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Los Angeles Times
Earth’s worrisome warming trajectory continued unabated last month, with March marking the 10th month in a row that the planet has broken global heat records, international climate officials announced this week. […]
March was well above the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) international target for limiting the worst effects of climate change. The global average temperature measured about 3 degrees, or 1.68 degrees Celsius, warmer than the designated 1850 to 1900 preindustrial reference period.
What’s more, the global average temperature for the last 12 months — April 2023 through March 2024 — is the highest on record, at 2.8 degrees, or 1.58 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial average.
AP News
Humanity has only two years left “to save the world” by making dramatic changes in the way it spews heat-trapping emissions and it has even less time to act to get the finances behind such a massive shift, the head of the United Nations climate agency said. […]
“Who exactly has two years to save the world? The answer is every person on this planet,” Stiell said. “More and more people want climate action right across societies and political spectrums, in large part because they are feeling the impacts of the climate crisis in their everyday lives and their household budgets.”
The Guardian
The levels of the three most important heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere reached new record highs again last year, US scientists have confirmed, underlining the escalating challenge posed by the climate crisis.
The global concentration of carbon dioxide, the most important and prevalent of the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity, rose to an average of 419 parts per million in the atmosphere in 2023 while methane, a powerful if shorter-lasting greenhouse gas, rose to an average of 1922 parts per billion. Levels of nitrous oxide, the third most significant human-caused warming emission, climbed slightly to 336 parts per billion.
AP News
In a move that environmentalists called a betrayal, the Biden administration has approved the construction of a deepwater oil export terminal off the Texas coast that would be the largest of its kind in the United States.
The Sea Port Oil Terminal being developed off Freeport, Texas, will be able to load two supertankers at once, with an export capacity of 2 million barrels of crude oil per day. The $1.8 billion project by Houston-based Enterprise Products Partners received a deepwater port license from the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration this week, the final step in a five-year federal review.
Environmentalists denounced the license approval, saying it contradicted President Joe Biden’s climate agenda and would lead to “disastrous” planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to nearly 90 coal-fired power plants.
Houston Chronicle
Solar panels supplied more electricity than coal-fired power plants to the Texas power grid in March for the first time, marking an important milestone in state’s energy transition.
Electricity generated from the sun’s energy sent 3.26 million megawatt-hours onto the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid last month while coal-fired facilities generated 2.96 million megawatt-hours, according to researchers with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit think tank promoting the transition to a sustainable energy economy. One megawatt can power about 200 Texas homes on the hottest summer days, according to ERCOT, which operates the grid supplying 90% of the state’s electricity.
Solar’s share of the ERCOT wholesale electricity market topped 10% in March, while coal’s market share fell below 10% for the first time, to 9.1%.
CBC News
The federal government says Canada could face another destructive wildfire season because of an unusually warm winter, widespread drought conditions and a forecast of above-normal temperatures in the months ahead. […]
"It is impossible to predict the summer that lies ahead of us, but what is clear is that wildfires will represent a significant challenge for Canada into the future as the impacts of climate change continue to intensify. And the costs to Canadians are growing every single year," said Harjit Sajjan, the minister of emergency preparedness.
ProPublica
Another great American migration is now underway, this time forced by the warming that is altering how and where people can live. For now, it’s just a trickle. But in the corners of the country’s most vulnerable landscapes — on the shores of its sinking bayous and on the eroding bluffs of its coastal defenses — populations are already in disarray. […]
People have always moved as their environment has changed. But today, the climate is warming faster, and the population is larger, than at any point in history.
As the U.S. gets hotter, its coastal waters rise higher, its wildfires burn larger and its droughts last longer, the notion that humankind can triumph over nature is fading, and with it, slowly, goes the belief that self-determination and personal preference can be the driving factors in choosing where to live. Scientific modeling of these pressures suggest a sweeping change is coming in the shape and location of communities across America, a change that promises to transform the country’s politics, culture and economy.
It has already begun. More Americans are displaced by catastrophic climate-change-driven storms and floods and fires every year.
The Economist
[…] About a tenth of the world’s residential property by value is under threat from global warming—including many houses that are nowhere near the coast. From tornadoes battering midwestern American suburbs to tennis-ball-size hailstones smashing the roofs of Italian villas, the severe weather brought about by greenhouse-gas emissions is shaking the foundations of the world’s most important asset class.
The potential costs stem from policies designed to reduce the emissions of houses as well as from climate-related damage. They are enormous. By one estimate, climate change and the fight against it could wipe out 9% of the value of the world’s housing by 2050—which amounts to $25trn, not much less than America’s annual gdp…
House prices show little sign of adjusting to climate risk.
The Hill
The Biden administration is putting $830 million toward helping protect bridges, roads, ports and other infrastructure from extreme weather disasters fueled by climate change. […]
Most of the funding, $621 million, will go toward 36 projects aimed at bolstering the resilience of existing infrastructure through efforts such as improving draining, moving roadways, and lifting up bridges. […]
The money comes from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
BBC News
A group of older Swiss women have won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights. The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to the effects of heatwaves linked to climate change.
