Enter a term in the search box to find its definition.
Settings
Use the controls in the far right panel to increase or decrease the number of terms automatically displayed (or to completely turn that feature off).
Term Lookup
Settings
All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.
Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Global warming is real and human-caused. It is leading to large-scale climate change. Under the guise of climate "skepticism", the public is bombarded with misinformation that casts doubt on the reality of human-caused global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming "skepticism".
Our mission is simple: debunk climate misinformation by presenting peer-reviewed science and explaining the techniques of science denial, discourses of climate delay, and climate solutions denial.
This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).
What happens after we stop emitting and changing our climate? Will things go back to normal, or will the global warming and climate changes we've caused stick around long into the future? And what does this mean for the consequences of climate change - from sea level rise to extreme weather? I take a look at what could happen thousands of years from now, and what that means about the choices that we make today.
Thanks to Zeke Hausfather for the input x /hausfath and to Lukas Hansen and Tamy Beyrouti for direction.
As 2024 passes its midpoint, the global climate continues to push into uncharted territory.
Carbon Brief’s analysis indicates a 95% probability that this year will surpass 2023 as the warmest year on record in the Copernicus/ECMWF ERA5 dataset.
This projection emerges amid a series of climate extremes that have marked the first half of 2024.
In the latest “state of the climate” quarterly update, Carbon Brief assesses the first full six months of 2024 and finds:
The first six months of 2024 have each set new temperature records, extending an already remarkable streak of 13 consecutive record-breaking months dating back to 2023.
On 22 July, the world experienced its highest absolute global daily temperature on record, reaching a scorching 17.15C.
The heat has been felt globally, with 63 countries experiencing their warmest June on record. Over the past 12 months, a staggering 138 countries have recorded their hottest temperatures ever.
July 2024 is very likely to be the first time in 13 months without a new record, coming in cooler than July 2023. However, it will still be more than 0.2C warmer than any July prior to 2023.
With El Niño fading and modest La Niña conditions potentially developing later this year, it is unlikely that the extreme monthly temperature records set in the second half of 2023 will be surpassed in 2024.
Antarctic sea ice extent has fallen to near 2023’s record lows in recent weeks, reflecting the broader trend of polar sea ice loss.
Record warm first half of the year
Global temperatures set a new record for each of the first six months of 2024, extending what was already a string of seven record setting months in 2023.
All in all, each of the last 13 months has been the warmest since records began in the mid-1850s.
The figure below shows how global temperature so far in 2024 (purple line) compares to each month in different years since 1940 (with lines coloured by the decade in which they occurred) in the Copernicus/ECMWF ERA5 surface temperature dataset.
Posted on 28 July 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 21, 2024 thru Sat, July 27, 2024.
Story of the week
In a week crammed with news of the Paris Olympics and another passing of an entirely different torch in Washington, D.C., USA— on top of the usual high noise level— came an inflection point, and our Story of the Week.
This comes on top of global ocean temperature continuing to run at record highs, with the ocean's heat capacity dwarfing that of the atmosphere.
This toasty situation is as entirely expected as it is thoroughly undesirable. Thanks to our accidental (at first) tampering with our atmosphere we're now accumulating a lot excess energy that otherwise would find an easier path back into the cold dark of space. With the atmosphere now effectively acting as a more efficient insulator, the Earth needs to heat up in order to radiate that energy back into space. It would be best if we slowed down our rate of warming, because heating up enough to dump excess energy accumulated thanks to our accident means the planet needs to become too warm too fast.
Given Skeptical Science's mission, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that getting this situation under control will be easier to accomplish without interested parties concertedly engaging in deceit so as to prolong their outmoded and increasingly lethal business plans.
As a technical matter it shouldn't be necessary to suffer through an object lesson of planetary scale but here we are, living exactly that tutelage. Decades of deception leading to prevarication and procrastination find us living in an undesirable future we could easily see long ago. Our climate is changing in accordance with projections we've had to hand for many years, with upward wiggles trumping downward bumps. It's obviously high time to retire doubt and dismissal of our influence on Earth's climate.
Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was updated by John Mason in collaboration with members from the Gigafact team. The initial version was published in 2021 and written by Anne-Marie Blackburn. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.
Are polar bears endangered?
Most polar bear populations could become extinct by 2100 if our greenhouse gas emissions continue.
Polar bears are classed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They hunt seals, their main food source, from the Arctic sea-ice. Human-caused global warming has led to a rapid loss of that ice, making it harder for polar bears to catch enough prey to survive.
There are 19 subpopulations of polar bears. According to the World Wildlife Fund in 2021, 3 were in decline, 4 were stable, 2 were increasing, and 10 were data-deficient.
In 1973, the international community agreed to restrict polar bear hunting, which helps explain why the population is estimated to be higher today than it was in the 1970s. However, that does not change their long-term endangerment if the sea ice they require to hunt is allowed to continue to melt.
Here, we first show based on multiple attribution methods that a winter of similar circulation conditions to 1963 would still lead to an extreme seasonal cold anomaly of about −4.9 to −4.7 °C (best estimates across methods) under present-day climate. This would rank as the second-coldest winter in the last 75 years. Second, we conceive storylines of worst-case cold winter conditions based on two independent rare event sampling methods (climate model boosting and empirical importance sampling): a winter as cold as 1963 is still physically possible in central Europe today, albeit very unlikely. While cold winter hazards become less frequent and less intense in a warming climate overall, it remains crucial to anticipate the possibility of an extremely cold winter to avoid potential maladaptation and increased vulnerability.
