The Atlantic
At a glance, the male western tanager looks like a little flame, its ruby head blending seamlessly into its bright, lemon-colored body. Females are less showy, a dusty yellow. The birds spend their winters in Central America and can be found in a variety of habitats, from central Costa Rica to the deserts of southeastern Sonora, in western Mexico. In the spring, they prepare to migrate thousands of miles to the conifer forests of the Mountain West, flying through grasslands, deserts, and occasionally, suburban yards.
To fuel them on their lengthy journey, western tanagers fill up on insects and berries. Like most migrating birds, they eat enormous amounts of food. But as global climate change causes spring to start earlier, birds such as western tanagers are arriving at their destination after what’s known as “green-up,” when flowers begin blooming and insects emerge. According to a study published in early March in the journal PNAS, this kind of timing mismatch between migrants and their food sources, which is happening across North America, could have dire consequences for migratory birds’ survival. “In discussing climate change, we often focus on warming,” says Scott Loss, a professor at Oklahoma State University and a co-author of the study. “But the length and timing of seasons—like when winter ends and spring begins—are some of the most dramatic effects of climate change.”
The New Yorker
The morally right side doesn’t lose the crucial battles: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend toward justice. We know that lesson too well, which may be a problem, in that it gives us undue confidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that we need to cut carbon emissions by nearly fifty per cent by 2030 in order to have a chance of meeting the targets set in Paris in 2015—and 2030 is five years and nine months away. It’s not impossible. Progress is being made around the world—including in this country, where the provisions of the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act are beginning to kick in, and in China—but as a planet we’re still using more fossil fuel each year. That’s why the signs of backsliding in recent weeks are particularly painful: they come at precisely the moment when we need to be accelerating the transition to renewable power.
Los Angeles Times
Deadly heat in the Southwest. Hot-tub temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean. Sweltering conditions in Europe, Asia and South America.
That 2023 was Earth’s hottest year on record was in some ways no surprise. For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm about rapidly rising temperatures driven by humanity’s relentless burning of fossil fuels.
But last year’s sudden spike in global temperatures blew far beyond what statistical climate models had predicted, leading one noted climate scientist to warn that the world may be entering “uncharted territory.”
“It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has,” wrote Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a recent article in the journal Nature.
The Economist
[…] A build-up of jaw-dropping events and extremes in recent years has shown that Antarctica is undergoing massive changes on land, sea and in the atmosphere above. […]
“When I first started working in Antarctic glaciology [30 years ago], it was about adventure and discovery,” says Martin Siegert, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. “It still is about those things but it has got really serious really quickly.”
Alarm bells rang loud and clear in the second half of 2023. They began with a second consecutive summer where the expanse of sea ice floating around the continent hit an
all-time low—10% lower than it was in 2022, itself a record-setter. Then, from May onwards and as the region headed into its winter, researchers watched with increasing alarm as the ice struggled to recover. By July, the extent of sea ice was 2.5m square kilometres smaller than the recent average… Ella Gilbert and Caroline Holmes, researchers with the British Antarctic Survey, wondered: “Antarctica is missing a chunk of sea ice bigger than Greenland—what’s going on?”
The New York Times
An “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season is likely this year, a key preseason forecast warns, with chances for long-lived and intense storms fueled by record ocean warmth and atmospheric patterns known for boosting tropical cyclones.
Hurricane researchers from Colorado State University are predicting that nearly two dozen named tropical storms will form, including 11 hurricanes, during the season that officially begins June 1. Accumulated cyclone energy, a measure that accounts for storms’ frequency and longevity, could rise nearly twice as high as normal, to a forecast 170 percent of average by the season’s end Nov. 30.
Phys.org
The world lost 10 football fields of old-growth tropical forest every minute in 2023 and despite uplifting progress in the Amazon, the picture elsewhere is less rosy, researchers said on Thursday.
