Smithsonian Magazine
Between 2012 and 2021, around 7,000 humpback whales died in the North Pacific Ocean, likely from starvation caused by a marine heatwave.
Researchers came to this sobering conclusion after reviewing observations from a massive citizen science database. They traced the species’ population trends over the last two decades in a new paper published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
Once hunted to the brink of extinction, humpback whales have made a major comeback—aided in large part by a moratorium on commercial whaling that the International Whaling Commission implemented in 1986. (The moratorium remains in place today.)
This chart of ocean temperatures should really scare you
Vox
[…]
The thick orangey-red line that runs the length of the chart and hovers above nearly all the others is from 2023. The North Atlantic started breaking heat temperature records in March of last year.
Even more alarming is the departure that the new, shorter line from 2024 represents. It’s far above the rest, indicating this extreme, anomalous increase has continued into this year. […]
All this heat is not only a problem for marine ecosystems today, scientists say. It’s also a warning of what could come — including what could put human life in harm’s way.
Scientists Are Freaking Out About Ocean Temperatures
The New York Times
From his office at the University of Miami, Brian McNoldy, an expert in hurricane formation, is tracking the latest temperature data from the North Atlantic with a mixture of concern and bewilderment.
For the past year, oceans around the world have been substantially warmer than usual. Last month was the hottest January on record in the world’s oceans, and temperatures have continued to rise since then. The heat wave has been especially pronounced in the North Atlantic.
“The North Atlantic has been record-breakingly warm for almost a year now,” McNoldy said. “It’s just astonishing. Like, it doesn’t seem real.”
Extinctions could result as fish change foraging behaviour in response to rising temperatures
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)
Fish are changing how they search for and consume prey in warmer waters, with models suggesting extinctions become more likely due to this behaviour change, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change.
Led by researchers at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the researchers found that fish in the Baltic Sea respond to temperature increases by consuming the first prey they encounter. This change in foraging behaviour led to the fish selecting prey that tends to be more abundant and smaller. Small prey present in their environment at all temperatures included brittle stars, small crustaceans, worms, and molluscs.
Emergency atmospheric geoengineering wouldn’t save the oceans
American Geophysical Union
Climate change is heating the oceans, altering currents and circulation patterns responsible for regulating climate on a global scale. If temperatures dropped, some of that damage could theoretically be undone. But employing “emergency” atmospheric geoengineering later this century in the face of continuous high carbon emissions would not be able to reverse changes to ocean currents, a new study finds. This would critically curtail the intervention’s potential effectiveness on human-relevant timescales. […]
Stratospheric aerosol injection is a commonly discussed geoengineering concept based on the idea that adding particles to the stratosphere could help cool the surface of the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. […]
“The big picture result is that we believe we can control the surface temperature of the Earth, but other components of the climate system will not be so fast to respond,” said Daniel Pflüger, a physical oceanographer at Utrecht University who led the study. “We need to bring down emissions as fast as possible. We’re only talking about geoengineering because the political will for emission mitigation is lacking.”
The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is rapidly melting. Scientists now have evidence for when it started and why
CNN
Scientists have looked back in time to reconstruct the past life of Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier” — nicknamed because its collapse could cause catastrophic sea level rise. They have discovered it started retreating rapidly in the 1940s, according to a new study that provides an alarming insight into future melting.
The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is the world’s widest and roughly the size of Florida. Scientists knew it had been losing ice at an accelerating rate since the 1970s, but because satellite data only goes back a few decades, they didn’t know exactly when significant melting began.
Now there is an answer to this question, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
By analyzing marine sediment cores extracted from beneath the ocean floor, researchers found the glacier began to significantly retreat in the 1940s, likely kicked off by a very strong El Niño event — a natural climate fluctuation which tends to have a warmingimpact.
Since then, the glacier has been unable to recover, which may reflect the increasing impact of human-caused global warming, according to the report.
Rain Comes to the Arctic, With a Cascade of Troubling Changes
Yale Environment 360
In August of 2021, rain fell atop the 10,551-foot summit of the Greenland ice cap, triggering an epic meltdown and a more-than-2,000-foot retreat of the snowline. The unprecedented event reminded Joel Harper, a University of Montana glaciologist who works on the Greenland ice sheet, of a strange anomaly in his data, one that suggested that in 2008 it might have rained much later in the season — in the fall, when the region is typically in deep freeze and dark for almost 24 hours a day.