Modern climate change is unprecedented. In recent decades, it has accelerated the melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets, leading to a rise in sea level. This pole-to-equator mass transport has significantly increased the Earth’s oblateness and length of day (LOD) since 1900. We show that the present rate of increase is higher than at any point in the 20th century. Under high emission scenarios, the climate-induced LOD rate will continue to increase and may reach a rate that is twice as large as at present, surpassing the impact of lunar tidal friction. These findings signify the unprecedented effect of climate change on planet Earth and have implications for precise timekeeping and space navigation, among others.
Here, we outline the key role of submarine canyons to convey southward flowing currents that transport warm Circumpolar Deep Water toward the East Antarctic shelf break, thus facilitating warm water intrusion on the continental shelf. Sediment drifts on the eastern flank of the canyons provide evidence for sustained southward-directed flows. These morpho-sedimentary features thus highlight areas potentially prone to enhanced ocean heat transport toward the continental shelf, with repercussions for past, present, and future glacial melting and consequent sea level rise.
The 79° North Glacier (Nioghalvfjerdsbrae, 79NG) is one of three remaining glaciers with a floating tongue in Greenland. Although the glacier was considered exceptionally stable in the past, earlier studies indicate that the ice tongue has thinned in recent decades. By conducting high-resolution ground-based and airborne radar measurements in conjunction with satellite remote sensing observations, we find significant changes in the geometry of 79NG. In the vicinity of the grounding line, a 500 m high subglacial channel has grown since ~2010 and caused surface lowering of up to 7.6 m a-1. Our results show extreme basal melt rates exceeding 150 m a-1 within a distance of 5 km from the grounding line, where the ice has thinned by 42 % since 1998. We found a heterogeneous distribution of melt rates likely due to variability in water column thickness and channelization of the ice base. Time series of melt rates show a decrease in basal melting since 2018, indicating an inflow of colder water into the cavity below 79NG.
Using Baltic cod otolith chemical proxies of hypoxia, salinity, and fish metabolic status and growth, we tracked changes from baseline conditions in the late Neolithic (4500 BP) and early twentieth century to the present, in order to understand how recent, accelerating climate change has affected this key species. Otolith hypoxia proxies (Mn:Mg) increased with expanding anoxic water volumes, but decreased with increasing salinity indexed by otolith Sr:Ca. Metabolic status proxied by otolith Mg:Ca and reconstructed growth were positively related to dissolved oxygen percent saturation, with particularly severe declines since 2010. This long-term record of otolith indicators provides further evidence of a profound state change in oxygen for the worse, in one of the world’s largest inland seas. Spreading hypoxia due to climate warming will likely impair fish populations globally and evidence can be tracked with otolith chemical biomarkers.
To address the multiple dimensions of equity associated with climate mitigation targets for individual actors such as companies or countries, social sciences and humanities need to become a core part of the science that informs target setting, including economics, political science, socio-technical transition theory and ethics. This requires embracing the wide range of actions that can contribute to the mitigation goals of the Paris Agreement, as opposed to hobbling acceptable actions by narrow and arbitrary decision-making rules.
Currently, 123 members of the 118th Congress publicly deny the scientific consensus of human-caused climate change. These 100 representatives and 23 senators wield significant influence on public perceptions of climate change as well as on the speed and direction of climate policy in the United States. Members of Congress also receive publicly disclosed contributions, which may provide a window into the possible influence of the fossil fuel industry.
The author's prior research has identified six distinct audiences within the public – the Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive – based on their beliefs and attitudes about climate change. Here, we apply this analysis to our large international survey of more than 100 countries and territories worldwide, collected in partnership with Data for Good at Meta and Rare’s Center for Behavior and the Environment in 2023. We find that the Alarmed are the largest group in about three-fourths of the areas surveyed (87 of the 110). Half or more respondents in thirty-one areas are Alarmed. The five areas with the largest percentage of Alarmed are Puerto Rico (70%), El Salvador (67%), Costa Rica (65%), Chile (64%), and Panama (64%). By contrast, Czechia (10%) and the Netherlands (9%) have the smallest percentages of Alarmed. In the United States, about one-third of respondents are Alarmed (32%). Among all areas, the Netherlands has the highest proportion of Doubtful and Dismissive (30%), followed by Norway (27%) and Libya (25%). In the United States, about one in four respondents are Doubtful or Dismissive (25%).
162 articles in 61 journals by 965 contributing authors
The critical context that’s typically left out is that the 1930s were the decade of the Dust Bowl — the grim result of relentless overplowing of the Great Plains followed by natural oceanic cycles that favored a multiyear drought, which coincided with the Great Depression. It’s a U.S. disaster almost a century old, one that draws little attention today and whose living memory is fading fast.