Tropical forests absorb carbon and are a vital ally in the fight against climate change, but they are also the most ravaged by deforestation.
High rates of tropical forest loss remain "stubbornly consistent" despite nations pledging in recent years to protect these critical environments, said researchers from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland.
Around 3.7 million hectares of primary tropical forest—an area almost the size of Switzerland—was lost last year, they said.
CBC News
Progress made when it comes to the protection of the world's forests was thwarted by last year's historic wildfire season in Canada, according to a new report.
The annual survey, published Thursday by the World Resources Institute, a research group, found that global tree cover loss outside of the tropics increased 24 per cent in 2023.
The change is attributed to the enormous loss of tree cover last year in Canada. Canada's wildfire season was the worst on record, with five times more tree cover lost due to fire in 2023 than the year before. Experts say drought and hot temperatures made more likely by climate change created the conditions that resulted in Canada's historic season.
CBC News
Fire is sucking the life out of parts of the Amazon rainforest. In Roraima State, in northern Brazil, the number of fires in February were more than five times the average, according to data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, and blazes continued to burn through March.
"We are losing the Amazon rainforest. These changes in the climate right now provoked by El Niño makes this forest fire season even worse than we are used to seeing in the forest," said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of Brazil's Climate Observatory.
Wildfires in the normally humid, tropical rainforest have been supercharged by a disastrous combination of elevated temperatures, historic drought and deforestation.
Los Angeles Times
Despite its aggressive reputation for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, California releases more of a climate-warming pesticide than all other states combined, most of it from homes fumigated for termites, according to a study published Wednesday.
The termite killing gas — sulfuryl fluoride — has been found to be 4,800 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat.
When a team of Johns Hopkins scientists set out to map exactly where the gas was being released, they were startled to find that California generated as much as 12% of global emissions of the synthetic fumigant.
NPR News
pen flames shot upward from four smokestacks at the Chevron refinery on the western edge of Richmond, Calif. Soon, black smoke blanketed the sky.
News spread quickly that day last November, but by word of mouth, says Denny Khamphanthong, a 29-year-old Richmond resident. "We don't know the full story, but we know that you shouldn't breathe in the air or be outside for that matter," Khamphanthong says now. "It would be nice to have an actual news outlet that would actually go out there and figure it out themselves."
The city's primary local news source, The Richmond Standard, didn't cover the flare. Nor had it reported on a 2021 Chevron refinery pipeline rupture that dumped nearly 800 gallons of diesel fuel into San Francisco Bay. […]
And there's a reason for that: Chevron owns The Richmond Standard.
AP News
The Vermont Legislature is advancing legislation requiring big fossil fuel companies pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather.
The state Senate is expected to give final approval this week to the proposal, which would create a program that fossil fuel companies would pay into for climate change adaption projects in Vermont. It will then be considered in the House. […]
Maryland, Massachusetts and New York are considering similar measures, but Vermont’s bill is moving quicker through the Legislature. Critics, including Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who is up against a veto-proof Democratic majority, warn that it could be a costly legal battle for the small state to go first.
Inside Climate News
Years ago, the law professor Donald Braman was listening to a description of the revelations that were emerging about fossil fuel companies’ detailed, long-held knowledge of the grievous risks their products posed to the global climate. David Arkush, the climate director at the advocacy group Public Citizen, was recounting these facts to Braman and noting the increasingly deadly impacts of extreme, climate-driven weather.
“This sounds like something that could be subject to a homicide charge,” Braman recently recalled telling Arkush.
Now, Arkush and Braman, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School, have been hosting a series of panels at prominent law schools, including Harvard and Yale, to promote the idea that fossil fuel companies should be charged with this most grievous of crimes.
ABC News (Australia)
New climate modelling suggests Australians should be preparing for the possibility of megadroughts lasting more than 20 years.
Research from the Australian National University, published in a special edition of the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, has indicated future droughts in Australia could be far worse than anything experienced in recent times — even without factoring in human impacts.
