Climate Change

Earth’s climate in 2024 is “in a major crisis with worse to come if we continue with business as usual,” a team of 14 climate scientists warned in “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth.” The report did not sugarcoat their view of the dangers humanity is facing.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” the report begins. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

That said, Nuccitelli says “The state of the climate is currently perilous, but humanity still has every opportunity to reduce the level of peril.”

The world is on course to miss a target for cutting emissions this decade by an overwhelming amount, new UN analysis shows, meaning more dangerous global warming is likely.

Total emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2030 will only be 2.6% lower than in 2019, according to the latest climate plans put forward by countries, a synthesis compiled by UN Climate Change said Monday. To be consistent with a goal for a 1.5C warming limit, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggest that emissions would have to fall by 43% over the same time period.

The best estimate of where temperatures will peak this century, based off the national climate plans, is between 2.1C-2.8C, the institution said. Still there’s a possibility that emissions could peak this decade.

An annual assessment by the world body tracks the gulf between what countries have vowed to do and what they’ve actually achieved. One year after world leaders made a landmark promise to move away from fossil fuels, countries have essentially made no progress in cutting emissions and tackling global warming, according to a United Nations report issued on Thursday.

Global greenhouse gas emissions soared to a record 57 gigatons last year and are not on track to decline much, if at all, this decade, the report found. Collectively, nations have been so slow to curtail their use of oil, gas and coal that it now looks unlikely that countries will be able to limit global warming to the levels they agreed to under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Emissions of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — are rising at the fastest rate in recorded history, scientists said Tuesday, defying global pledges to limit the gas and putting the Earth on a path toward perilous temperature rise.

New research from the Global Carbon Project — an international coalition of scientists that seeks to quantify planet-warming emissions — finds that methane levels in the atmosphere are tracking those projected by the worst-case climate scenarios. Because methane traps about 30 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 100-year time frame, the accelerating emissions will make it nearly impossible for the world to meet its climate goals, the authors warned.

“These extra methane emissions bring the temperature thresholds ever closer,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project. “Warming that was once inconceivable is now perhaps likely.”

Global temperatures between June and August were 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said Friday — just edging out the previous record set last summer. The sweltering season reached its apex in late July, when Copernicus’s sophisticated temperature analysis program detected the four hottest days ever recorded.

Meanwhile, temperatures for the year to date have far exceeded anything seen in the agency’s more than 80 years of recordkeeping, making it all but certain that 2024 will be the hottest year known to science.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, CleanTech must displace DirtyTech in all sectors. That will only happen when CleanTech is cheaper than DirtyTech. And THAT will happen if we support CleanTech’s “learning curve” reductions in unit costs and/or if the cost of DirtyTech rises owing to carbon pricing.

It’s easy to think of sports as an escape from reality, removed from the glaring problems of our world. Researcher Madeleine Orr shatters that illusion in Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport. In her debut book, Orr shepherds readers through an at-times overwhelming deluge of all the ways climate change is disrupting sports around the world, providing a compelling case for action from athletes, sports leagues and fans alike.

Orr, a sport ecologist at the University of Toronto, draws on her academic expertise to outline how climate change is upending sports, be it wildfires almost destroying a …

The summer of 2023 was exceptionally hot. Scientists have already established that it was the warmest Northern Hemisphere summer since around 1850, when people started systematically measuring and recording temperatures.

Now, researchers say it was the hottest in 2,000 years, according to a new study published in the journal Nature that compares 2023 with a longer temperature record across most of the Northern Hemisphere.

For the ninth straight month, Earth has obliterated global heat records — with February, the winter as a whole and the world’s oceans setting new high-temperature marks, according to the European Union climate agency Copernicus. Sea surface temperatures eclipsed any month on record. And February, as well the previous two winter months, soared well past the internationally set threshold for long-term warming,

Ben King, Michael Gaffney, and Alfredo RiveraJanuary 10, 2024 In 2023, the US experienced something it hasn’t since before the COVID-19 pandemic: a growing economy paired with shrinking greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. After two years of emissions…