The University of Nebraska’s excellent summary of the Dust Bowl points to some of the sociological factors that led to the catastrophe:
“Boosters” of the region, hoping to promote settlement, put forth glowing but inaccurate accounts of the Great Plains’ agricultural potential. In addition to this inaccurate information, most settlers had little money and few other assets, and their farming experience was based on conditions in the more humid eastern United States, so the crops and cultivation practices they chose often were not suitable for the Great Plains. But the earliest settlements occurred during a wet cycle, and the first crops flourished, so settlers were encouraged to continue practices that would later have to be abandoned.
Three multi-year periods of drought unfolded between 1928 and 1942, with virtually no break in between. Much of the topsoil across the central United States simply blew away during those nasty years. The bare landscape allowed for maximal warming from the summer sun, which in turn helped reinforce the deep atmospheric heat that prevailed. Day-to-day weather patterns sometimes pushed the dust and heat all the way to the East Coast.
Hundreds of thousands of destitute farmers made their way from the Great Plains to California in hopes of finding work, a migration immortalized in the acclaimed book and movie “The Grapes of Wrath.” [From Bob Henson: My own mother grew up in western Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, and I vividly remember her telling me how she sometimes walked to school with a wet handkerchief over her face, simply to be able to breathe without inhaling lungfuls of dust.]
Figure 1. An unidentified car on a road in the Texas Panhandle in March 1936 with heavy clouds of dust in the sky — a typical phenomenon of the Dust Bowl. (Image credit: Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Texas grid, run by ERCOT, has had a rough few years. In 2021, winter storm Uri blacked out much of the state for several days. About a week ago, Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to millions of Houstonians, and a week later, hundreds of thousands of Houstonians still hadn’t had their power restored.
It might seem that these two events are completely different — one was a winter storm that caused a blackout by knocking out the natural gas supply, while the other one is a hurricane that knocked out the power distribution system.
Global society may have finally slammed on the brakes for climate-warming pollution released by human fossil fuel combustion.
According to the Carbon Monitor Project, the total global climate pollution released between February and May 2024 declined slightly from the amount released during the same period in 2023. Many experts believe that the clean energy transition has reached the point where emissions will stabilize and then begin to decline. The critical milestone of peak climate pollution might be happening right now.
And it’s happening none too soon. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in early June that “carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever — accelerating on a steep rise to levels far above any experienced in human existence.”
“Over the past year we’ve experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires, and storms,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad. “Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever. We must recognize that these are clear signals of the damage carbon dioxide pollution is doing to the climate system, and take rapid action to cut fossil fuel use as quickly as we can.”
How can CO2 levels in the atmosphere be increasing so rapidly if society is reaching peak emissions? It’s because the peak comes after two centuries in which more and more fossil fuels were burned every year to power economic growth. The relatively rare exceptions tended to come in years of economic decline, such as global recessions or pandemics. The global economy has grown in most years, and the consumption of fossil fuels for energy and their associated climate pollution has also increased as a result.
“Fossil fuel pollution just keeps building up, much like trash in a landfill,” Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps CO2 program, said in the NOAA June 6 report.
Emissions have peaked at an unsustainably high level and now must fall steeply and quickly to reach net zero by the second half of the century. The clean energy transition has been a huge help; in most of the years over the past decade that weren’t affected by the COVID pandemic, including 2022 and 2023, global emissions only rose by about 1% even as the economy continued to grow. Yet global climate pollution stubbornly kept rising to record levels.
Posted on 21 July 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 32 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 14, 2024 thru Sat, July 20, 2024.
Story of the week
As reflected by preponderance of coverage, our Story of the Week is Project 2025. Until now traveling mostly unobserved below the surface of public attention, this public policy submarine launched by the Heritage Foundation and loaded with missiles targeted at civil society as we express it via competent and impartial governance (or sincere attempts at such) now emerges as a hot topic of concern, spanning many domains of public administration.
What's Project 2025? If you didn't follow the link above, here's shorthand supplied by the instigators:
Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.
This ambition is accompanied by a detailed plan of action assembled by people well qualified for this task. Project members include over two dozen former Trump administration figures, all now well familiar with federal government and— per the policy formulation they've created— bringing their experience to bear with laser focus on inviting avenues of attack on our civil infrastructure.
Project 2025 certainly gives nods to various voguish culture war issues, but a scan of the entire plan reveals a bit of a pattern. "Deconstructing the administrative state" roughly translates into crippling the US government's capacity to impose accountability for external costs— by all necessary means.
As a practical matter, avoiding responsibility for burdens unilaterally imposed on other people follows a fairly simple logic. We cannot assign ownership of those harms people (us) don't know of. Hence ignorance is strength when seeking to hide uninvited costs visited on others at industrial scale. In our context of Project 2025— which at a glance appears to be operating chiefly to the benefit of interests uncaring of others-- blinding and deafening the eyes and ears of government is thus a fast and efficient route to serenely peaceful and maximally effective pursuit of profit.
How is all of this relevant to human-caused climate change and climate mitigation obstruction? Beyond one project author having form as a climate science vandal, the plan is quite specific. In particular, Project 2025 calls out NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), naming it "a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry" and explicitly calling for the agency's dismantlement. This seems to be the main objection to NOAA on the plan's part, and is exemplary of how the authors are using their informed perspective to lean toward complete decapitation (or in some cases "only" bureacratic lobotomy) rather than tinkering around the edges of offending branches of government. More generally to the overall point of Project 2025, there can hardly be a better example of astronomically expensive external costs than human-caused climate change.
