US climate data pinpoints Monday as hottest recorded day on Earth https://thehill.com/policy/energy-e...ints-monday-as-hottest-recorded-day-on-earth/
During the last deglaciation Earth warmed at a rate of 0.25 to 0.4 W/m², 0.4 being periods when the AMOC "shut down". That lasted for 10k years. We're currently at 1.8 W/m² and still rising.
New report reveals that China is reaching a ‘tipping point’ that could affect the entire world — here’s what’s happening https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/report-reveals-china-reaching-tipping-113000028.html China is the largest producer of planet-overheating gases in the world. According to some research, the country accounted for 27% of the world’s total air pollution in 2019, and more than tripled its air-polluting gases over the past three decades. However, there may be cause for some hopefulness, as China’s investments in solar energy and electric vehicles (EVs) may be pushing the country toward a “tipping point,” where dirty energy usage falls into long-term decline and more sustainable energy sources take over, according to Bloomberg News. Bloomberg painted a scene of the recent SNEC PV Power Expo in Shanghai, where China’s largest automaker, BYD; the world’s largest EV battery manufacturer, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd.; and thousands of domestic solar companies were all in attendance, signaling massive investment in clean energy. China is now expected to add nearly three times the solar capacity in 2023 than it did just two years ago, while EVs made up a third of all car sales in the country last month. One expert predicted recently that “half of China’s total car fleet could be electric by 2030.” In addition, the country has made major investments in wind energy, including building one wind turbine as tall as a 70-story building. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, China needs another $38 trillion in clean energy investment to hit net zero by 2050, in accordance with the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which 196 countries agreed on standards and goals to meaningfully address our planet’s changing climate. Though it had not previously seemed like China was on track to meet those goals, per Bloomberg, the country’s newly invigorated push into clean energy now leaves the outcome more up in the air. China currently imports 10.8 million barrels of oil per day, accounting for 19% of the global demand for crude oil. But experts predict that that number will begin to fall sharply, thanks to China’s investment in solar and wind energy. According to Goldman Sachs, “China’s progress on renewables should help cut its energy imports by 10% by 2030,” and could cut them in half by the early 2040s.
Imo it's too late, though. We've already emitted enough GHG to push us well over +2°C warming, and going past +2°C means going past +4°C (CH₄ feedback, albedo decline, etc.). "Synchronized low yields"—euphemism of the day! means there is not going to be enough food.
"Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models." Part of the reason famines are rare in the modern world is because of the opposite of this Abstract Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security. Concurrent weather extremes driven by a strongly meandering jet stream could trigger such events, but so far this has not been quantified. Specifically, the ability of state-of-the art crop and climate models to adequately reproduce such high impact events is a crucial component for estimating risks to global food security. Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models. While climate models accurately simulate atmospheric patterns, associated surface weather anomalies and negative effects on crop responses are mostly underestimated in bias-adjusted simulations. Given the identified model biases, future assessments of regional and concurrent crop losses from meandering jet states remain highly uncertain. Our results suggest that model-blind spots for such high-impact but deeply-uncertain hazards have to be anticipated and accounted for in meaningful climate risk assessments. Paper in full...
‘Double agents’: fossil-fuel lobbyists work for US groups trying to fight climate crisis Exclusive: new database shows 1,500 US lobbyists working for fossil-fuel firms while representing universities and green groups https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/05/double-agent-fossil-fuel-lobbyists
Why a sudden surge of broken heat records is scaring scientists Scientists say to brace for more extreme weather and probably a record-warm 2023 amid unprecedented temperatures By Scott Dance Updated July 6, 2023 at 2:55 p.m. EDT|Published July 6, 2023 at 4:00 a.m. EDT A remarkable spate of historic heat is hitting the planet, raising alarm over looming extreme weather dangers — and an increasing likelihood that this year will be Earth’s warmest on record. New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their swift evolution: historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak; unparalleled low sea ice levels around Antarctica, where global warming impacts had, until now, been slower to appear; and the planet experiencing its warmest June ever charted, according to new data. Want to know how your actions can help make a difference for our planet? Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter, in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday. And then, on Monday, came Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years. Tuesday was hotter. “We have never seen anything like this before,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. He said any number of charts and graphs on Earth’s climate are showing, quite literally, that “we are in uncharted territory.” Monday was Earth’s warmest day on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Service. Another data set showed Tuesday was even hotter. It is no shock that global warming is accelerating — scientists were anticipating that that would come with the onset of El Niño, the infamous climate pattern that reemerged last month. It is known for unleashing surges of heat and moisture that trigger extreme floods and storms in some places, and droughts and fires in others. But the hot conditions are developing too quickly, and across more of the planet, to be explained solely by El Niño. Records are falling around the globe many months ahead of El Niño’s peak impact, which typically hits in December and sends global temperatures soaring for months to follow. A new El Niño is brewing for 2023 1:22 Warming ocean waters point to a developing El Niño weather pattern for 2023. The Post's Scott Dance breaks down what this means for future forecasts. (Video: John Farrell/The Washington Post) “We have been seeing unprecedented extremes in the recent past even without being in this phase,” said Claudia Tebaldi, an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. With El Niño’s influence, “the likelihood of seeing something unprecedented is even higher,” she said. In recent weeks, weather extremes have included record-breaking heat waves in China, where Beijing surpassed 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time, and in Mexico and Texas, where officials were once again struggling to keep the electricity grid up and running. A woman uses a sweater to shield from the sun on a hot day in Beijing on July 3. Employers in Beijing were ordered July 6 by the government to stop outdoor work after scorching summer heat in the Chinese capital was forecast to reach 40 degrees Celsius. (Andy Wong/AP) The sun sets northwest of Edinburg, Tex., on June 15 amid a dangerous heat wave. (Delcia Lopez/AP) Wildfire smoke that has repeatedly choked parts of the United States this summer is a visible reminder of abnormal spring heat and unusually dry weather that have fueled an unprecedented wildfire season in Canada, which saw both its hottest May and June. Ocean heat is to be expected during El Niño — it is marked by unusually warm sea surface temperatures along the equatorial Pacific. But shocking warmth has developed far beyond that zone, including in the North Pacific, around New Zealand and across most of the Atlantic. Marine heat wave conditions covered about 40 percent of the world’s oceans in June, the greatest area on record, NOAA reported. That footprint is only expected to grow, forecast to reach 50 percent of ocean waters by September. Records broken by wide margins It’s not just that records are being broken — but the massive margins with which conditions are surpassing previous extremes, scientists note. In parts of the North Atlantic, temperatures are running as high as 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, the warmest observed there in more than 170 years. The warm waters helped northwestern Europe, including the United Kingdom, clinch its warmest June on record. New data the Copernicus center published Thursday showed global surface air temperatures were 0.53 degrees Celsius (0.95 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1991-2020 average in June. That was more than a tenth of a degree Celsius above the previous record, “a substantial margin,” the center said. June global average temperature from 1979 to 2023. (Copernicus Climate Service) Antarctic sea ice, meanwhile, reached its lowest June extent since the dawn of the satellite era, at 17 percent below the 1991-2020 average, Copernicus said. The previous record, set a year earlier, was about 9 percent below average. The planet is increasingly flirting with a global warming benchmark that policymakers have sought to avoid — 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. It has, at times, been surpassed already this year, including in early June, though the full month averaged 1.36 degrees above an 1850-1900 reference temperature, according to Copernicus. The concern is when long-term averages creep closer to that threshold, Buontempo said. “The average will get there at some point,” he said. “It will become easier and easier, given the warming of the climate system, to exceed that threshold.” Halfway through 2023, the year to date ranks as third-warmest on record, according to Copernicus. Odds of a record warm year, once considered slim, are rising At the start of 2023, it appeared possible, if only narrowly, that the year would end up Earth’s warmest on record. For now, 2016 holds that benchmark, heavily influenced by a major El Niño episode that arrived the previous year. But as El Niño has rapidly developed — and as signs of extreme warmth have spread across the planet — the odds of a new global temperature record have increased. Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, estimates the probability has climbed to at least 54 percent — more likely than not. “The warmth thus far in 2023 and the development of El Niño has definitely progressed faster than initially expected,” Rohde said in a message. Tourists shield themselves from the sun during high temperatures in Seville, Spain, on July 5. (Angel Garcia/Bloomberg News) Climate scientists diverge over whether a new global temperature record should be a focus of concern. Flavio Lehner, an assistant professor at Cornell University, likened it to tracking sports scores. “It’s not necessarily meaningful,” Lehner said. What matters, he said, is that “we have a long-term trend that is a warming climate.” For others, though, records are a sign of trouble, nearly as hard for people to ignore as the incessant waves of wildfire smoke. “It just raises everybody’s awareness that this is not getting better; it’s getting worse,” said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “My hope is that we’ll raise alarm bells by breaking a new record and that will help motivate people to do the right thing and stop ignoring this crisis.” For Tebaldi, records underscore a need to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare communities for new weather extremes. After all, she said: What was once unprecedented will one day become the norm. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/06/earth-record-heat-climate-extremes/