Climate scientist Georgy Falster said while megadroughts occurred naturally, climate change would make them more severe.
Stat
Many of the effects of climate change play out at a very large scale: Heatwaves that grip entire continents. Flooding that submerges vast swaths of island nations and continental coastal areas. Other effects are far less visible because they’re taking place inside people’s bodies. That doesn’t make them any less dangerous.
Diseases linked to problems in immune health have been steadily rising over the past few decades. Nasal allergies in children more than doubled from 2012 to 2022. Food allergies, which can be deadly, have also spiked. The global prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis has jumped 14% since 1990. Young people are increasingly vulnerable to colorectal cancer.
To be sure, climate change isn’t the only culprit here: diets heavy in ultra-processed foods, lack of exercise, high levels of stress, and improved testing all likely contribute to rising disease rates. Yet there is also strong evidence, at both the biological and the epidemiological levels, that the environment plays a crucial role in the rise of immune-mediated diseases.
Newsweek
U.S. homeowners are worried that climate change is impacting the values of their houses amid elevated insurance costs across the country fueled by the increased frequency of natural disasters.
Forty percent of homeowners who have had to file insurance claims say that climate change is affecting their home values, according to a survey from Insurify. Overall, 25 percent said climate change is responsible for bringing down their property values, while 60 percent said the opposite.
The concern over climate change comes as homeowners insurance costs are soaring across the country, particularly in states like California, Texas and Florida, as weather-related disruptions are forcing the cost of coverage to skyrocket and in some cases compel insurance companies to cease providing services.
The University of Adelaide
Changing weather patterns induced by climate change are contributing to shifts in the location of terrorist activity, according to new research.
An exploratory study led by extremism expert Dr Jared Dmello, from the University of Adelaide’s School of Social Sciences, found some climatological variables affected terrorist activity in India. […]
“This research shows that stopping the damaging effects of climate change is not just an environmental issue but one that is directly tied to national security and defence,” says Dr Dmello, who was recently announced as the inaugural recipient of the Early Career Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences ’ Security and Crime Prevention Section.
PBS
In 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan sent a one-page memo to a top Nixon advisor on “the carbon dioxide problem.”
What he wrote was a prescient early warning about the consequences of burning fossil fuels. […]
Moynihan’s letter has surprising resonance today, especially when broken down by its arguments. It begins:
“As with so many of the more interesting environmental questions, we really don't have very satisfactory measurements of the carbon dioxide problem. On the other hand, this very clearly is a problem, and, perhaps most particularly, is one that can seize the imagination of persons normally indifferent to projects of apocalyptic change.” —Memo by Daniel P. Moynihan, September 17, 1969
[…]
Climate change wasn’t a polarized issue until the fossil fuel industry helped make it one. Despite its own in-house research, the oil industry has spent decades promoting scientific misinformation and sabotaging political action.
Mother Jones
Pessimism is in… Data backs up the notion a lot of people see gloom on the horizon. As of January, 63% of the country believes the economic outlook is worsening. Under a quarter of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction; over 40% believe that a civil war is at least somewhat likely within the next decade.
The Russian-American academic Peter Turchin doesn’t think this outlook is just a vibe. Turchin, who helped develop an area of study known as “cliodynamics,” which attempts to scientifically quantify how history moves forward, predicted in 2010 the US would see a significant uptick in political violence by 2020. Today Turchin’s cliodynamic models remain pessimistic. In his 2023 book End Times, Turchin says political violence and societal instability have already increased, a condition that is here to stay for another five to 10 years, even if we started trying to fix things.
Turchin posits that the operation of what he terms a “wealth pump” has disproportionately benefited the top sliver at the direct expense of every other socioeconomic band. With too many people aspiring to join the top echelons and not enough slots—as Turchin argues in End Times, citing an array of historical examples—the structures holding society together start to get a bit shaky.