"Freedom" is a word much bandied about in the US., and Project 2025 uses the term liberally— in more than one sense. Freedom of thought and religion are certainly founding principles of the country. It's however highly doubtful that the authors of the Bill of Rights intended that we each should be free to end our sanitary sewer at our neighbor's property line. Yet human nature is such that some people will do exactly that— if they can sneak it by and nobody notices, or has no recourse to object.
Why do we agree to governance, and support the infrastructure of government as it pertains to law and regulation? In no small part it's because we know very well thanks to history (and our current climate predicament) that a small percentage of people with whom we all share space won't behave in a socially acceptable manner unless they're forced. If Project 2025 is an indicator, the Heritage Foundation doesn't seem to have good grasp of this underlying and pervasive feature of human behavior— and commensurate requirement for effective and robust civil governance. That seems unlikely, so it may be more parsimonious to assume that the Heritage Foundation simply doesn't believe in cooperative behavior as the foundation of true social prosperity.
With the Project 2025 submarine now exposed to view various contributing authors and participating organizations are jumping ship, but the document stands as the bared soul of poorly socialized people and what they'll do with access to levers of power. This circus of the self-interested has told us in plain language what they'd like to see, and whether or not they desert the Heritage Foundation we should appreciate their candor, listen to it, think about what it implies. None of them are actually learning from the general revulsion they're hearing and will all continue their program of "it's all about me," regardless of whether or not we continue paying attention.
Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:
To better account for spatial non-uniform trends in warming, a new GITD [global instrumental temperature dataset] was created that used maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to combine the land surface air temperature (LSAT) anomalies of non-infilled HadCRUT5 with the sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies of HadSST4. This GITD better accounts for non-uniform trends in warming in two ways. Firstly, the underlying warming trends in the model are allowed to vary spatially and by the time of year. Secondly, climatological differences between open-sea and sea ice regions are used to better account for changes in sea ice concentrations (SICs). These improvements increase the estimate of GMST change from the late 19th century (1850–1900) to 2023 by 0.006°C and 0.079°C, respectively. Although, for the latter improvement, tests suggest that there may be an overcorrection by a factor of two and estimates of SICs for the late 19th century are a significant source of unquantified uncertainty. In addition, this new GITD has other improvements compared to the HadCRUT5 Analysis dataset, including correcting for a small underestimation of LSAT warming between 1961 and 1990, taking advantage of temporal correlations of observations, taking advantage of correlations between land and open-sea observations, and better treatment of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Overall, the median estimate of GMST change from the late 19th century to 2023 is 1.548°C, with a 95% confidence interval of [1.449°C, 1.635°C].
Roofing highways with solar panels offers a new opportunity for PV development, but its potential of global deployment and associated socio-economic impacts have not been investigated. Here, we combine solar PV output modeling with the global highway distribution and levelized cost of electricity to estimate the potential and economic feasibility of deploying highway PV systems worldwide. We also quantify its co-benefits of reducing CO2 equivalent emissions and traffic losses (road traffic deaths and socio-economic burdens). Our analysis reveals a potential for generating 17.58 PWh yr−1 of electricity, of which nearly 56% can be realized at a cost below US$100 MWh−1. Achieving the full highway PV potential could offset 28.78% (28.21%–29.1%) of the global total carbon emissions in 2018, prevent approximately 0.15 million road traffic deaths, and reduce US$0.43 ± 0.16 trillion socio-economic burdens per year. Highway PV projects could bring a net return of about US$14.42 ± 4.04 trillion over a 25-year lifetime.
Understanding the behaviors of tropical cyclone (TC) intensity under the CO2 removal scenario is important for future climate adaptation and policy making. Based on the idealized CO2 ramp-up (from 284.7 to 1,138.8 ppm) and symmetric ramp-down experiments, our results suggest an asymmetric and irreversible response of TC potential intensity to CO2 reduction. Potential intensity shows an additional enhancement at the same CO2 level during the CO2 ramp-down relative to the ramp-up periods (though with regional differences), and does not completely return to the initial value even when CO2 recovers on multi-decadal to centennial timescale. The enhanced potential intensity is dominated by the increased thermodynamic disequilibrium, which is mainly attributed to the weakened surface winds arising from the El Niño-like warming pattern and inter-hemispheric ocean temperature contrast.
In this work, we collected 333,635 tweets in English about anthropogenic climate change. We used Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning methods to embed the semantic meaning of the tweets into vectors, cluster the tweets, and analyze the results. We clustered the tweets into four clusters that correspond to four narratives in the discussion. Analyzing the behavioral dynamics of each cluster revealed that the clusters focus on the discussion of whether climate change is caused by humans or not, scientific arguments, policy, and conspiracy. The research results can serve as input for media policy and awareness-raising measures on climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, and facilitating future communications related to climate change.
This article investigates the impact of climate policies on electoral support for governing parties in Sweden through mixed methods combining a sentiment analysis of news articles and regression discontinuities of voter support over time. The regression discontinuity models indicate that the effects of climate policies on government support are not robust and are spurious across different model specifications. To ensure that we can detect effects, we used a set of political events that could have affected government support, such as elections and the Covid-pandemic as robustness checks. Contrary to expectations from literature and analyzed news reporting, we cannot determine robust effects of introducing climate policies on governmental support in Sweden. This suggests that governments do not need to anticipate losing substantial support when implementing climate policies – at least in favorable conditions.
