drought” — when extreme drought and heat occur simultaneously — has increased in severity and frequency over the last century due to human-caused climate change, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
“What we’re seeing is that megadrought conditions are being amplified by anthropogenically driven (human caused) temperature increases,” said Karen King, lead author of the study and assistant professor in physical geography at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Wednesday’s study builds on previous research, including one study that found the last two decades in the West have been the driest in 1,200 years, and the human-caused climate crisis made the yearslong dry spell 72% worse.
NBC News
More Americans, even Republicans, are accepting the reality that the Earth is getting warmer — but they’re still very much split on why and what to do about it.
Public opinions on global warming, including perceived risk and support for climate policies, have shifted considerably over more than a decade, with some of the most pronounced upward trends coming in deeply conservative states, according to new national surveys released by Yale University.
Researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that Americans are more worried about climate change now than they were in 2010, and support for renewable energy has also grown over time. But the findings showed that there are still discrepancies in how people talk about climate change and strong divisions over what should be done to address it.
Salon
The era of certainty is gone. The modern age is defined by heightened confusion and inexplicable world events… In the face of all this, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that our current system is dysfunctional. There is mass uncertainty about the future in America and other Western nations, bolstered by a series of alarming trends. […]
These symptoms of decline did not come out of nowhere. We have been following this trajectory for decades. America now ranks as a “developing nation” on a number of international indexes. Our condition is not terminal, but it is moving in the wrong direction. The overall health of our society is backsliding, and it seems conceivable that we could be approaching a major upheaval on the scale of the collapse of communism in the 1990s. […]
America is effectively becoming two societies…
Last March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its annual climate change synthesis report, which concluded that uncontrolled greenhouse-gas emissions will lead to “widespread adverse impacts on food and water security, human health and on economies and society and related losses and damages to nature and people.” Last June, smoke from wildfires in Canada drifted hundreds of miles down to the eastern seaboard of the U.S., turning the skies orange over New York City. July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. […]
In an era when multiple catastrophes are competing for primacy, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that our society is entering a death spiral. We are in a period of what UC Berkeley professor Alexei Yurchak calls "hypernormalisation," a term he coined to describe life in the Soviet Union during the last years of the Communist regime. It describes a moment when everyone knows the system is failing but no one has a viable alternative vision, so the state of decay comes to seem normal.
Mother Jones
When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires…
But underpinning the sordid Russian saga was an inescapably American one. As investigators pored over bank statements and real estate records, they added new layers to a map journalists and watchdogs have been piecing together for years—of a sometimes underground but often wholly legal international network in which the wealth of autocratic regimes was funneled through the firms, markets, and institutions of places that fashion themselves as the antithesis of Putin’s Russia. Through a labyrinth of corporations, trusts, and false fronts, oligarch money made its way into the hands of nannies in California, fracking firms in Texas, wealth managers in New York, startups in Silicon Valley, and factory workers in the Midwest. […]
America’s oligarchs, like Russia’s, are both the results of a system failure, and active engineers of that failure. They hang in many of the same circles. They dock their boats at the same marinas, compete for the same real estate and works of art, and stash their money under the same couch cushions. Their worlds converge on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, and in the corridors of power. There has been so much Russian oligarchic money sloshing around the United States, in fact, that it is sometimes hard to say where exactly one system ends and another begins.
The New York Times
The Biden administration is pausing a decision on whether to approve what would be the largest natural gas export terminal in the United States, a delay that could stretch past the November election and spell trouble for that project and 16 other proposed terminals, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The White House is directing the Energy Department to expand its evaluation of the project to consider its impact on climate change, as well as the economy and national security, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations. The Energy Department has never rejected a proposed natural gas project because of its expected environmental impact.
The move comes as Mr. Biden gears up for what is likely to be a contentious re-election campaign. He is courting climate voters, particularly the young activists who helped him win election in 2020 and who have been angered by his administration’s approval last year of the Willow project, an enormous oil drilling operation in Alaska.
BBC News
One of our planet's most vital defences against global warming is itself being ravaged by climate change. It was the main driver of the Amazon rainforest's worst drought in at least half a century, according to a new study.
Often described as the "lungs of the planet", the Amazon plays a key role in removing warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But rapid deforestation has left it more vulnerable to weather extremes.
While droughts in the Amazon are not uncommon, last year's event was "exceptional", the researchers say. [...] But human-caused climate change was the main driver of the extreme drought, according to the World Weather Attribution group, reducing the amount of water in the soil in two main ways.