When Harper and his colleagues closely examined the measurements they’d collected from sensors on the ice sheet those many years ago, they were astonished. Not only had it rained, but it had rained for four days as the air temperature rose by 30 degrees C (54 degrees F), close to and above the freezing point. It had warmed the summit’s firn layer — snow that is in transition to becoming ice — by between 11 and 42 degrees F (6 and 23 degrees C). The rainwater and surface melt that followed penetrated the firn by as much as 20 feet before refreezing, creating a barrier that would alter the flow of meltwater the following year.
All that rain is significant because the melting of the Greenland ice sheet — like the melting of other glaciers around the world — is one of the most important drivers of sea level rise. Each time a rain-on-snow event happens, says Harper, the structure of the firn layer is altered, and it becomes a bit more susceptible to impacts from the next melting event. “It suggests that only a minor increase in frequency and intensity of similar rain-on-snow events in the future will have an outsized impact,” he says.
US spends billions on roads rather than public transport in ‘climate time bomb’
The Guardian
Roads, roads and more roads. The US is continuing to spend billions of dollars on expanding enormous highways rather than fund public transport, with a landmark infrastructure bill lauded by Joe Biden only further accelerating the dominance of cars at the expense, critics say, of communities and the climate.
Since the passage of the enormous $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021, hailed by Biden as a generational effort to upgrade the US’s crumbling bridges, roads, ports and public transit, money has overwhelmingly poured into the maintenance and widening of roads rather than improving the threadbare network of bus, rail and cycling options available to Americans, a new analysis has found.
Of reported funds dispersed to states, more than half – around $70bn – have been spent on the resurfacing and expansion of highways, a process that researchers have consistently found only spurs greater use of cars and therefore more congestion.
Just a fifth of the money has gone so far to public transit, with much of the remainder also facilitating more car driving, such as the refurbishment of bridges.
Exxon CEO blames public for failure to fix climate change
The Hill
[…] Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from Fortune that the world has “waited too long” to begin investing in a broader suite of technologies to slow planetary heating.
That heating is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and much of the current impacts of that combustion — rising temperatures, extreme weather — were predicted by Exxon scientists almost half a century ago. […]
Woods blamed “activists” for trying to exclude the fossil fuel industry from the fight to slow rising temperatures, even though the sector is “the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies.” […]
Woods’s comments Tuesday doubled down on the claim that the energy transition will succeed only when end-users pay the price.
“People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price,” Woods said.
ExxonMobil is suing investors who want faster climate action
NPR News
ExxonMobil faces dozens of lawsuits from states and localities alleging the company lied for decades about its role in climate change and the dangers of burning fossil fuels. But now, ExxonMobil is going on the offensive with a lawsuit targeting investors who want the company to slash pollution that's raising global temperatures. […]
ExxonMobil's lawsuit points to growing tensions between companies and activist investors calling for corporations to do more to shrink their climate impact and prepare for a hotter world. Interest groups on both sides of the case say it could unleash a wave of corporate litigation against climate activists. It is happening at a time when global temperatures continue to rise, and corporate analysts say most companies aren't on track to meet targets they set to reduce their heat-trapping emissions.
Report: Shell’s fossil hydrogen plant in Canada found to be emitting more climate-wrecking gases than it is capturing
Global Witness
In just a few years, hydrogen has shot into mainstream conversations about tackling the climate crisis. It is now one of the most hotly discussed energy topics, and a very particular form of hydrogen known as fossil hydrogen (or 'blue hydrogen’) is being pushed by the fossil fuel industry for government backing.
They claim it is climate friendly and can help with efforts to decarbonise our energy system, as it involves the use of carbon capture technology to trap and store emissions. One of the very few plants of this type,“Quest” is owned by Shell in Alberta, Canada.
Shell have boasted about the project as an example of how it is tackling global heating, claiming that the project demonstrates that carbon capture systems are “safe and effective” and is a “thriving example” of how this technology can significantly reduce carbon emissions.
But our new research reveals that Quest is in fact emitting more than it is capturing. Despite having captured 5 million tonnes of carbon across a five-year period, it has emitted a further 7.5 million tonnes of climate polluting gases during the same time. Each year, Shell’s plant has the same carbon footprint as 1.2 million petrol cars.