As global temperatures continue to rise, climate change should become increasingly important in the planning of mass gatherings and should be viewed as an existential threat to all mass sporting, artistic, and religious events. As such, planners and organisers of these events need to start to bring together research, ideas, and technology that can reduce future risks of severe heat-related illnesses and deaths.
To date, governments’ decisions (such as continuing with vast subsidies for fossil fuels) clearly show that powerful vested interests have been much more influential than the amassed scientific knowledge and advice. We argue that in the face of this inaction, scientists can have the maximum amount of influence by lending their support to social movements pressing for action, joining as active participants and considering civil disobedience. Scientists seeking to halt continued environmental destruction also need to work through our institutions. Too many scientific organizations, from national academies of science to learned societies and universities, have not taken practical action on climate; for example, many still partner with fossil fuel and other compromised interests. We therefore also outline a vision for how scientists can reform our scientific institutions to become powerful agents for change.
The authors discuss the entrenched nature of the oil and gas industry's opposition to the alternatives to fossil fuels, revealing a decades-long playbook employed to hinder progress toward the transition. It builds on previous analysis of historical fossil fuel industry lobbying that highlighted the use of climate science denial tactics. It demonstrates that a range of other narratives and arguments are still being deployed by the sector to this day, despite contradicting the Science-Aligned Climate Policy analysis of the IPCC. The authors highlight the potentially seismic effects that are associated with this influencing campaign, which has enabled an expanded and sustained market for fossil fuel products at the expense of zero-carbon alternatives. The sale and use of these products have resulted in cumulative GHG emissions that now threaten to put global temperature rises on track for catastrophic climate impacts.
Some observers have argued that clean energy is to blame for rising electric rates, but the data does not support this conjecture. The author walks through recent trends in electricity rates and unpacks the myriad factors that have contributed to rate increases in recent years, leading to several key takeaways including evidence that does not suggest that clean energy is driving electricity cost increases; wildfire costs and risks have significantly increased electricity rates in California; natural gas price volatility has been a major driver of higher electricity costs in some states; utilities have made substantial investments in aging, uneconomic coal plants, raising costs to customers; transmission and distribution costs are rising nearly twice as fast as inflation, driven by a focus on grid hardening, resilience, and advanced technology; and regulated utility profit margins and bias toward capital investments underly rising electricity rates.
136 articles in 67 journals by 757 contributing authors
June 2024 was Earth’s warmest June since global record-keeping began in 1850 and was the planet’s 13th consecutive warmest month on record, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI, reported July 12. As opposed to being focused in one region or another, the record heat was unusually widespread, with 14.5% of the world’s surface experiencing record heat – beating the previous June record set in 2023 by 7.4%.
Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for June 2024, the world’s warmest June since record-keeping began in 1850. Record warm temperatures covered 14.5% of the world’s surface. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)
NASA placed June at 1.44 degrees Celsius (2.59 °F) above the 1880-1899 period, its best estimate for when preindustrial temperatures last occurred. This beat the previous June record (from 2023) by an impressive 0.13 degrees Celsius (0.23 °F).
The European Copernicus Climate Change Service also rated June 2024 as the warmest June on record and said that the global average temperature for the past 12 months (July 2023-June 2024) was the highest on record for any 12-month period, 1.64 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 preindustrial average.
Land areas had their warmest June on record in 2024, according to NOAA, and for the 15th consecutive month, global ocean temperatures were the warmest on record. The recent record heat in the oceans has brought on a global coral bleaching event, the fourth one in recorded history (1998, 2010, 2014-17, and now 2024).
It was the warmest June on record for Africa, Asia, and South America, second-warmest for Europe, fourth-warmest for North America, and 25th-warmest for Oceania. The Main Development Region for hurricanes in the Atlantic had its warmest June on record, 0.08 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous record-warm June of 2023.
Dr. Ella Gilbert is a climate scientist and presenter with a PhD in Antarctic climate change, working at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Her background is in atmospheric sciences and she's especially interested in the physical mechanisms of climate change, clouds, and almost anything polar. She is passionate about communicating climate science to non-specialist audiences and using film and TV to do it. After all, climate change affects everyone, so everyone should be able to understand it. To help with that, she publishes videos about climate science, Antarctica, weather and anything climate related on her Youtube channel called Dr Gilbz.
Here is a sample of her videos to "showcase" her work, each with a description based on what Ella provided on Youtube for it.
Climate extremes are reshaping Antarctica - published Aug 21, 2023
Antarctica is experiencing more and more extreme events, driven in large part by climate change. These extremes are changing the polar environment, with consequences for us all. Lots of this video is based on new work by Siegert et al. (2023).
Air conditioning was initially a symbol of comfort and wealth, enjoyed by the wealthy in theaters and upscale homes. Over time, as technology advanced and costs decreased, air conditioning became more accessible to the general public.
With global warming, though, air conditioning has moved from being a luxury to being necessary for survival in many places. If you live in Phoenix or Houston and your air conditioner fails, staying in your house may be impossible and you may need to evacuate.