Geographical
[…] Since the 1970s, we have already lost an estimated 20 per cent of the total Amazon rainforest. This brings us perilously close to the 25 per cent deforestation that scientists have warned would be the breaking point for the Amazon. Of the remaining 80 per cent, scientists warn that 38 per cent is suffering from some kind of degradation.
The Amazon is home to about three million species of plants and animals, and with 60 per cent of the Amazon found within the borders of Brazil, this giant country contains the jaguar’s share of this vital forest. So, this month’s news that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has declined by 50 per cent in 2023 to a five-year low is a rare piece of good news. Brazilian government data released in early January showed that deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon had dropped by half over 2022 to reach its lowest level since 2018.
The left-wing government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Lula), which has been in power since January 2023, has placed a lot of focus on reducing Amazonian deforestation after it soared to a 12-year high under Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. Lula has said that he intends to stop illegal land clearing – the biggest cause of deforestation – completely within the Amazon by 2030.
E&E News
An unusual collection of Senate leaders, British lords, environmentalists and a secretive lobbying group is urging the Biden administration to block a Brazilian meat processing giant linked to Amazon deforestation from offering shares to U.S. investors.
Opponents of JBS argue that its move to join the New York Stock Exchange would provide more cash and less oversight for a scandal-plagued company that’s a major climate polluter and the world’s largest meat processor.
There’s just one problem for the company’s critics: The Securities and Exchange Commission lacks the power to stop JBS from selling stock in the U.S. if the company is open with investors about its impact on the climate and other risks, according to financial experts.
“They could say, ‘Our goal is to literally destroy the planet,'” Ann Lipton, a former securities litigator who now teaches business law at Tulane University, said of JBS. “As long as that was accurate and complete, the securities laws have nothing to say about it.”
The Guardian
What a difference a year makes in the Brazilian Amazon. At the start of 2023, I wrote about the green shoots of the rainy season and feelings of hope inspired by the new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who promised to strengthen Indigenous rights and aim for zero deforestation. Twelve months on, both the vegetation and political optimism are drying up.
The most severe drought in living memory has finally been broken, but the rains are late and weak compared with previous years. The Xingu River is far lower than normal for January. The pulse of forest growth is also fainter – the new vegetation does not push out as far into the road as it did last January. The neighbouring cattle pasture is faring even worse. The forage grasses, known as capim, were so severely burned that they have not grown back, leaving the hillsides brown and the cows emaciated. Several of the poor, skeletal beasts have escaped their fields and wandered towards our community in search of food. Local people say more than a dozen cows have died of starvation at this one ranch, and countless others elsewhere.
Less obvious, but in many ways more worrying, is the dearth of leafcutter ants…
ABC News (Australia)
[…] According to the latest public records, the Canadian wildfires of 2023 have razed 18.5 million hectares of land to date — nearly triple the previous record. […]
Experts have found climate change made the extreme fire weather experienced in eastern Canada twice as likely during this period.
But with that much CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, have these megafires contributed to climate change themselves? […]
According to estimates, approximately 7 to 8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide was emitted, overall, from wildfires between January and October 2023.
Pep Canadell, CSIRO's chief research scientist and the executive director of the Global Carbon Project, says the higher-than-normal emissions came despite a less active fire season in the tropics and Africa.
When it comes to the impact on the climate, Dr Canadell says these fire emissions — though significant — are barely a blip on the radar compared with the decades of accumulated emissions caused by the fossil fuel industry.
Yale Climate Connections
Until recently, Antarctica’s ice has seemed surprisingly stable. In contrast to the far north, the southern continent’s massive ice sheets, glaciers, ice shelves (ice that floats on the ocean), and seasonal ice appeared to be reliably frozen: Enough snow fell in the high interior to compensate for what melted around the edges.
But the situation has changed. On balance, Antarctica is now losing ice. And more and more, scientists are concerned about that melting and its potential impacts — from sea level rise to changed ocean and air circulation to stress on wildlife — both local and global. Knowing that there is still much to learn, they are stepping up their research, despite the massive challenges in learning anything in such extreme conditions.