The court said Switzerland's efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate. It is the first time the powerful court has ruled on global warming.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Three quarters of the Great Barrier Reef has been hit in a widespread coral bleaching sparked by a marine heatwave, with aerial survey results revealing a major bleaching event is unfolding all the way along the 2300 kilometre ecosystem. […]
Half of the Great Barrier Reef has been hit by high to very high bleaching, the new aerial surveys found, with and 10 per cent classed as extreme bleaching – when more than 90 per cent of corals are distressed.
The University of Adelaide
While climate change has led to an increase in the abundance of octopuses, heat stress from projected ocean warming could impair their vision and impact the survivability of the species.
“We found several proteins important for vision that were affected by thermal stress,” says Dr Qiaz Hua, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological Sciences.
“One of them is a structural protein found in high abundance in animal eye lenses to preserve lens transparency and optical clarity, and another is responsible for the regeneration of visual pigments in the photoreceptors of the eyes. […]
Octopuses are highly visual animals, with 70 per cent of the octopus brain dedicated to vision – which is 20 per cent more than in humans.
South China Morning Post
China drove a global surge in new coal-fired power plants last year, building and approving capacity at a rate not seen in nine years despite the country’s promise to “strictly control” its use of the most damaging fossil fuel, according to a new report.
China accounted for two-thirds of the coal-fired power capacity that came online last year, adding 47.4 gigawatts (GW) out of the global total of 69.5GW, according to an annual survey released on Thursday by San Francisco-based
Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and 14 other non-profit climate organisations. […]
Outside China, new construction of coal power has slowed considerably, with 2023 hitting the lowest level since 2015, the year GEM started keeping records.
Reuters
Deaths caused by the mosquito-born dengue disease have more than tripled in Peru so far this year, according to data from the South American nation's government, which is redoubling efforts to contain an epidemic that has hit poor areas the hardest.
The government of President Dina Boluarte this week said it had approved an "emergency decree" allowing extraordinary economic measures to bolster the plan to counter the outbreak, which experts say is exacerbated by climate change.
The Guardian
n 18 March, 2022, scientists at the Concordia research station on the east Antarctic plateau documented a remarkable event. They recorded the largest jump in temperature ever measured at a meteorological centre on Earth. According to their instruments, the region that day experienced a rise of 38.5C above its seasonal average: a world record.
This startling leap – in the coldest place on the planet – left polar researchers struggling for words to describe it. “It is simply mind-boggling,” said Prof Michael Meredith, science leader at the British Antarctic Survey. “In sub-zero temperatures such a massive leap is tolerable but if we had a 40C rise in the UK now that would take temperatures for a spring day to over 50C – and that would be deadly for the population.”
This amazement was shared by glaciologist Prof Martin Siegert, of the University of Exeter. “No one in our community thought that anything like this could ever happen. It is extraordinary and a real concern,” he told the Observer. “We are now having to wrestle with something that is completely unprecedented.”
E&E News
Allies of former President Donald Trump don’t just want to muzzle federal climate science if he wins a second term — they also want to upend the agencies that fuel such research.
The strategy is outlined in a governing playbook known as Project 2025 that was written by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other conservative organizations. It’s designed to serve as a road map for a second Trump administration, and it includes suggestions such as using an executive order to reshape “climate change research programs.” […]
The Project 2025 report takes aim at NOAA, suggests the National Weather Service commercialize its forecasting operations and says information from the National Hurricane Center should be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”
Forbes
[…] The company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Whatsapp last week blocked all links on its platforms to the Kansas Reflector, a non-profit news outlet that had published a piece criticizing the firm’s alleged suppression of content about climate change. When journalist Marisa Kabas wrote about the event, all Meta links to her site, The Handbasket, were blocked too. Kabas was even momentarily blocked from posting anything at all on Threads, Meta’s microblogging site.
Then, CNN got hold of the story. Meta was forced to deploy its public relations people, who
claimed that the sites had been blocked due to a "security error." The links to the
Reflector and
The Handbasket were restored. Instagram head Adam Mosseri even posted about the event on Threads' rival platform Bluesky, saying that the domains had been "mistakenly classified as a phishing site." Nevertheless, the damage had been done. CNN followed up its reporting with an article titled, “Big Tech’s grip on social media is a growing problem.”
Grist
In response to growing pressure to address the plastic pollution crisis, Amazon has been cutting down on plastic packaging. Last July, the company said it used 11.6 percent less plastic for all of its shipments globally in 2022, compared to 2021. Much of Amazon’s reductions took place in countries that have enacted — or threatened to enact — restrictions on certain types of plastic packaging. But the company’s progress may not extend to the U.S., which has not regulated plastic production on a federal level.
Amazon generated 208 million pounds of plastic packaging trash in the United States in 2022, about 10 percent more than the previous year, according to a new report from the nonprofit Oceana. This packaging includes Amazon’s ubiquitous blue-and-white mailers, as well as other pouches, bags, and plastic cushioning. If all of it were converted into plastic air pillows and laid end to end, Oceana estimates it would circle the Earth more than 200 times. […]
The type of plastic typically used in Amazon packaging — known as “film” — is almost never recycled. Most of it is sent to landfills or incinerators, or is discarded into the environment.