Air-conditioning now plays a central role in protecting public health in homes, workplaces, and public spaces. But, of course, not everyone can afford it. This is one of the biggest equity issues in the climate debate, with some saying, “we’ll rely on air conditioning” to address climate change. This essentially abandons the poorest in our society, as well as the animal world, to a hellishly hot world they did not create.
Given the enormous importance of air conditioning, I thought it would be useful to put together a few posts about it. This is part one: some background on the physics of air conditioning.
Heat engines
In thermodynamics, a heat engine is a device that converts thermal energy into mechanical work by exploiting the temperature difference between a hot and a cold reservoir.
A coal-fired power plant is an example of a heat engine: It takes heat from a coal-burning furnace, the hot reservoir, converts some of it to work, e.g., driving a generator to produce electricity, and rejects the remainder of the heat into the cold reservoir, which is the environment.
Note that you cannot convert heat to work with 100% efficiency. This is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics (see appendix). The second law in fact allows us to derive exactly how much of the energy extracted from the hot reservoir can be converted into work:
efficiency=1−Tc/Th
where Th is the temperature of the hot reservoir, e.g., the furnace, and Tc is the temperature of the cold reservoir, usually the environment. Plugging in typical values of 80F and 600F for a coal-fired power plant1, you get an efficiency of around 50%.
This is the best you can do and, in the real world, you can’t achieve this: Very efficient coal-fired power plants tend to be around 40% efficient. This means that, for every 100 Joules of energy from burning coal, you get 40 Joules of electricity. The other 60 Joules are waste heat ejected into the environment. This necessary production of waste heat is a main reason that thermal power plants are usually sited next to rivers or lakes, which are used as heat sinks.
Posted on 14 July 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 7, 2024 thru Sat, July 13, 2024.
Story of the week
It's still early summer in the Northern Hemisphere. The season comes as our first year of 1.5°C warming of Earth's land surface is recorded and ocean temperature remains at historical highs, leaving our atmosphere loaded with heat and moisture crammed in by our changing our climate. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that summer 2024 is off to a roaring start, setting numerous new records of various unattractive kinds. Thus our Story of the Week is how only a little warming leads to notably worse and more frequent extreme weather— exemplified by some 1/3rd of this week's collection of news items being centered on "just" 1.5°C of warming, and extreme weather and impacts of this so-called best case warming scenario (highlighted in red).
Summer 2024's climate-fueled weather problems are leading to burgeoning cases of heat exhaustion and heat stroke, with hospitals sometimes struggling to manage influxes of patients urgently in need of care to avoid organ shutdown and death. Skeptical Science's beat is principally about combating climate change denial, a mission that is driven as much by care and consideration for others as it is annoyance with liars and the lies they tell. Meanwhile, excessive heat can and does kill workers. Hence we can't help but note that as climate change is added to the bonfire stupidity of "culture war," politicians claiming to act on behalf of workers are in fact making it legally impossible for local governments to protect those workers from excess heat exposure, despite near complete absence of binding guidance from upper echelons of jurisdiction. We believe this is helpful background information for making fully joined-up decisions in an important election year. After all, in general it's best to choose leaders who reliably can see and employ crisp facts rather than spout useless ideology when administering our affairs.
Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:
Before July 7
Oxford University climate survey shows majority want action, Oxford Mail News, Lucy Williams. The University of Oxford has helped create the biggest ever survey on climate change and the results show 80 per cent of people want more government action on the environment.
Crucial gaps in climate risk assessment methods, Science Daily, Staff. Significant flaws in current climate risk assessment techniques could lead to a severe underestimation of climate-related financial losses.
To Save the Amazon, What if We Listened to Those Living Within It?, Justice & Health, Inside Climate News, Katie Surma,. "Aiming to prevent “climate and ecological collapse,” rainforest inhabitants release a detailed plan to save their home, honing in on ending fossil fuel subsidies and securing Indigenous land rights."
Exposing Bjorn Lomborg's Climate Lies, ClimateClub on Youtube, Andreas Hernandez Denyer. A 17 minute long video explaining why most of what Björn Lomborg says about climate change is flawed.
Posted on 13 July 2024 by John Mason, BaerbelW, Ken Rice
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by John Mason in collaboration with members from the Gigafact team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.
Were scientists caught falsifying data in the hacked emails incident dubbed 'climategate'?
Nine separate investigations found that climate scientists involved in the “climategate” controversy did not falsify data.
In 2009, the Climatic Research Unit’s servers were hacked. One scientist was reported as saying that he “completed Mike’s nature trick” to “hide the decline” in an email. The “trick” in question simply refers to combining instrumental temperature data and tree ring data.
“Hide the decline” referred not to a temperature decline, but a decline in the reliability of some tree rings as a temperature proxy. This had become an issue in data starting from the year 1960. Also known as the "divergence problem," it had been discussed in the scientific literature since the mid 1990s — 15 years before "climategate."
Steve Mosher, who fueled the conspiracy theory, has since issued a public apology, acknowledging that the scientists’ work was accurate.