Critical 1.5C threshold breached over 12-month period for first time
Financial Times
The average global temperature has for the first time breached the critical benchmark of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels over a 12-month period, according to data from the European earth observation agency showing that last month was the hottest January on record.
As countries contend with bouts of extreme weather events, including floods and wildfires, the Brussels-based Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said the global mean temperature for February 2023 to January 2024 was the highest ever at 15.02C, 1.52C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period. […]
January’s average surface air temperature was 13.14C, 0.12C above the temperature of the previous warmest January in 2020. It was also 1.66C warmer than an estimate of the January average for 1850-1900.
Climate change is throwing the water cycle into chaos across the U.S.
NBC News
The water cycle that shuttles Earth’s most vital resource around in an unending, life-giving loop is in trouble. Climate change has disrupted that cycle’s delicate balance, upsetting how water circulates between the ground, oceans and atmosphere.
The events of 2023 show how significant these disruptions have become. From extreme precipitation and flooding to drought and contaminated water supplies, almost every part of the U.S. faced some consequence of climate change and the shifting availability of water. […]
For every degree of warming in Fahrenheit, the atmosphere can hold about 3%-4% more moisture. Global temperatures in 2023 were 2.43 degrees higher than they were in preindustrial times, meaning today’s storms can deliver a stronger punch. […]
Hotter temperatures are increasing evaporation and transpiration in some areas, making drought more likely and stressing plants, which was evident during a summer of extreme heat in 2023.
Climate change makes droughts more frequent, more severe and longer-lasting.
Historic winter heat wave smashes records in central U.S., fuels tornadoes
The Washington Post
The central United States has just witnessed what was probably its most significant February heat wave on record, after scores of records were not just broken, but demolished.
Half a dozen states registered their highest February temperature on record as did more than 130 cities and towns, including Minneapolis, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Detroit. Multiple locations also posted their highest temperatures ever observed during any of the winter months. […]
The heat also fueled an outbreak of damaging tornadoes in the Midwest, including what was probably Michigan’s farthest north tornado observed in February. At the same time, it contributed to massive wildfires that erupted in Texas and other parts of the Plains.
Climate-Fueled Extreme Weather Costs US Nearly $100 Billion a Year: Study
Common Dreams
The climate crisis is already having a major impact on the U.S. economy, and the damages are only going to increase.
A new report from the reinsurance company Swiss Re estimates climate change is currently costing the U.S. roughly $97 billion per year. This cost comes from the increased frequency of natural disasters that are connected to climate change, which is driven by the burning of fossil fuels.
"Climate change is leading to more severe weather events, resulting in increasing impact on economies," said the Swiss Re group's chief economist Jerome Jean Haegeli. "Therefore, it becomes even more crucial to take adaptation measures."
The human cost of climate-related disasters is acutely undercounted, new study says
NPR News
[…] A new study published in Nature Medicine looks directly at the human health impacts from severe weather like hurricanes, floods, and intense storms. The study examined Medicare records before and after weather disasters that incurred more than $1 billion of damages from 2011 to 2016. The analysis didn't include Hurricane Dorian, but it finds exactly what Storr saw: emergency admissions, and even deaths, are higher than expected for days and weeks after storms.
"Based off experience that we've seen unfold in the U.S. and elsewhere, we see that there's destruction and disruption to our ability to deliver the high-quality care we want to give patients in the weeks following the weather disasters," says Renee Salas, an emergency department physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. She's also a researcher at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the study's lead author. The study found that six weeks after a storm, the death rate in counties with the greatest destruction was 2 to 4 times higher than in less impacted areas.
That's a big jump—and those deaths, Salas says, likely went uncounted in the official death tolls.
People displaced by climate crisis to testify in first-of-its-kind hearing in US
The Guardian
Communities under imminent threat from rising sea level, floods and other extreme weather will testify in Washington on Thursday, as the region’s foremost human rights body holds a first-of-its-kind hearing on how climate catastrophe is driving forced migration across the Americas.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) will hear from people on the frontline of the climate emergency in Mexico, Honduras, the Bahamas and Colombia, as part of a special hearing sought by human rights groups in Latin America, the US and the Caribbean.
Two dead as largest wildfire in Texas history rages through the Panhandle
The Texas Tribune
Texas firefighters on Thursday struggled to contain a series of wildfires in the Panhandle that have killed at least two people and engulfed more than 1 million acres of land — an area larger than the state of Rhode Island, making the fire the largest in Texas history.