Zoology A Third of North America’s Birds Have Vanished At first Adam Smith couldn’t believe his calculations. Then it sank in. By Anders Gyllenhaal & Beverly Gyllenhaal June 30, 2023 For weeks, Adam Smith had been crunching the raw data from more bird statistics than anyone had ever tried before—thirteen different bird counts and millions of radar sweeps. Suddenly he heard the musical chime that tells him his results are ready. He leaned across his desk, surrounded by enough high-powered computers to heat up his entire office, and stared at what could only be an impossible conclusion: Over the past fifty years, his calculations found, a third of North America’s birds had vanished. “Well, that can’t be right,” he thought. “I must have made a mistake somewhere.” Smith, one of the hemisphere’s top specialists in bird populations, just sat for a while in his cluttered cubicle at the Canadian Wildlife Service, which was decorated with caribou antlers, a musk-ox skull, and early drawings from his twin boys. Then it dawned on him. “This would be a massive change, an absolutely profound change in the natural system,” he said. “And we weren’t even aware of it.” GLOBE TROTTER: Teams of researchers in both South and North America are trying to protect the Cerulean Warbler, one of scores of tiny world-travelers whose ranges span the hemisphere. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. Up until that point, counting the abundance of individual birds throughout the entire continent was impossible. At any given time, many species number in the tens of millions in North America—adding up to billions of birds—and they’re constantly on the move. But the science of bird study was advancing, and a close-knit group of scientists was experimenting with using radar imagery, satellite photos, and citizen science to add precision to the dozens of conventional bird counts done for groups of species. CITIZEN SCIENCE: The Great Blue Heron, shown here with its decorous mating plumage, is one of the species most often reported by birders as part of the massive citizen science project powered by the eBird smartphone app. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. The computation Smith had just finished that day in May 2019 combined individual population estimates for 529 bird species, from the most common sparrows and robins to rarities hardly ever seen. When Smith pulled these estimates together and adjusted each for its degree of certainty, the findings came down to a single ski slope of a chart. It showed a precipitous drop in nearly all these species in every part of the continent. At the bottom sat four lone digits—2.913. That’s the number of breeding birds in billions that had disappeared since the early 1970s. He had documented an accelerating churn of seasonal losses that slowly took their toll on the abundance of birds. And it translated to an astounding third of the adult birds that not long ago filled North America but now are gone. BYE, BIRDS: The graphic that Adam Smith sent out to his fellow scientists, showing the seismic drop in bird populations over the past fifty years. Credit: Adam Smith. The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows. That equates to 750 million birds, from bright yellow Eastern and Western Meadowlarks with their incessant morning songs to the stately Horned Lark with black masks across the male’s eyes and tiny hornlike feathers that sometimes stick up from their heads. Forest birds lost a third of their numbers, or 500 million, including the compact, colorful warblers and speckle-breasted Wood Thrushes that sing like flutes. Common backyard birds experienced a seismic decline. That’s where 90 percent of the total loss of abundance occurred, among just twelve families of the best-known birds—including sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, and finches. There’s been relatively little research on these species, and there’s no sense of urgency when resources are already stretched thin for so many other birds in more dire need. The possibility of such losses was too startling to share with his colleagues until Smith checked every step of his calculations, particularly since he’d never attempted this analysis before. “It always takes a couple of times to get these numbers right,” he said. After a day and a half of painstaking scrutiny, Smith realized there was no mistake. “I was speechless. We’ve lost almost 30 percent of an entire class of organisms in less than the span of a human lifetime, and we didn’t know it.” SUCCESS STORY: The Bald Eagle is North America’s great conservation success story, more than quadrupling its population in the past decade under an all-out effort to protect the iconic raptor. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. SOUND ON: The California Spottled Owl is at the center of the world’s largest research project that uses sound to determine how to protect this storied species. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. HUM HALLELUJAH: The Ruby-throated hummingbird delivers one of the core services that birds provide in the balance of nature. Hummingbirds alone help pollinate more than 8,000 species of plants and flowers in North and South America. Photo by Anders Gyllenhaal. FOLLOW THE BIRD: Scientists hope to save the Florida Scrub-Jay, the state’s lone native bird, with the help of a new tracking technique that follows the birds wherever they go around the clock. Photo by Jay Gyllenhaal. From A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds by Anders Gyllenhaal and Beverly Gyllenhaal. Copyright © 2023 by Anders Gyllenhaal and Beverly Gyllenhaal. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Lead image: Bonnie Taylor Barry / Shutterstock