Cold winds blowing over polynyas (areas of ice-free water) on the Antarctic continental shelf create sea ice, forming very cold and somewhat salty, hence very dense, waters. These dense shelf waters descend the continental slope to the abyss, mixing with adjacent waters to form Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW). AABW spreads northward from there, filling much of the global abyssal ocean as it mixes with warmer, lighter waters above. AABW has been warming on pressure surfaces, freshening and cooling on density surfaces, and reducing in volume (contracting). These changes are likely a result of melting Antarctic ice sheets, which freshen the shelf waters, making them less dense, hence less able to sink to the bottom. We compare profiles of ocean temperature and salinity in the eastern Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean collected in 2023 and 2024 by robotic freely drifting profilers to data collected from ships from the early 1990s to the late 2010s. We find all of the above listed changes, but also acceleration of the warming, with the rate from 2017/18 to 2023/24 being nearly triple the rate from 1992/95 to 2023/24. The contraction rate has nearly quadrupled. This acceleration has been predicted by high-resolution climate model simulations.
Clear-Air Turbulence (CAT) is associated with wind shear in the vicinity of jet streams in upper atmospheric levels. This turbulence occurs in cloudless regions and causes most weather-related aircraft accidents. Recent studies have shown that in response to climate change, CAT could significantly increase over certain regions as a consequence of strengthening of jet streams. In this study we use several atmospheric reanalyses and coupled model experiments database to evaluate CAT recent and future changes in the Northern Hemisphere. Several CAT diagnostics are computed to assess the sensitivity of the results to different turbulence representations. A significant positive trend in CAT frequency is found in the reanalyses in different Northern Hemisphere regions over the period 1980–2021. The signal-to-noise analysis shows that over North Africa, East Asia and Middle East the increase of CAT occurrence in the last decades is likely attributed to the response to anthropogenic forcing. In contrast, over the North Atlantic and North Pacific the response to external forcing is not detectable due to a weak signal to noise ratio related to large internal variability.
Using the approximate partial radiative perturbation (APRP) method, future shortwave aerosol effective radiative forcing changes are isolated from other shortwave changes in an 18-member ensemble of ScenarioMIP projections from phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). APRP-derived near-term (2020–2050) aerosol forcing trends are correlated with published model emulation values but are 30%–50% weaker. Differences are likely explained by location shifts of aerosol-impacting emissions and their resultant influences on susceptible clouds. Despite weaker changes, implementation of aggressive aerosol cleanup policies will have a major impact on global warming rates over 2020–2050. APRP-derived aerosol radiative forcings are used together with a forcing and impulse response model to estimate global temperature trends. Strong mitigation of GHGs, as in SSP1-2.6, likely prevents warming exceeding 2C since preindustrial but the strong aerosol cleanup in this scenario increases the probability of exceeding 2C by 2050 from near zero without aerosol changes to 6% with cleanup. When the same aerosol forcing is applied to a more likely GHG forcing scenario (i.e., SSP2-4.5), aggressive aerosol cleanup more than doubles the probability of reaching 2C by 2050 from 30% to 80%.
Climate Data Democracy is critical to open up a new era where climate data does not remain a commodity whose access is restricted to the learned or moneyed few. With the climate crisis unfolding around us, the need for informed action has never been as urgent, or apparent, as it is now. Data should not act as a barrier to action, as it does today. We argue for academia to take an enabling role, acting as a node to connect governments, business, civil society and other critical stakeholders.
At least 230 new climate cases were filed in 2023. Many of these are seeking to hold governments and companies accountable for climate action. However, the number of cases expanded less rapidly last year than previously, which may suggest a consolidation and concentration of strategic litigation efforts in areas anticipated to have a high impact. Climate cases have continued to spread to new countries, with cases filed for the first time in Panama and Portugal in 2023. 2023 was an important year for international climate change litigation, with major international courts and tribunals being asked to rule and advise on climate change. Just 5% of climate cases have been brought before international courts, but many of these cases have significant potential to influence domestic proceedings.
The authors present the fossil fuel holdings of over 7,500 pension funds, insurance companies, asset managers, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds, and asset management arms of commercial banks. In May 2024, these institutional investors held $4.3 trillion in bonds and shares of fossil fuel companies. For the second year in a row, Vanguard holds the sad record as the world’s biggest fossil fuel investor. The US asset management company holds and manages assets of coal, oil, and gas companies worth $413 billion. Due to its sheer volume and because it does not have any fossil fuel policy, Vanguard is the number one in fossil fuel investments worldwide. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset management company, holds rank number 2. Its' fossil fuels assets add up to $400 billion. Fossil fuel investors number 3 and 4 are State Street, which holds $171 billion, closely followed by Capital Group, which holds $165 billion. Collectively these four US asset managers hold and manage assets in fossil fuel companies worth $1.1 trillion.
145 articles in 63 journals by 846 contributing authors
The world’s coral reefs are like underwater cities, bustling with all kinds of fish and sea animals. Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean, but they support an estimated 25% of all marine species, including many important fish species. The economic value of the services that these complex ecosystems provide is estimated at over US$3.4 billion yearly just in the U.S.
Today, rising ocean temperatures threaten many reefs’ survival. When ocean waters become too warm for too long, corals expel the colorful symbiotic algae, called zooxanthellae, that live in their tissues – a process called coral bleaching. These algae provide the corals with food, so bleached corals are vulnerable to starvation and disease and may die if the water does not cool quickly enough.