Authorities said they hoped cooler, snow temperatures and calmer winds on Thursday would help with fire suppression efforts. Wildfires have become more frequent and severe in the Western United States because of warmer and drier conditions, factors that are worsening because of climate change.
The Smokehouse Creek fire alone, which broke out Monday afternoon in Hutchinson County, surpassed the million acreage mark across Texas and Oklahoma. It is larger than the East Amarillo Complex fire in 2006, which blazed through 906,000 acres of land and used to hold the record for the state's largest wildfire.
Texas wildfires force major nuclear weapons facility to briefly pause operations
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
A wildland fire in the Texas Panhandle forced the Pantex plant, a nuclear facility northeast of Amarillo, to temporarily cease operations on Tuesday and to evacuate nonessential workers. Plant workers also started construction on a fire barrier to protect the plant’s facilities.
The plant resumed normal operations on Wednesday, officials said. […]
While the specific cause of the Smokehouse Creek fire has not yet been identified, climate change is making explosive wildfires more likely, with serious implications for the country’s nuclear weapons programs.
Since 1975, the Pantex plant has been the United States’ primary facility responsible for assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons. It is one of six production facilities in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nuclear Security Enterprise.
Decades after the US buried nuclear waste abroad, climate change could unearth it
Grist
[…] A federal report by the Government Accountability Office published last month examines what’s left of that nuclear contamination, not only in the Pacific but also in Greenland and Spain. The authors conclude that climate change could disturb nuclear waste left in Greenland and the Marshall Islands. “Rising sea levels could spread contamination in RMI, and conflicting risk assessments cause residents to distrust radiological information from the U.S. Department of Energy,” the report says.
In Greenland, chemical pollution and radioactive liquid are frozen in ice sheets, left over from a nuclear power plant on a U.S. military research base where scientists studied the potential to install nuclear missiles. The report didn’t specify how or where nuclear contamination could migrate in the Pacific or Greenland, or what if any health risks that might pose to people living nearby. However, the authors did note that in Greenland, frozen waste could be exposed by 2100.
Nearly 3,000 fires in Brazilian Amazon in February, new record
AFP via MSN
Nearly 3,000 forest fires were registered in the Brazilian Amazon this month, the highest for any February since records began in 1999, and made more likely by climate change, according to experts.
Brazil's INPE space research institute said Wednesday its satellites had picked up 2,940 fires so far this month, 67 percent more than the previous high of 1,761 recorded in February 2007 and four times more than in the same month last year.
"The climate factor certainly plays a fundamental role in this anomaly," Ane Alencar, scientific director of the IPAM Amazonia research institute, told AFP.
The northern part of the rainforest was hardest hit, particularly the state of Roraima, home to the Yanomami Indigenous reserve.
Major meatpackers are unlawfully deforesting Brazil’s Cerrado, report says
Mongabay
The cattle ranching industry in Brazil is deforesting one of the country’s largest ecosystems without proper authorization, often with the financial backing of major international banks.
Some of the country’s largest meatpackers are clearing parts of the Cerrado at an even faster rate than the Amazon Rainforest, a new report from U.K.-based NGO Global Witness says. The savanna ecosystem covers about a fifth of Brazilian territory and is an important carbon sink helping combat climate change.
“Like its neighbor the Amazon, it is being destroyed to feed the world’s appetite for beef — and it is major financial institutions who are bankrolling the bulldozers,” the report said.
These Cities Aren’t Banning Meat. They Just Want You to Eat More Plants.
The New York Times
Amsterdam won’t be giving up its Gouda. Los Angeles eateries will keep serving up combinations of bacon, chicken, egg and blue cheese that are essential to its signature Cobb salads. And Scots can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that Edinburgh has no plans to outlaw haggis.
Yet officials from each of these cities want people to consume less dairy and meat. They are signatories to the Plant Based Treaty, which was launched in 2021 with the aim of calling attention to the role played by greenhouse gases that are generated by food production.
The treaty is not binding and its effect varies wildly, ranging from just messaging to concrete plans to reduce dairy and meat served in institutions and schools and cut down on food waste.
Climate change: alarming Africa-wide report predicts 30% drop in crop revenue, 50 million without water
The Conversation
African countries will suffer significant economic loss after 2050 if global warming is not limited to below 2°C, a new study by the Center for Global Development has found.
Environment and energy economist Philip Kofi Adom is the author of the report. He synchronised many years of research by climate change scientists and researchers and found that west and east Africa will fare worst. […]
If climate change continues on its current trend, crop production in Africa will decline by 2.9% in 2030 and by 18% by 2050. About 200 million people risk suffering from extreme hunger by 2050. The crop revenue loss of approximately 30% will cause a rise in poverty of between 20% and 30% compared to a no-climate-change scenario.
How this will happen is that climate change will drive agricultural production down, so crop sales will suffer although scarcity will raise prices.
UK power station still burning rare forest wood
BBC News
A power company that has received £6bn in UK green subsidies has kept burning wood from some of the world's most precious forests, the BBC has found.
Papers obtained by Panorama show Drax took timber from rare forests in Canada it had claimed were "no-go areas". […]
In 2022, Panorama revealed the company had obtained logging licences in the Canadian province of British Columbia and filmed logs being taken from what the programme said was primary forest to a pellet plant owned by Drax.
Primary forests are natural forests that have not been significantly disturbed by human activity.
Coal mine climate change case challenges the government's use of 'drug dealer's defence' on emissions
ABC News (Australia)
There's a case happening at the moment that highlights the strange place we are at in the shift away from fossil fuels.
A Queensland environmental group took federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to court over two coal mine extensions, arguing that she did not consider the impacts of the emissions released when the coal is burnt.
The minister used two arguments that have been deployed for decades to justify Australia's coal exports.
They're known by environmentalists as the "drug dealer's defence" and the "drop in the ocean" argument.
Aerial surveys of Great Barrier Reef ordered as flights show extensive coral bleaching
The Guardian
The Great Barrier Reef’s management authority is preparing to carry out aerial surveys across the entire length of the marine park after helicopter flights confirmed extensive coral bleaching across the southern section of the world’s biggest coral reef. […]
Conservationists fear a seventh mass bleaching event could be unfolding on the reef.
On Wednesday, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said helicopter flights had covered 27 inshore reefs and 21 offshore reefs in the southern region off the Queensland coast and found bleaching was “extensive and fairly uniform” at all surveyed spots.
US SEC to vote on long-awaited climate disclosure rule, notice says
Reuters
Wall Street's top regulator will vote on March 6 on whether to adopt rules requiring U.S.-listed companies to report climate-related risks, the agency said in a notice on Wednesday, in a potentially major overhaul of U.S. disclosure rules.
The Securities and Exchange Commission rules aim to standardize climate-related company disclosures about greenhouse gas emissions, risks and how much money they are spending on the transition to a low-carbon economy. The agency says that such information is important for investors.
Currently, US securities regulations do not impose common standards for climate-related disclosures. But the agency says that investors need such information to be consistent and comparable across the many companies increasingly producing climate information on their own terms.
Climate Vulnerable Nations Reject US-led Push for Solar Geoengineering at UNEA-6
Center for International Environmental Law
Climate-vulnerable states successfully blocked a dangerous push to legitimize solar geoengineering technologies, in a significant development welcomed by the Center for International Environmental Law during the sixth United Nations Environment Assembly, UNEA-6, in the Kenyan capital.
Efforts by Switzerland, Monaco, Georgia, and Israel, which sought to establish an Expert Scientific Group on solar geoengineering, were halted when Member States made it clear there was no consensus to do so.
The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Japan attempted to further undermine existing UN moratoria on Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) during UNEA-6, but faced strong opposition from African, Pacific, and Latin American countries.
Trump wants to unravel Biden’s landmark climate law. Here is what’s most at risk.
MIT Technology Review
President Joe Biden’s crowning legislative achievement was enacting the Inflation Reduction Act, easily the nation’s largest investment into addressing the rising dangers of climate change.
Yet Donald Trump’s advisors and associates have clearly indicated that dismantling the landmark law would sit at the top of the Republican front-runner’s to-do list should he win the presidential election. […]
The sprawling federal policy package marks the “biggest defeat” conservatives have suffered during Biden’s tenure, according to Myron Ebell, who led the Environmental Protection Agency transition team during Trump’s administration. And repealing the law has become an obsession among many conservatives, including the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, widely seen as a far-right road map for the early days of a second Trump administration.