The Hill
Climate change has caused ocean temperatures to steadily rise, which, experts warned senators Wednesday, could significantly harm the fishing industry. […]
Rashid Sumaila, a University Killam professor and research chair at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, said fisheries catch about 120 million tons of fish annually…
“Now in the U.S., and the chair has given us some numbers that are quite similar, in 2020 commercial and recreational saltwater fishing alone generated over $250 billion in sales,” Sumaila said. “So lots of dollars, and the contribution to America’s [gross domestic product] is estimated to be over $110 billion a year, which supports 1.7 million American jobs in the marine sector. Huge, huge benefits to everybody.”
If climate change kills or forces fish to move, crucial food sources and jobs will be gone, Sumaila said.
Pressenza
Cristina Romera Castillo … is a chemist and oceanographer who studies the main component of the Earth’s hydrosphere, and observes the damage caused by human action. During her expeditions, she can spend weeks at sea studying the composition of the water. She claims that plastic has found its way into every corner of the ocean. She laments that the current generation will be the last to be able to marvel at the coral reefs that are dying because of warming seawater.
Romera is also the author of the book AntropOcéano (Espasa), in which she stresses that there are solutions to many of the problems that plague the ocean. She currently works at the Institute of Marine Sciences-CSIC in Barcelona and has received several international awards for her research on the ocean carbon cycle and the impact of microplastics on marine ecosystems. She is attending this interview in the midst of bureaucratic procedures to be able to continue her scientific work. Her message is clear: protecting the ocean is fundamental to protecting life.
We are giving it more bad things than good, and I call this oceanic karma: everything we give it returns to us. If we give it protection and conservation it returns food and protection to our shores. And it is able to sequester more carbon, to remove it from the greenhouse gas emissions we have launched into the atmosphere. Conversely, if we give it litter, it is going to give us back litter like plastics in our fish. The same with other kinds of chemical pollution that we are dumping into the ocean and then eating in our food.
Grist
Over the past several years, U.S. cities and states have passed hundreds of policies restricting the sale and distribution of single-use plastic bags. A new report says these laws have largely succeeded in their goal of reducing plastic bag use. The report — copublished by three nonprofits, Environment America, U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and Frontier Group — draws on industry and government data to suggest that plastic bag bans can eliminate nearly 300 single-use plastic bags per person per year.
“The bottom line is that plastic bag bans work,” said Faye Park, president of the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, in a statement. “People realize quickly it’s easy to live without plastic bags and get used to bringing a bag from home or skipping a bag when they can.”
CNN
Holden Ringer has experienced incredible highs trekking across America on foot. […]
Ringer didn’t really know then why he wanted to make the trip on foot but he’s found his purpose on the road – using his journey and experience as the ultimate pedestrian to shed light and advocate for walkable communities…
Ringer understood his cross-country trek would be far from glamorous, as the US isn’t the most walkable country. But he thought he could use his adventure to draw more attention to this and advocate for a more walkable society. […]
“If every close call that I had with a car – it’s been numerous – if that’s what stopped me, I wouldn’t have made it this far,” Ringer said. “I think a huge part of this walk is shining light on these issues.”
The Tyee
Fall in Prince William Sound, Alaska, is a stormy affair, with rain, wind, falling temperatures and diminishing daylight. But for kelp farmers like Skye Steritz, it’s a time to be outdoors in rubber boots and rain gear, prepping for the winter growing season. This includes long hours of what Steritz calls “line work,” the labour of stretching lines and building the floating arrays that by spring will support thousands of kilograms of kelp.
“Setting the anchors can be nerve-racking,” says Steritz, explaining that the arrays — rectangular networks of buoys and partially submerged lines — are kept taut through winter with heavy anchors.
Steritz and her husband, Sean Den Adel, live in the fishing town of Cordova, 15 kilometres from their remote kelp operation, called Noble Ocean Farms. They do much of the work with their small seiner, the Lindy. But they contract a larger boat to drop their anchors, which must land on precisely the right bit of muddy sea floor to keep the system under tension.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Monterey Bay Aquarium researchers strengthen the link between sea otters and long-term health of California kelp forests in a new study released today. The paper, published in the journal PLOS Climate, finds that sea otter population growth during the last century enhanced kelp forest resilience in the state. This finding reinforces the importance of conservation and recovery of the threatened southern sea otter and highlights a potential nature-based solution for restoring kelp forests along the California coast, and perhaps beyond.
The study revealed dramatic regional kelp canopy changes over a 100-year period, from 1910 to 2016. During this time there was a significant increase in kelp forest canopy along the central coast, the only region of California where southern sea otters survived after being hunted nearly to extinction for their fur in the 1800s. At the century scale, the species’ favorable impact on kelp forests along the central coast nearly compensated for kelp losses along both northern and southern California resulting in a slight overall decline statewide during this period.
Science
The machines that turn Tennessee’s Raccoon Mountain into one of the world’s largest energy storage devices—in effect, a battery that can power a medium-size city—are hidden in a cathedral-size cavern deep inside the mountain. But what enables the mountain to store all that energy is plain in an aerial photo. The summit plateau is occupied by a large lake that hangs high above the Tennessee River, so close it looks like it might fall in.
Almost half a century ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the region’s federally owned electric utility, built the lake and blasted out the cavern as well as a 329-meter-tall shaft that links the two…
At night, when demand for electricity is low but TVA’s nuclear reactors are still humming, TVA banks the excess, storing it as gravitational potential energy in the summit lake…
Pumped storage hydropower, as this technology is called, is not new. Some 40 U.S. plants and hundreds around the world are in operation. Most, like Raccoon Mountain, have been pumping for decades.
But the climate crisis is sparking a fresh surge of interest. Shifting the electric grid away from coal and gas will require not only a lot more solar panels and wind turbines, but also a lot more capacity to store their intermittent output—to keep electricity reliable when the Sun doesn’t shine and winds are calm.
Leiden University (Netherlands)
How does climate change affect the migration routes of birds? Mainly negatively, according to a new study from Yali Si from the CML. ‘It changes the timing of natural events differently in each region,’ she explains. ‘This can lead to a growing mismatch between the availability of food and the supposed arrival of the birds in a certain area.
‘For migratory birds, food must be available at precisely the right time and place,’ tells Si. ‘If the growth of grass or other food occurs earlier or later, the birds face the risk of arriving too late or too early.’ Climate change, however, alters the timing of the seasonal natural events such as the onset of spring. This presents a significant challenge for all animals, as they or their prey rely on vegetation as a source of food and to find shelter. However, for migratory species, such as certain birds, the problem is even more challenging.
AP News
Federal wildlife officials announced Wednesday they will consider adding 10 new species to the Endangered Species Act, including a big bumble bee that serves as a key pollinator across the United States.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials said they had completed 90-day reviews of petitions to add the species to the list and determined that listing may be warranted. The finding triggers reviews of the species’ status.
One of the more prominent species up for consideration is the Southern Plains bumble bee, a large black-and-yellow bumble bee that inhabits open prairies, meadows and grasslands in the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic states and the Plains states from Texas to North Dakota. It’s also found in the grasslands and savannas in the southeastern U.S., including Florida. Queens can grow as large as an inch (26 mm); workers can grow to as large as three-quarters of an inch (18 mm).
Financial Times
Scientists are increasingly clear: if the world wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it needs to eat less meat. […]
Global meat consumption is set to rise 14 per cent by 2030, compared with 2018-2020, forecasts the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
A few countries are beginning to embrace change, however. Denmark has perhaps gone furthest. In 2021, it updated its official dietary guidelines, recommending that adults eat just 350g of meat a week (equivalent to about three hamburgers), in line with proposals from the scientific EAT-Lancet commission.
Last October, Denmark also became the first country to publish an Action Plan for Plant-based Foods, which called plant-based (vegan) foods “the future” and set out steps to increase both the supply and demand. The government initially allocated DKr675mn ($98mn/£78mn) for a fund for promoting plant-based food. In addition, it is committed — at least in theory — to introducing a carbon tax on agriculture.
Financial Times
[…] Mount Etna normally provides an ideal microclimate for viticulture, with lower temperatures and better air circulation than the scorching Sicilian plains below. But, last year, southern Italy was hit by incessant rain in May and June, leading to a proliferation of the fungus Plasmopara viticola, which thrives in warm, humid conditions.
This fungus — first discovered in the US and introduced to Europe with the onset of transatlantic shipping — causes grapevine downy mildew and wreaked havoc in vineyards across southern Italy. Al-Cantàra’s autumn harvest was less than 60 tonnes — about half of the normal yield of 100 to 120 tonnes. […]
Italy’s coveted status as the world’s largest wine producer — held for the past nine years — was lost to France. Experts warn the pathogen’s impact will be felt this year too, highlighting the threats to Italian viticulture from climate change.
Italian grape cultivation once took place amid fairly predictable seasonal patterns. But increasingly erratic weather and the growing frequency of extreme events — such as droughts, excessive off-season precipitation, and hail — are posing new challenges.