The current bleaching event in the wider Caribbean region is longer and more severe than any previous bleaching episode recorded since the first global one in 1998. I study large-scale climate and ocean dynamics and am analyzing how biological connections between coral reefs – sometimes extending over great distances – may help reefs recover from heat stress.
The current mass coral bleaching event is the fourth such episode since 1998.
Some people thought Juliana Dockery and her husband Sean were being impractical when they bought an electric vehicle in 2022. Why? Like one in five Americans, they live in a rural area — Grass Valley,California — where charging stations are few and far between. And with a bustling household including three kids, it would be their family’s only car.
Just 17% of rural Americans live less than a mile from a public EV charger, while 60% of urbanites do. So it was understandable to wonder: Could they keep their car charged without drama? Would they still be able to manage longer-distance drives, like chaperoning out-of-town school field trips for their kids?
Two years later, Juliana Dockery answers with confidence: yes and yes. Like most EV drivers, Dockery charges her car mostly at home and uses apps to plan her longer trips around charging station availability. So even though she’s excited that more charging infrastructure is on the way, she says the family has already been able to get everywhere they need to go.
In addition to reducing their carbon footprint, she said the family has benefited financially by ditching their old gas-powered Honda Fit and transitioning to the Volkswagen ID4.
The Dockerys are not alone in recognizing the advantages of moving to an EV. A new report by Coltura, a nonprofit working to speed up the shift from gasoline and diesel to cleaner alternatives, sheds light on how EV adoption can benefit rural communities in particular.
Federal Chevron deference is dead. On June 28, 2024, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court overturned the 40-year-old legal tenet that when a federal statute is silent or ambiguous about a particular regulatory issue, courts should defer to the implementing agency’s reasonable interpretation of the law.
The reversal came in a ruling on two fishery regulation cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce.
This decision means that federal courts will have the final say on what an ambiguous federal statute means. What’s not clear is whether most courts will still listen to expert federal agencies in determining which interpretations make the most sense.
While courts and judges will vary, as a scholar in environmental law, I expect that the demise of Chevron deference will make it easier for federal judges to focus on the exact meaning of Congress’ individual words, rather than on Congress’ goals or the real-life workability of federal laws.
Posted on 7 July 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz
A listing of 31 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, June 30, 2024 thru Sat, July 6, 2024.
Story of the week
Our Story of the Week is brought to us by Dr. Ella Gilbert, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey. As Gilbert mentions in her bio, she's passionate about "making climate science accessible to non-scientists." Dr. Gilbert backs that ambition with action, presenting as "Dr. Gilbz" on YouTube. In her newest production, Gilbert walks us through three very recent scientific publications that amplify worry over the fate of Antarctic ice sheets and hence the fate of coastal cities all over the globe:
As Dr. Gilbert explains, these papers suggest a high degree of risk unaccounted for in models of future behavior of ice in West Antarctica. These findings join other recent work raising biq questions about what our climate accident is unleashing from Earth's most southerly continent. It's fair to say that these investigations collectively trend toward grim possibilities.
What happens in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica. Leaving aside fear of the unknown, the practical implications of underestimated Antarctic ice loss are unanticipated sea level rise, and hence suboptimal planning for adaptation of coastal cities to challenges presented by the rising sea. We may fail to see cases for complete retreat in time for some degree of planned exit as opposed to a panicked rout. Failng to take into account what Antactica is going to deliver to our shorelines will be very costly.
Dr. Gilbert points out that even while we don't have complete information on the magnitude of Antarctic upheaval we're created, we do still know perfeclty well how to reduce whatever mayhem is in store: as quickly as possible we need to modernize our energy systems and dump the outmoded fossil fuels creating problems in the Antarctice and everwhere else on the planet. The biggest answer remains the same and plainly visible, leaving an even larger question hanging in the air: will we listen to and act on the best advice we have?
Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:
Before June 30
More extreme heat demands coordinated action, WMO Press Release, Staff. "With extreme heat posing a growing threat to human health, the environment and key economic sectors, hundreds of millions of people in the northern hemisphere are bracing for what is typically the hottest month of the year, July."
The University of Chicago’s new climate initiative, Climate Change, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,, Jessica McKenzie . "Brave research program or potentially dangerous foray into solar geoengineering?"https://thebulletin.org/2024/06/the-university-of-chicago-new-climate-initiative/
Arguments
Skeptical Science is partnering with 
Most polar bear populations could become extinct by 2100 if our greenhouse gas emissions continue.
Figure 1. An unidentified car on a road in the Texas Panhandle in March 1936 with heavy clouds of dust in the sky — a typical phenomenon of the Dust Bowl. (Image credit: 
Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for June 2024, the world’s warmest June since record-keeping began in 1850. Record warm temperatures covered 14.5% of the world’s surface. (Image credit: 
Nine separate investigations found that climate scientists involved in the “climategate” controversy did not falsify data.
(Photo credit: Automotive Rhythms / 
Gilbert mentions in her bio, she's passionate about "making climate science accessible to non-scientists." Dr. Gilbert backs that ambition with action, presenting as "Dr. Gilbz" on YouTube. In her newest production, Gilbert walks us through three very recent scientific publications that amplify worry over the fate of Antarctic ice sheets and hence the fate of coastal cities all over the globe:
