Any doubts about Climate Change?

**harrybarracuda** · 17-07-2023, 09:24 PM

Imaging you're the world's biggest polluter and you lie through your teeth about how much coal you burn, and you keep burning more and more coal, and then:

China's highest-ever temperature increases by almost two degrees

As dangerously hot conditions sweep across Asia, China has provisionally recorded its highest temperature in history.
Temperatures reached 52.2C (126F) in Sanbao, Xinjiang province today - which is 1.7C (3F) higher than the previous record.
In an indication of just how extreme weather events are becoming - it's only been six months since China broke its record for the lowest-ever temperature (-53C or -63F).
In January the country's National Meteorological Centre confirmed the previous record of -52.3C, set in 1969, had been beaten in Mohe, northern China.
That creates a swing of more than 100C (212F).

**S Landreth** · 21-07-2023, 06:09 PM

Before the next update. Extreme weather…..

Zeke Hausfather - We are now at 16 days in a row where global temperatures are hotter (in absolute terms) than any prior days on record.

Barring an unprecedented drop in temperatures over the next two weeks, its almost certain that July will be the warmest July (and month) on record. https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1681748676006522881

**S Landreth** · 24-07-2023, 06:37 PM

NOAA – June 2023 was the warmest June recorded

2023 Year-to-date Temperature: January – June was the 3^rd warmest January – June recorded

NOAA

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What this summer's weather reveals about climate change

Monitoring the planet's climate this summer can give one the impression that the climate system — which includes the oceans, atmosphere, ice sheets and more — has gone off the rails.

Why it matters: The blitz of extreme weather events is posing dangers to life and infrastructure, and exposing our vulnerabilities even at today's relatively modest level of warming, about 1.2°C (2.16°F) above preindustrial levels.

Even a quick scan at the front pages of newspapers worldwide can impart a sense of deep unease.

The big picture: This past weekend alone featured dangerous heat in the Southwest and West; Miami's first "Excessive Heat Warning;" explosive, dark and angry clouds erupting from massive wildfires in British Columbia; and more.

On Sunday, China set a provisional all-time national heat record, with a high of 52.2°C (126°F) in Sanbao. Separately, European nations are poised to tie or break their all-time record high temperature this week amid a fierce heat wave building along the Mediterranean coast.
In Vermont, residents are only beginning to clean up from one of the state's most damaging flash floods on record.

Meanwhile, climate scientists are raising alarms about global trends. The planet is coming off the warmest June on record, with temperatures likely to climb even higher in July. The oceans, especially the North Atlantic, are off-the-charts warm.

Far to the south, Antarctic sea ice cover has precipitously dropped in a development that has scientists searching for answers.

The intrigue: Climate studies have warned about an uptick in simultaneous heat waves occurring in the Northern Hemisphere. That's partly due to the contortions of the jet stream, which helps to steer and power storm systems.

One such study published last year found concurrent heatwaves are becoming more intense and affecting larger areas, with a nearly sixfold increase in their frequency in the most recent decade compared to the 1980s.
Initial signs point to a particularly slow-moving or even stuck jet stream pattern known to favor heat waves as potentially related to the extreme heat in the U.S., Europe and China, University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann told Axios via email.
Research that Mann and his colleagues have published shows that climate change may be increasing the chances that such weather patterns will develop.

Between the lines: Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, says what is happening now demonstrates that the climate is a non-linear system.

"In a linear system, changes occur in a straight line. If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage," he tells Axios in an email.
He notes, however, that the built and natural worlds each have thresholds, beyond which severe impacts can occur.
This might be the clearance of a bridge above a suddenly raging river during a flash flood, or a temperature threshold above which bark beetles can survive once-frigid Western winters.
"Each 0.1°C of additional warming will surpass an increasing number of thresholds in the climate system. We will see more and more "sudden" climate impacts that have never happened before," he adds.

What they're saying: Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, cautioned against thinking that we've reached a "new normal," since that implies a semblance of stability.

"We’re nowhere near a normal, we’re in a phase of accelerated warming, because we are still increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The result is the weather we see," she told Axios via email.
"Whenever we stop burning fossil fuels we can begin to figure out what 'normal' means again."

The bottom line: As scientists investigate whether human-caused climate change has caused additional thresholds to be crossed this summer, it's time to prepare for more surprises.

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Between the lines: Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, says what is happening now demonstrates that the climate is a non-linear system.

More about a non-linear system, here.

A snippet..........

In a linear system, changes occur in a straight line. If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage. In this world, things slowly get worse over decades until, later this century, the accumulations of slow impacts becomes truly terrible.

But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event, for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.

As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.

In short.......

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U.S.-China climate talks are back on track — with obstacles

John Kerry, the top U.S. climate diplomat, wrapped up three days of climate talks with senior Chinese officials on Wednesday, calling them "productive" but noting the urgency of the work ahead for the world's two biggest carbon emitters.

Why it matters: Cooperation between the U.S. and China has proven in the past to be helpful in paving the way for successful climate negotiations. An agreement leading up to the Paris Climate Summit has been cited as an example.

But with tense relations between the two countries and a lack of in-person meetings for about a year, the most recent talks did not result in any joint statements or agreements.
Importantly, however, the two countries announced plans for additional rounds of discussions in the runup to the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, which is just four months away.

Flashback: Climate talks were suspended as part of China's retaliation for the visit of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) visit to Taiwan last year.

Kerry has long sought to carve climate change out from other sticking points in the U.S.-China relationship, but that has not been entirely successful.

The big picture: The extreme weather events occurring worldwide, including in Beijing, where all-time record heat was recorded this month, set the backdrop for the talks, and were brought up multiple times by Kerry over the past few days.

"We are both deeply alarmed by the best available science and the findings," Kerry said of the U.S. and China in a press briefing in Beijing. Kerry noted that China's provisional highest temperature reading on record, 52.2°C (126°F), occurred in Sanbao Sunday.
"We both agreed that we want to work together to guarantee a positive outcome from COP28, where obviously the cooperation of China and the United States is critical to any outcome," Kerry said. "This is not a one-off meeting. We are already pinpointing the time for our next meeting."
"We have to make up a certain amount of time for the period that this discussion has not been taking place."

Zoom in: Kerry, who met with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua, as well as China's chief diplomat, Wang Yi, Premier Li Qiang, and Vice President Han Zheng, laid out focus areas for future discussions.

He said among the topics to be discussed include the "scaling and integrating of renewable energy into a power sector," with the goal of reducing coal emissions. Reducing non-CO2 emissions, such as methane, is also on the table.

Yes, but: Chinese President Xi Jinping, who did not meet with Kerry, indicated in remarks made this week and reported in the official People's Daily that China would determine its own pace of emissions cuts.

“The pathway and means for reaching this goal, and the tempo and intensity, should be and must be determined by ourselves, and never under the sway of others,” Xi stated, per the New York Times.
Kerry, when asked about Xi's remarks, did not say he interpreted them as contrary to the spirit of the talks, noting that neither the U.S. nor China was "dictating" climate plans to the other.

What they're saying: "People should see the visit as an effort to re-start dialogue. The way to evaluate a starting point is by what it starts, not what it concludes," Li Shuo, senior adviser to Greenpeace East Asia, told Axios via email.

“Kerry’s visit is an important step in what will be a complex rescue operation for the US-China climate dialogue. With the positive signals shown by both sides, this trip will hopefully put Kerry’s dialogues with his Chinese counterparts on a stronger footing."

Reality check: U.S.-China relations are fragile, with anti-China sentiment on Capitol Hill reaching a fever pitch, and the potential exists for any geopolitical incident to derail the fledgling climate engagement once again.

https://www.axios.com/2023/07/19/us-...te-talks-kerry

**S Landreth** · 30-07-2023, 07:31 PM

NASA – June 2023 was the warmest June recorded

NASA

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Report: Record heat "virtually impossible" without climate change

Record-breaking, deadly heat in the U.S. and Europe would have been "virtually impossible" in a world without human-driven climate change, according to new data published early Tuesday.

Why it matters: The findings show society is more vulnerable than previously thought to relatively low levels of warming.

The study also drives home the speed with which greenhouse gas emissions are transforming our climate.
The study concludes that climate change increased the odds of this month's heat wave in China, which set a provisional national record high temperature.

Driving the news: With all-time heat records falling in North America, Europe and Asia, seven members of the international group of scientists known as World Weather Attribution examined the potential that human-caused climate change is shifting the likelihood and severity of heat waves.

The group functions as a scientific detective squad, having investigated climate change's possible connections to dozens of extreme weather events.

Reality check: Such rapid analyses are conducted and released too quickly to undergo outside peer review.

This is a tradeoff: The goal is to provide the public and policymakers with needed context for ongoing or recent extreme events.

Zoom in: The data found that the heat waves still affecting three continents have been transformed from rare events to relatively common occurrences, in a matter of just a few decades.

Without climate change, the study finds, China's heat wave would have been a 1-in-250-year event. But now, such an event has a 20% chance of occurring in any given year.
Sweltering conditions in the U.S., Mexico and southern Europe would have been "virtually impossible ... if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels," the study says.

How they did it: Using weather observations and computer models, scientists compared the extreme heat in the context of the climate as it exists today — after about 1.2°C (2.16°F) of human-caused warming — with that of the preindustrial era.

They found that climate change has already transformed once-rare events into far more common occurrences: In southern Europe, for example, each year has a 10% chance of such an extreme heat event.

The intrigue: Climate change made heat waves both more possible, and hotter — about 2.5°C (4.5°F) degrees warmer in southern Europe, and 2°C (3.6°F) higher in the southwestern U.S.

During a press call with reporters Monday, the study's authors warned that failing to rein in the burning of fossil fuels will cause similar heat waves to occur roughly every two to five years in the U.S.

They also pushed back on the notion that these heat waves are evidence of an unexpected speeding up of global warming.
"This is absolutely not a surprise," said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College in London who heads the group that conducted the study, of the extreme heat.

By the numbers: The heat waves are taking place as global air and ocean temperatures smash records.

The world's average surface temperatures have been among the warmest on record for more than three weeks in a row. July is on course to set a record for the planet's warmest month.

What they're saying: Otto said fossil fuel-driven climate change alone can yield simultaneous extreme heat events, as has occurred during June and July.

"As long as we keep burning fossil fuels, we will see more and more of these extremes," she said. "The most important thing is that they kill people. And they particularly kill and hurt and destroy lives and livelihoods of those most vulnerable."

https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstr...ere%20Heat.pdf

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State of the climate: 2023 now likely hottest year on record after extreme summer

The first half of 2023 has been extremely warm worldwide as a developing El Niño event on top of human-caused climate change helped drive temperatures into record-breaking territories.

Growing El Niño is driving up global temperatures

While human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are responsible for effectively all of the Earth’s long-term warming, temperatures in any given year are strongly influenced by short-term variations in the Earth’s climate that are typically associated with El Niño and La Niña events.

Due to the fact that only half a year of data is available so far, there is still a fair amount of uncertainty around where temperatures will end up. The figure below shows the projected 2023 temperatures in the Berkeley Earth dataset, with both the year-to-date and the range of likely 2023 annual temperatures shown.

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Dr Eleanor Frajka-Williams - Will the #AMOC collapse by 2025? Here’s what we know from direct observations (since 2004).
Image from Srokosz & Bryden (2015) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1255575

https://twitter.com/EleanorFrajka/status/1683917521735368704

Tipping Point

From Stefan Rahmstorf

What is happening in the Atlantic Ocean to the AMOC?

For various reasons I’m motivated to provide an update on my current thinking regarding the slowdown and tipping point of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). I attended a two-day AMOC session at the IUGG Conference the week before last, there’s been interesting new papers, and in the light of that I have been changing my views somewhat. Here’s ten points, starting from the very basics, so you can easily jump to the aspects that interest you.

1, The AMOC is a big deal for climate. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a large-scale overturning motion of the entire Atlantic, from the Southern Ocean to the high north. It moves around 15 million cubic meters of water per second (i.e. 15 Sverdrup). The AMOC water passes through the Gulf Stream along a part of its much longer journey, but contributes only the smaller part of its total flow of around 90 Sverdrup. The AMOC is driven by density differences and is a deep reaching vertical overturning of the Atlantic; the Gulf Stream is a near-surface current near the US Atlantic coast and mostly driven by winds. The AMOC however moves the bulk of the heat into the northern Atlantic so is highly relevant for climate, because the southward return flow is very cold and deep (heat transport is the flow multiplied by the temperature difference between northward and southward flow). The wind-driven part of the Gulf Stream contributes much less to the net northward heat transport, because that water returns to the south at the surface in the eastern Atlantic at a temperature not much colder than the northward flow, so it leaves little heat behind in the north. So for climate impact, the AMOC is the big deal, not the Gulf Stream.

4. The AMOC is now weaker than any time in the past millennium. Several groups of paleoclimatologists have used a variety of methods to reconstruct the AMOC over longer time spans. We compiled the AMOC reconstructions we could find in Caesar et al. 2021, see Figure 3. In case you’re wondering how the proxy data reconstructions compare with other methods for the recent variability since 1950, that is shown in Caesar et al. 2022 (my take: quite well).

6. The AMOC has a tipping point, but it is highly uncertain where it is. This tipping point was first described by Stommel 1961 in a highly simple model which captures a fundamental feedback. The region in the northern Atlantic where the AMOC waters sink down is rather salty, because the AMOC brings salty water from the subtropics to this region. If it becomes less salty by an inflow of freshwater (rain or meltwater from melting ice), the water becomes less dense (less “heavy”), sinks down less, the AMOC slows down. Thus it brings less salt to the region, which slows the AMOC further. It is called the salt advection feedback. Beyond a critical threshold this becomes a self-amplifying “vicious circle” and the AMOC grinds to a halt. That threshold is the AMOC tipping point. Stommel wrote: “The system is inherently frought with possibilities for speculation about climatic change.”

That this tipping point exists has been confirmed in numerous models since Stommel’s 1961 paper, including sophisticated 3-dimensional ocean circulation models as well as fully fledged coupled climate models. We published an early model comparison about this in 2005. The big uncertainty, however, is in how far the present climate is from this tipping point. Models greatly differ in this regard, the location appears to be sensitively dependent on the finer details of the density distribution of the Atlantic waters. I have compared the situation to sailing with a ship into uncharted waters, where you know there are dangerous rocks hidden below the surface that could seriously damage your ship, but you don’t know where they are.

10. There are possible Early Warning Signals (EWS). New methods from nonlinear dynamics search for those warning signals when approaching tipping points in observational data, from cosmology to quantum systems. They use the critical slowing down, increasing variance or increasing autocorrelation in the variability of the system. There is the paper by my PIK colleague Niklas Boers (2021), which used 8 different data series (Figure 6) and concluded there is ”strong evidence that the AMOC is indeed approaching a critical, bifurcation-induced transition.”

Another study, this time using 312 paleoclimatic proxy data series going back a millennium, is Michel et al. 2022. They argue to have found a ”robust estimate, as it is based on sufficiently long observations, that the Atlantic Multidecadal Variability may now be approaching a tipping point after which the Atlantic current system might undergo a critical transition.”

And today (update!) a third comparable study by Danish colleagues has been published, Ditlevsen & Ditlevsen 2023, which expects the tipping point already around 2050, with a 95% uncertainty range for the years 2025-2095. Individual studies always have weaknesses and limitations, but when several studies with different data and methods point to a tipping point that is already quite close, I think this risk should be taken very seriously.

Conclusion

Timing of the critical AMOC transition is still highly uncertain, but increasingly the evidence points to the risk being far greater than 10 % during this century – even rather worrying for the next few decades. The conservative IPCC estimate, based on climate models which are too stable and don’t get the full freshwater forcing, is in my view outdated now. I side with the recent Climate Tipping Points report by the OECD, which advised:

Yet, the current scientific evidence unequivocally supports unprecedented, urgent and ambitious climate action to tackle the risks of climate system tipping points.

If you like to know more about this topic, you can either watch my short talk from the Exeter Tipping Point conference last autumn, or the longer video of my EPA Climate Lecture in Dublin Mansion House last April.

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Zack Labe - The current sea ice anomaly remains more than 2 million square kilometers below the 1981-2010 average for this time of year (https://zacklabe.com/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/…).

https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1683205029555994626

**S Landreth** · 09-08-2023, 12:44 AM

Copernicus – July 2023 was the warmest July recorded and it was the warmest month ever recorded

Copernicus

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Ocean surface hits highest ever recorded temperature and set to rise further

The surface temperature of the world’s oceans has hit its highest ever level as climate breakdown from burning fossil fuels causes the oceans to heat.

Global average daily sea surface temperatures (SST) hit 20.96C this week, breaking the record of 20.95C reached in 2016, according to the Copernicus climate modelling service.

Scientists say it is likely the record will continue to be broken, as usually oceans are at their hottest globally in March, not August.

Dr Samantha Burgess, from Copernicus, said: “The fact that we’ve seen the record now makes me nervous about how much warmer the ocean may get between now and next March.”

It is likely the temperatures are partly driven by the El Niño weather phenomenon – 2016 was also an El Niño year. However, these weather patterns are probably exacerbated by climate breakdown and the heating atmosphere.

“The more we burn fossil fuels, the more excess heat will be taken out by the oceans, which means the longer it will take to stabilise them and get them back to where they were,” Burgess told the BBC.

This week, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, announced more than 100 new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, against the advice of climate experts.

Oceans also regulate the climate, soaking up heat, driving weather patterns, acting as a carbon sink and providing respite as cool air blowing off the sea can make hot land temperatures more bearable. However, these useful impacts lessen as the oceans heat, and warm waters also have less ability to absorb carbon dioxide, which means there will be more of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Warming oceans also contribute to ice melting, which causes sea level rise.

Sea surface temperature measurements made from ships go back more than 150 years and are some of the longest instrumental records available for understanding the climate. For the past 40 years, there have also been measurements available from satellites and buoys.

From this data, scientists have found that over the full period of the records, global mean sea surface temperature has increased by close to 0.9C, and that the increase over the past four decades is about 0.6C. The latest five-year average is about 0.2C above the average between 1991 and 2020.

Some of the fastest warming areas are parts of the Arctic Ocean, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and parts of the extra-tropical Pacific.

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Zeke Hausfather - Neat to see my comparison of record ocean temperatures to climate model projections in today's @nytimes.

Its definitely approaching the upper end of what we'd expect to see based on climate models: https://nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/03/climate/ocean-temperatures-heat-earth.html - https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1687502591733964800

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Coral Bleaching Heat Stress Monitoring

https://www.noaa.gov

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A Record Breaking Boreal Wildfire Season

The Northern Hemisphere has seen significant wildfire activity since the beginning of May this year, with widespread record-breaking fires in Canada and large fires across eastern Russia. Wildfire activity follows seasonal patterns, with the Northern Hemisphere typically seeing fires from May to October, with peaks in July and August, coinciding with the hottest and driest months of the year. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS*) monitors the locations and intensity of fires, as well as tracking emissions and forecasting the impacts of the resulting smoke on the atmosphere.

From 1 January to 31 July, accumulated carbon emissions from wildfires across Canada total 290 megatonnes. This is already more than double the previous record for the year as a whole and represents over 25% of the global total for 2023 to date.

The impact of climate change

Warm and dry weather has created conditions conducive to the record-breaking scale of the 2023 wildfires in Canada. Climate change is making such conditions more likely and increase the chance of a longer fire season. El Niño conditions, declared by the WMO in early July, may have also contributed, especially in northern parts of the country.

In addition, surface air temperatures in the Arctic are increasing faster than the global average, and this could be contributing to increased flammability and potentially more fire activity.

https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/rec...ildfire-season

**S Landreth** · 11-08-2023, 08:00 AM

What a record July means for 2023 temperature

Just how likely is 2023 to be the warmest year on record?

Using this approach, we find a best-estimate of 1.38C, with a 5th to 95th percentile uncertainty range of 1.30C to 1.46C. This gives us an 85% chance of 2023 being the warmest year on record.

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Awareness - News headlines the day after the July report

July 2023 hottest month on record as heatwaves scorch Earth | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera

July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth with abnormally high temperatures recorded on both land and sea, the European Union’s climate observatory confirmed, warning of dire consequences for the planet.

About 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.16F) of global warming since the late 1800s, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has made heatwaves hotter, longer and more frequent, as well as intensifying other weather extremes such as storms and floods.

July was the world's warmest month in recorded history, and $1 billion weather disasters continue to mount

With extreme heat waves roasting the planet on nearly every continent, July easily set a record for the warmest month on land in recorded history, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

“The global average temperature for July 2023 is confirmed to be the highest on record for any month,” the WMO said in a statement on Tuesday. “The month was 0.72°C warmer than the 1991-2020 average for July, and 0.33°C warmer than the previous warmest month, July 2019.”

$1 billion weather disasters pile up

In the U.S., some of the “dire consequences” of fast-rising global temperatures have included a growing number of $1-billion weather disasters.

“There have been 15 individual weather and climate disaster events confirmed for January through July 2023, each with losses exceeding $1 billion,” the NOAA said on Tuesday in a press release. “This is the highest number of billion-dollar disasters ever recorded for the first seven months of a year since NOAA began tracking these events in 1980.”

July was world’s hottest month on record, climate scientists confirm | Climate crisis | The Guardian

The global average temperature was 16.95C last month, surpassing the previous record set in 2019 by a substantial 0.33C. Temperatures exceeded 40C last week in several countries across Europe including Greece, France, Italy and Spain.

Scientists have said that if greenhouse gas emissions are not controlled, extreme weather will increasingly damage Antarctic ecosystems, which would affect the rest of the world.

**harrybarracuda** · 14-08-2023, 10:51 AM

Bangkok sinking....

Fears for Bangkok as sea levels continue to rise - ABC News

**S Landreth** · 15-08-2023, 12:20 PM

NOAA – July 2023 was the warmest July ever recorded.

This marked the first time a July temperature exceeded 1.0°C (1.8°F) above the long-term average.

To date, Jan – July 2023 is the 3^rd warmest Jan – July recorded.

NOAA

**S Landreth** · 20-08-2023, 06:40 PM

NASA – July 2023 was the warmest July recorded

According to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, July 2023 was hotter than any other month in the global temperature record.

GISS Director Gavin Schmidt: “The science is clear this isn’t normal. Alarming warming around the world is driven primarily by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. And that rise in average temperatures is fueling dangerous extreme heat that people are experiencing here at home and worldwide.”

NASA

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Rocket Lab to Launch Climate Change Research Mission Focused on Arctic Ice Caps for NASA

Rocket Lab USA, Inc. (Nasdaq: RKLB) (“Rocket Lab” or “the Company”), a global leader in launch services and space systems, today announced it has signed a double-launch deal with NASA to deliver the Agency’s climate change research-focused mission, PREFIRE, to low Earth orbit in 2024.

The two dedicated missions on Electron will deploy one small satellite each to a 525km circular orbit from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand from May 2024. The PREFIRE mission has specific LTAN (Local Time of the Ascending Node) requirements and a need for the second satellite to be deployed to space shortly after the first, which is made possible by Electron’s unique ability to deploy dedicated small satellite missions on highly responsive timelines. The launches will be the 7th and 8th missions Rocket Lab has launched for NASA since 2018.

NASA’s PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment) mission will help close a gap in understanding of how much of Earth’s heat is lost to space, especially from the Arctic and Antarctica. Analysis of PREFIRE’s measurements will inform climate and ice models, providing better projections of how a warming world will affect sea ice loss, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise. Improving climate models can ultimately help to provide more accurate projections on the impacts of storm severity and frequency, as well as coastal erosion and flooding. PREFIRE consists of two, 6U CubeSats with a baseline mission length of 10 months.

Rocket Lab founder and CEO, Peter Beck, said: “Missions like these are core to the whole reason why Rocket Lab was founded in the first place – to open up access to space to improve life on Earth – and climate change is a hugely urgent cause for us all. It’s a privilege to be able to support this important mission and an honor to be a continued trusted launch provider for small satellite missions with big impact.”

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Earth’s hottest month: these charts show what happened in July and what comes next

**harrybarracuda** · 21-08-2023, 07:38 AM

A storm so bad they "cancelled the actor's strike". Huh? Talk of drought will be forgotten for a while.

California is bracing for its first tropical storm in 84 years with almost 1,000 flights cancelled and the ongoing actors' strike called off due to the impending extreme weather.

Storm Hilary was previously classed as a Category 4 hurricane but weakened as it approached the Mexican coast, from where it was due to head to California and other states in the southeastern US.

At least nine million people in southern California were under flood warnings as they faced "life-threatening" rain, mudslides, tornadoes, high winds and power outages.

Hilary: California braces for first tropical storm in 84 years as Mexico reels from its impact | World News | Sky News

**S Landreth** · 21-08-2023, 07:54 AM

NASA started a couple new visuals to help some understand

**S Landreth** · 27-08-2023, 05:02 PM

July 2023 Temperature Update - Berkeley Earth

Berkeley Earth - Globally, July 2023 was the warmest July — and the warmest month of any kind. The global mean temperature in July 2023 was 1.54 ± 0.09 °C (2.77 ± 0.16 °F) above the 1850 to 1900 average

Antarctica - Another feature of the temperature distribution in July 2023 was unseasonably warm conditions around the periphery of Antarctica. Though Antarctica remains well-below freezing, and is in the middle of Southern Hemisphere Winter, temperatures in July were not as cold as is typically expected. The sea ice around Antarctica is refreezing far more slowly than in any previously observed year in the satellite record (starting in 1979), running roughly a month behind the typical schedule.

Rest of 2023 - 2023 is on pace to be the warmest year yet observed since instrumental measurements began. The surprisingly strong warming in June and July 2023, combined with the likelihood of a strong El Niño event, have increased the forecast for the rest of 2023. The statistical approach that we use, looking at conditions in recent months, now believes that 2023 is virtually certain to become the warmest year on record (99% chance).

Likelihood of final 2023 ranking:

1st place (99 %)
2nd or 3rd place (1 %)
Top 3 overall (> 99 %)

Year to Date - This year began with a January that was similar to January in 2021 and 2022. However, with the end of La Niña, temperatures diverged markedly in February and March, and are now considerably warmer than in 2021 or 2022. With the development of El Niño and record warmth in the North Atlantic, July warmed significantly relative to May and June.

So far, only June and July have set records for monthly average temperature in 2023, though they have done so by large margins.

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Kids’ landmark Montana court win adds momentum to fight for climate protections

Youth climate activists’ landmark legal victory against the state of Montana last week could set the stage for wider recognition of rights to protection from climate change, with litigants potentially challenging state permitting for fossil fuel projects directly.

The decision, Held v. Montana, came in the wake of a state rule that would have barred Montana agencies from factoring greenhouse gas emissions into the permitting process for large energy projects. Youth plaintiffs successfully argued this rule violated their rights under the state constitution to a “clean and healthful environment.”

Six other states — New York, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island — guarantee environmental protections in their constitutions in some form, and the Held decision will likely “add force” to future litigation that aims to enforce those rights, said Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

The case was the first in the U.S. to hinge on one of these state constitutional climate provisions. And not only that, Gerrard noted: “Climate scientists were on the stand under oath” and cross-examined, he said, “affirming scientific findings [and] making it even harder to contest those scientific findings in the future.”

Indeed, in the ruling, Judge Kathy Seeley of the 1st District Court in Montana wrote that “the science is unequivocal that dangerous impacts to the climate are occurring due to human activities, primarily from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.”

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Climate change more than doubled the likelihood of extreme fire weather conditions in Eastern Canada

During May and June 2023 Canada witnessed exceptionally extreme fire-weather conditions, leading to extensive wildfires that burned over 13 million hectares.

Extreme wildfire conditions in Canada have been fueled by intense, spatially extensive and persistent fire-conducive weather conditions, known as fire weather, which has been observed since the beginning of May throughout the country. Canada has experienced its warmest May-June period since 1940, beating the previous record set in 1998 by a huge margin (0.8°C). At the national scale, relative humidity was also very low. The warm and dry conditions, together with continuous southeasterly winds fueled extensive fire spread in Alberta, British Columbia, central Saskatchewan and southwestern portions of the Northwest Territories.

There are at least 17 direct fatalities linked to the fires, more than 150,000 people have been evacuated, and at least 200 structures, including homes, were damaged in the fires (AP News, 2023). The Canadian wildfires have severely impacted air quality locally in Canada, and in the neighbouring United States with Air Quality Index (AQI) values frequently exceeding safe levels in the midwest and northeast USA, and in some cases approaching record levels (e.g. on June 7th AQI reached 341 in New York City, considered hazardous for all residents) (CNBC, 2023). Similarly, in southern Ontario, including the cities of Ottawa and Toronto, air quality reached the “very high risk” level forcing officials to cancel public events and reduce hours for outdoor public services. Schools remained closed for several days in many states, including Nova Scotia, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

In this study we focus on the fires in eastern Canada, which experienced a particularly unusually active fire season in 2023 and are most directly linked with the very large-scale impacts on air quality. In order to identify the role of human-induced climate change we focus on fire-weather indices rather than on fire regime variables such as area burned, in order to identify whether and to what extent climate change altered fire-prone weather conditions.

To capture the extent and duration of the extreme fire weather across the region, we will use the cumulative daily severity rating (Figure 1). The DSR is a scaled power transformation of the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI), and reflects how difficult a fire is to suppress once ignition has occurred; it is commonly used for assessing fire weather on monthly or longer timescales (Van Wagner,, 1987). To capture the peak intensity of the fire season, we also take the annual maximum of the 7-day moving average of the FWI. This index has been used in previous attribution studies (eg. van Oldenborgh et al., 2021), where it has been found to have a good correlation with the area burned.

Main messages

Fire weather is one important condition driving wildfires, although changes in vegetation (wildfire fuel), ignition factors, and fire management strategies also contribute to future wildfire risk.
In today’s climate, intense fire weather like that observed in May-July 2023 is a moderately extreme event, expected to occur once every 20-25 years. This means in any given year such an event is expected with 4-5% probability.
Climate change made the cumulative severity of Québec’s 2023 fire season
to the end of July around 50% more intense, and seasons of this severity at least seven times more likely to occur. Peak fire weather (FWI7x) like that experienced this year is at least twice as likely, and the intensity has increased by about 20% due to human-induced climate change.
Observed changes are typically larger than in the models.
As expected, likelihood and intensity are projected to increase further in a 2°C warmer world.
Changes in fire weather are associated with an increase in temperature and decrease in humidity, both of which are driven by human-induced warming; the effect was compounded in 2023 by unusually low precipitation
The extent, magnitude, and location of concomitant wildfires posed significant challenges for wildfire management which largely focused on disaster response and wildfire containment to limit the impact on lives and infrastructure.
The wildfires had disproportionate impacts on indigenous, fly-in, and other remote communities who were particularly vulnerable due to lack of services and barriers to response interventions.
The consequences from the wildfires reached far beyond the burned areas with displaced impacts due to air pollution threatening health, mobility, and economic activities of people across North America.
As fire weather risks increase, changes in fire management strategies and increased resources will be required to meet the increased challenges.

__________

Tropical forests face ‘massive leaf death’ from global heating, study finds

Tropical forests could become so hot that some kinds of leaves will no longer be able to conduct photosynthesis, according to a study published in the journal Nature.

The photosynthetic machinery in tropical trees begins to fail at about 46.7C on average. The research suggests that forests may be nearing dangerous temperature thresholds sooner than expected.

Using a combination of high-resolution data from Nasa’s thermal imaging instruments on the International Space Station and ground-based experiments in tropical forests across the world, researchers found that a small fraction, approximately 0.01% of all leaves, are already exposed to temperatures beyond their functional limits.

Models predict that once we hit a global temperature increase of 3.9 C, these forests might experience mass leaf damage.

Warming leaves, even if now in low numbers, act as a “canary in a coalmine for tropical ecosystems”, said Chris Doughty, an associate professor of ecoinformatics at Northern Arizona University and the lead researcher of the study.

He said the leaf-warming experiments had revealed a nonlinear rise in temperatures. “We were really surprised that when we warmed leaves by 2, 3 or 4C, the highest leaf temperatures actually increased by 8C. This shows a concerning nonlinear feedback that we were not expecting,” said Doughty.

“If we adopt a do-nothing response to climate change and tropical forest air temperatures increase by greater than 4C, there could be massive leaf death, possible tree mortality and species turnover across all tropical forests,” he added.

In terms of global impact, “the photosynthetic response would be the tip of the iceberg in terms of effects – reduced carbon uptake, likely increased mortality and even triggering possible transitions from forest to savannah”, said Mat Disney, a professor of remote sensing at University College London.

At least 50% of global CO2 exchange occurs through forest canopies, which act as key regulators of our climate.

“The importance of this work is that it is a first look at the specific impact of this leaf-scale warming on photosynthesis in tropical forests,” Disney said. “So while it is quite specific in one sense, it also provides a really interesting look at one of the underpinning processes in this region, and what might happen to it in the near future if we don’t act fast.”

Disney urged people to take action. “Vote for politicians who are serious about addressing climate change and transitioning to low-carbon economies,” he said. “More generally, we can all recognise the importance of supporting those countries and people who live in and rely on tropical forests economically, to help those transitions.

“But the serious changes to tropical forests that this work hints at don’t just affect the local people – it’s a global issue.”

**S Landreth** · 02-09-2023, 12:23 PM

August 2023 numbers will start showing up by the 2^nd week in September. Until then, a preview……

**S Landreth** · 03-09-2023, 06:00 PM

JMA – July 2023 was the warmest July recorded

Five Warmest Years (Anomalies)

1st. 2023 (+0.62°C), 2nd. 2021,2016 (+0.29°C), 4th. 2019 (+0.28°C), 5th. 2020 (+0.27°C)

JMA

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NASA Study Reveals Compounding Climate Risks at Two Degrees of Warming

If global temperatures keep rising and reach 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, people worldwide could face multiple impacts of climate change simultaneously. This is according to a NASA-led study that analyzed the projected impacts of such warming to understand how different climate effects might combine. A 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change will occur.

The researchers found that more than a quarter of the world’s population could experience an additional month of severe heat stress each year compared to the middle of the 20th century (1950-1979). High temperatures and drought could combine dangerously in places like the Amazon, increasing the risk of wildfire. In the American West, extreme fire weather will likely be more intense and last longer.

To investigate potentially compounding effects of rising temperatures, the study’s authors worked with a specially processed set of climate predictions. The predictions were originally generated by 35 of the world’s leading climate models – specifically, contributors to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which includes models developed by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. CMIP provides climate projections that help the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other international and national climate groups understand historical, current, and future climate changes.

__________

Scientists link greenhouse gas emissions to polar bear population declines

Planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions pose a direct threat to the survival of polar bears — by limiting their access to the sea ice that serves as their hunting grounds, a new study has found.

During ice-free summer months, the bears must fast, which in worst-case scenarios mean adults could die and, before then, lose the ability to successfully raise cubs, according to the study, published Thursday in the journal Science.

The first-of-its-kind research quantifies the amount of ice-free days caused by specific amounts of emissions, as well as associated polar bear survival rates and declining trends in some subpopulations.

“We’ve known for decades that continued warming and sea ice loss ultimately can only result in reduced distribution and abundance of polar bears,” lead author Steven Amstrup, chief scientist emeritus at Polar Bears International, said in a statement.

“Until now, we’ve lacked the ability to distinguish impacts of greenhouse gases emitted by particular activities from the impacts of historic cumulative emissions,” added Amstrup, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Wyoming.

Amstrup and his colleagues were able to connect ice-free days and polar bear fasting limits to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions — conducting a data analysis that establishes a direct link between these circumstances.

They found that the hundreds of power plants across the U.S. will emit more than 60 gigatons of greenhouse gases over their 30-year lifespans — reducing polar bear cub survival by 4 percent in the southern Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska.

“Polar bears are beautiful creatures, and I hope they survive global warming,” co-author Cecilia Bitz, a University of Washington professor of atmospheric sciences, said in a statement.

“All of us have experienced heat extremes in the last few years. The harm is inescapable,” she added.

Although polar bears were listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2008 because of climate-induced sea ice loss, federal officials at the time issued a legal opinion indicating that impacts of emissions need not be considered when evaluating infrastructure projects that touch on polar bear habitats.

This decision, known as the Bernhardt Opinion, required specific proof as to how a project’s emissions would affect a population’s survival, while arguing that such pollution could not be separated from the greenhouse gas releases that have occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

“Overcoming the challenge of the Bernhardt Opinion is absolutely in the realm of climate research,” Bitz said.

While scientists in 2008 could not quantify how emissions equated to the plunge in polar bear populations, this is no longer the case, Bitz explained. The new findings, the authors contended, provide the Department of Interior with the evidence needed to repeal the Bernhardt Opinion.

Bitz expressed hopes that the U.S. government “fulfills its legal obligation to protect polar bears by limiting greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.”

“I hope investments are made into fossil fuel alternatives that exist today, and to discover new technologies that avoid greenhouse gas emissions,” she added.

**S Landreth** · 07-09-2023, 01:45 AM

August numbers are out (hint: warmest Summer ever recorded) but I wanted to show HadCRUTS5 July 2023 information before I update this thread with those numbers.

John Kennedy - All of the big six global temperature datasets have now reported July (just in time for August). It was a very, very warm month: the warmest July on record by a wide margin https://twitter.com/micefearboggis/s...55166797381791

HadCRUT5 – July 2023 was the warmest July recorded

https://www.uea.ac.uk/groups-and-centres/climatic-research-unit

**S Landreth** · 10-09-2023, 07:10 PM

Part 1 of 2

Copernicus – August 2023 was the warmest August recorded and warmer than all other months except July 2023

Summer (JJA) 2023 was the warmest Summer recorded

This summer shattered global temperature records, report shows

"The scientific evidence is overwhelming —we will continue to see more climate records and more intense and frequent extreme weather events impacting society and ecosystems, until we stop emitting greenhouse gases," Burgess (deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service) said.

Copernicus

__________

World is releasing greenhouse gases at level unprecedented in geologic history, scientist says

But the unchecked burning of fossil fuels is undermining that foundation, according to a leading climate scientist.

“There is no analog in the past for the rapid warming” we are seeing today, University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann argued.

In a speech Thursday at the “The Good, The Bad and the Wicked” climate conference, presented by the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University, Mann argued climate is the hidden factor in the history of life — and its many devastating extinctions.

The talk was drawn from Mann’s new book, “Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis,” which will be released later this month.

In 1999, Mann published the famed “Hockey Stick graph” of the world climate system. The name conveys a long, largely stable climate since the year 1000 — with a sharp upward sweep of temperatures beginning in the mid-1900s.

This publication plunged Mann into the increasingly politicized debates about climate change. Over the past two decades, he said, that hockey stick has become more like a scythe: Research into historical climate data and a generation of continued warming has given it ”a longer handle and a sharper blade.”

In his speech Thursday, Mann argued forcefully against “climate doomers” who argue that onrushing climate change will unavoidably wreck human civilization.

This perspective, he argues, only benefits polluters by depressing activism.

But Mann argued that humans were tiptoeing on the edge of an atmospheirc tipping point of our own making.

“My themes here are urgency and agency,” he said. “There is still time.”

A sense of tragedy hung over Mann’s speech. A graph on climate investigative outlook Grist shows that if the energy transition had begun in 2000 — as proposed by Democratic presidential popular vote winner Al Gore — then keeping warming to the U.N. agreed-upon climate target of 1.5 degrees Celsius would have been a “bunny slope to ski down.”

Now, Mann said, it’s a far more treacherous descent. “ExxonMobil and others have bought us a ticket on the black double diamonds,” he said, referring to the most challenging ski route.

The scientist argued that life has long worked to moderate the climate — and faced devastation when it has failed.

In the early eons of life on Earth, life released more greenhouse gases when the sun was 30 percent dimmer — warming the planet — only to cut its emissions as the sun warmed.

“It almost sounds like a religious explanation, like some sentient being is tuning the knobs to keep our climate in bounds,” Mann said.

But that’s a misreading, he argued.

James Lovelock, the progenitor of this “Gaia hypothesis,” was “frustrated” by these quasi-spiritual accounts. To explain how life could act to protect itself from the ravages of an often inhospitable planet, Lovelock used the analogy of a simplified world full of only white daisies.

In that world, the hotter it gets, the more the daises grow — and the more their spreading surface reflects light into space, cooling the planet without any conscious intervention.

“The system acts to keep the planet habitable for life,” Mann said. “Life itself participates in a way that keeps the planet habitable.”

“But there is a cautionary tale here,” Mann said. “At some point you hit a limit.”

At a certain point in the simplified ecosystem of Daisy World, the sun gets hot enough to kill off the daisies — the reflection vanishes, and heat suddenly increases rapidly.

In other words, Mann said, life can be pushed to a point — but the whole system can collapse past that point.

In at least one case — the Great Dying of 252 million years ago, in which 96 percent of all life died off — this collapse was driven by an onslaught of greenhouse gases: huge releases of carbon dioxide from volcanoes, sulfides from the deep seas and methane.

Mann emphasized that this isn’t an analogy or prophecy. He said that “climate doomers” — who argue that our current conditions already match the Late Permian period when that extinction got underway — overstate the case.

“The truth is bad enough,” he said. “There’s no [current] evidence of runaway warming.”

But in that extinction and others, Mann depicted a clear connection between atmospheric gases and mass extinction.

For example, the Chicxulub meteor that is infamous for killing off the dinosaurs didn’t actually do so, Mann noted: It was the global cooling from the dust cast into orbit by the impact.

The nearest analog to our current situation is a rapid warming spike that preceded the “hothouse Earth” of 55 million years ago.

Mann noted that’s rapid in geological terms — “tens of thousands of years, not tens of years, which is what we’re doing today.”

Surviving life grew very small in this period — including the first tiny primates.

But that’s not a sign of resilience, Mann argued. Life became small because the large life died off.

“So when people say, ‘Oh, well, we’ll just adapt to warming.’ Yeah, we can adapt if we do nothing and warm the planet.”

But in that scenario, he said, “a lot of people are going to die.”

In one key area, climate scientists might have missed the mark.

They have correctly predicted the levels of warming we are currently experiencing for decades, Mann said. The climate “ is warming exactly as much as ExxonMobil predicted back in 1982,” he said.

But key tipping points — the weakening of key Atlantic currents, the rotting of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets — are looming “sooner than expected.”

“Uncertainty is not our friend,” he said.

But since that 1.5 degree Celsius goal was set when the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, commitments by world governments have cut projected warming from about 4 degrees Celsius to about 3 degrees.

**S Landreth** · 12-09-2023, 07:40 AM

Dr. Robert Rohde -This year, the seasonal open water passage through the Arctic Ocean opened in mid-August, earlier than in 2021 or 2022, but still much later than the record set in 2020.

As a reminder, such open water passages in the Arctic Ocean were rarely observed prior to 2005. https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1700075617020981642

_________

Reporting on the State of the Climate in 2022

International report confirms record-high greenhouse gases, global sea level, and ocean heat in 2022

Greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea level and ocean heat content reached record highs in 2022, according to the 33rd annual State of the Climate report.

Notable findings from the international report include:

Earth’s greenhouse gas concentrations were the highest on record.

Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide⁠—Earth’s major atmospheric greenhouse gases⁠—once again reached record high concentrations in 2022.

Warming trends continued across the globe.

A range of scientific analyses indicate that the annual global surface temperature was 0.45 to 0.54 of a degree F (0.25 to 0.30 of a degree C) above the 1991–2020 average.

La Niña conditions moderated sea surface temperatures.

La Niña conditions in the equatorial Pacific Ocean that began in mid-2020, with a short break in 2021, continued through all of 2022.

Ocean heat and global sea level were the highest on record.

Over the past half-century, the oceans have stored more than 90% of the excess energy trapped in Earth’s system by greenhouse gases and other factors.

Heatwaves shattered temperature records across the planet.

In July, a 14-day heatwave swept through western Europe.

The Arctic was warm and wet.

The Arctic had its fifth-warmest year in the 123-year record.

Antarctica experienced a variety of extremes in 2022.

Several landfalling atmospheric rivers brought an extraordinary amount of precipitation over Antarctica in 2022. All five of the long-term staffed weather stations on the Antarctic Peninsula recorded their second-warmest year on record.

Although tropical cyclone activity was near average, storms brought devastation to many areas across the globe.

There were 85 named tropical storms during the Northern and Southern Hemisphere storm seasons last year, which was near the 1991–2020 average of 87. Major Hurricane Ian killed more than 100 people and became the third-costliest disaster in the United States, with damage estimated at $113 billion (U.S. dollars).

The State of the Climate report is a peer-reviewed series published annually as a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The journal makes the full report openly available online. NCEI’s high-level overview report is also available online.

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Antarctica warming much faster than models predicted in ‘deeply concerning’ sign for sea levels

Antarctica is likely warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the world and faster than climate change models are predicting, with potentially far-reaching implications for global sea level rise, according to a scientific study.

Scientists analysed 78 Antarctic ice cores to recreate temperatures going back 1,000 years and found the warming across the continent was outside what could be expected from natural swings.

In West Antarctica, a region considered particularly vulnerable to warming with an ice sheet that could push up global sea levels by several metres if it collapsed, the study found warming at twice the rate suggested by climate models.

Climate scientists have long expected that polar regions would warm faster than the rest of the planet – a phenomenon known as polar amplification – and this has been seen in the Arctic.

Dr Mathieu Casado, of the Laboratoire des Science du Climat et de l’Environnement in France and lead author of the study, said they had found “direct evidence” that Antarctica was also now undergoing polar amplification.

“It is extremely concerning to see such significant warming in Antarctica, beyond natural variability,” he said.

Antarctica is the size of the continental US and Mexico combined, but has only 23 permanent weather stations and only three of these are away from the coast.

Casado and colleagues examined 78 Antarctic ice cores that hold a record of temperature and then compared those temperatures to climate models and observations.

The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found Antarctica was warming at a rate of between 0.22C and 0.32C per decade, compared to 0.18C per decade predicted by climate models.

Part of the warming in Antarctica is likely being masked by a change in a pattern of winds – also thought to be linked to global heating and the loss of ozone over the continent – that has tended to reduce temperatures.

Dr Sarah Jackson, an ice core expert at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the study, said the findings were “deeply concerning”.

“All our projections for future sea level rise use these low rates of warming. Our models might be underestimating the loss of ice that we might get,” she said.

Dr Danielle Udy, a climate scientist and ice core expert at the University of Tasmania, who was not involved in the paper, said the research was timely “given the extreme events we have been seeing in Antarctica”.

Scientists are scrambling to understand why Antarctic sea ice has been at record low levels over the last two years, with some suggesting global heating could now be affecting the region.

__________

Deadly humid heatwaves to spread rapidly as climate warms – study

Life-threatening periods of high heat and humidity will spread rapidly across the world with only a small increase in global temperatures, a study has found, which could cause a sharp acceleration in the number of deaths resulting from the climate crisis.

The extremes, which can be fatal to healthy people within six hours, could affect hundreds of millions of people unused to such conditions. As a result, heat deaths could rise quickly unless serious efforts to prepare populations were undertaken urgently, the researcher said.

Normally, the human body cools itself by producing sweat, which evaporates and takes heat away. But when humidity is high, evaporation is reduced. The study used a limit based on experiments on people showing that when combined heat and humidity, as measured by so-called wet bulb temperature, passes 31.5C, the body is no longer able to cool itself.

The researchers called this threshold “non-compensable heat stress”, as sweating cannot compensate for the extreme conditions. Without cooling aids, such as cold water, fans or air conditioning, death is likely within hours.

The research analysed data from thousands of weather stations across the world to show that 4% had already experienced at least one six-hour period of this extreme heat stress since 1970, with the frequency of such events doubling by 2020. However, these have been confined to date to hot places, including the Gulf in the Middle East, the Red Sea and the North Indian Plain, where people expect extreme heat.

The analysis, which also used climate models, shows that extreme heat stress will spread rapidly to other regions with global heating of only 2C. The climate crisis has already raised global temperatures by about 1.2C. At 2C, more than 25% of the weather stations would suffer the extreme heat stress once a decade on average.

__________

Climate crisis poses greatest risk to people with respiratory illnesses, experts warn

The climate crisis may pose the greatest risks to people with respiratory illnesses, with high temperatures and changing weather patterns exacerbating lung health problems, experts have said.

Respiratory experts have called on the EU to lower its regulatory limits for air pollution in line with the World Health Organization (WHO). In a European Respiratory Journal editorial, they said: “We need to do all we can to help alleviate patients’ suffering.”

They added that the impact of the climate emergency and human health had become interlinked and was now “irreversible”. An increase in pollen and other allergens as well as wildfires, dust storms and fossil fuel-based traffic all worsen existing respiratory conditions or can create new ones, the authors wrote in the peer-reviewed paper.

Air pollution is estimated to have killed 6.7 million people globally in 2019 and 373,000 in Europe, with greenhouse gases and air pollution sharing many of the same sources.

“Climate change affects everyone’s health, but arguably, respiratory patients are among the most vulnerable,” said Zorana Jovanovic Andersen, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the University of Copenhagen and an author of the report. “These are people who already experience breathing difficulties and they are far more sensitive to our changing climate. Their symptoms will become worse, and for some this will be fatal.”

Children are more affected by the climate crisis and air pollution because their lungs are still developing, they breathe faster and they inhale two to three times more air than adults while spending more time outdoors.

Exposure to air pollution early in life could make it more likely that people develop chronic lung diseases later on, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or bronchitis from smoking, the authors said.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions and stopping the planet from further heating would lead to “substantially larger and more immediate benefits”, the authors wrote, as people’s health would swiftly improve as air becomes cleaner.

Jovanovic Andersen added: “We all need to breathe clean, safe air. That means we need action from policymakers to mitigate impacts of climate change on our planet and our health. As respiratory doctors and nurses, we need to be aware of these new risks and do all we can to help alleviate patients’ suffering.”

https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/62/2/2201960

**misskit** · 15-09-2023, 07:22 AM

What this month’s deadly floods tell us about our global climate future

When heavy rain hit southern Brazil last week, Moisés Alexandre Heck de Carvalho braced for shin-deep floodwaters, like the country saw a 2020 deluge. Instead, the waters rose so high that the 43-year-old grabbed his television and fled to the roof. He spent two nights there, waiting for help.

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On the other side of the globe last week, winding Hong Kong streets became surging rapids. Wise Hui, a 20-year old student, said downpours tied to a typhoon came on more suddenly than she had ever seen.

Then came a torrent of rain over northeastern Libya on Monday, leaving 5,300 dead and thousands still missing after perhaps the most ferocious of a spate of recent floods that have inundated communities in countries from Japan to Greece and the United States.

This summer’s record heat helps explain the floods’ intensity and persistence, scientists say, a phenomenon that climate models have long predicted would come with rising temperatures.

Yet “I’m a little shocked at how many are coming this year,” said Michael Bosilovich, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who focuses on Earth’s water cycle.

In each case, factors leading to the disasters have varied: A stagnant weather pattern allowed storms to park over Spain, Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria. In southern China, the tail of Typhoon Haikui collided with monsoons. In Libya, as much as 16 inches of rain across desert landscapes overwhelmed reservoirs and dams.

But the globe’s remarkable warmth — especially of its oceans, most of which have been running several degrees warmer than normal for months — served as a backdrop for all of the floods.

It’s too soon to know the degree to which global warming, driven by humans’ use of fossil fuels, contributed to any single deluge. But scientists said there is no question that warmer water is more prone to evaporation, and warmer air can carry more water vapor, factors that can produce more intense rains and storms.

“As long as the average temperatures keep going up, that’s just going to continue,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

A spate of floods spanning the globe

At the end of what has already been a summer of extremes, floods have spanned the Northern Hemisphere with remarkable intensity in recent days.

Across Brazil, deadly floods had already hit at least eight states this year before the most recent deluged ares in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Floods from nearly a foot of rain from a tropical cyclone killed at least 46 people and displaced more than 25,000 people.

Heck de Carvalho and other survivors face an uncertain recovery. “We are traumatized,” he said. “I can’t stay in a place like this. I don’t know how long we will stay at this shelter we are now, because we are surviving on donations. But I want to move away from here.”

In parts of the Japanese island of Honshu, record rainfall from remnants of Tropical Storm Yun-yeung killed at least three people and triggered some 200 landslides, according to FloodList.com.

And in Hong Kong, authorities said rain fell at rates of as much as six inches per hour — the most intense since record-keeping began in 1884. The city was at a standstill for 16 hours, while some of the worst flooding was in the north of Hong Kong, near the border with mainland China, where local farmers lost hundreds of pigs to the torrents.

Even with road closures and advanced warnings, more than 150 injuries and at least two deaths were recorded at the height of the storm, the Hong Kong Hospital Authority said.

“I never thought that the water levels could go this high,” Hui said. “The weather has become much more extreme.”

Around the Mediterranean, a stagnant weather pattern and warm seas contributed to flooding from Spain to Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. Those floods developed on either side of a stubborn high-pressure heat dome parked over northern and central Europe, a pattern that has been the hallmark of recent summers and which has contributed to other major floods, including across Germany in 2021, said Hayley Fowler, a professor at Newcastle University.

Low-pressure systems that developed and lingered around the heat dome killed at least three people in Spain, Reuters reported, and 15 people across Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, according to the Associated Press.

As it shifted southward from Greece, that moisture gained strength over the Mediterranean to become a cyclone-like storm that inundated Libya.

It poured as much as 16 inches of rain within six hours across terrain that usually sees half an inch of September precipitation. It flowed violently through dams and over waterfalls into Derna, a seaside city of about 100,000 people.

“They tell us that almost a quarter [of Derna] was vanished away by the hurricane,” said Tamer Ramadan of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, relaying reports from aid workers. “They tell us that the dead bodies, you can see them on the streets everywhere.”

One day later, major flooding hit Massachusetts and Rhode Island, dumping as much as 9 inches in the Leominster, Mass., area and causing “catastrophic damage,” authorities said. No casualties were reported.

A recipe for exceptional rainfall

While land across the Northern Hemisphere hit its warmest temperature for the year in July, because it takes longer for water to heat up, many bodies of water are still close to or reaching their peak temperatures. Global average sea surface temperatures, excluding polar regions, have been hovering at or around record highs for six weeks, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data charted by the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer.

Average global temperatures across both land and sea are meanwhile on pace to be among Earth’s warmest on record, if not setting a record high, surpassing 2016.

That is a recipe for exceptional storms, scientists said. About 80 percent of the moisture that feeds into storms comes from oceans and other large bodies of water, Meehl said. And with each degree of warming, the air can hold about 4 percent more water vapor.

That is not to say conditions would not produce flooding rains absent the warming trends, said Kenneth Kunkel, a research professor at North Carolina State University. Summer storms and cyclones have always contained large amounts of moisture and still require the right conditions to develop.

But given the current climate, “they’re happening with a background that’s richer in water vapor,” he said.

In the past, warming was already proved to be fueling more severe precipitation. A study published in March found that since 2002, precipitation extremes have been closely correlated with rising temperatures. While warmer air can produce heavier downpours, it can also suck more moisture from land.

The study found that instances of extremely wet or dry conditions became about 33 percent more common during the warmest years, from 2008 through 2021.

“As the planet continues to warm, what this says is that it seems more likely we’re going to be having more of these extreme wet and dry events around the world,” said Matthew Rodell, the study’s lead author and deputy director of Earth sciences for hydrosphere, biosphere and geophysics at NASA Goddard.

The climate pattern El Niño threatens to produce more precipitation extremes as it approaches an expected peak this winter, with intensity that could rival a historic El Niño in 1997 and 1998. It is known for bringing stormy conditions to the southern United States and drought to Southeast Asia and southern Africa.

That, along with the unprecedented global warmth, could mean conditions remain conducive to heavy precipitation events into next year.

“I’ve come to expect — I don’t want to say the unexpected — but I’ve come to expect that some areas will get something highly unusual and record-breaking virtually every year,” Kunkel said.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/to...ds/ar-AA1gHpby

**S Landreth** · 16-09-2023, 05:10 AM

Originally Posted by misskit

This summer’s record heat helps explain the floods’ intensity and persistence, scientists say, a phenomenon that climate models have long predicted would come with rising temperatures.

Yet “I’m a little shocked at how many are coming this year,” said Michael Bosilovich, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who focuses on Earth’s water cycle.

In each case, factors leading to the disasters have varied: A stagnant weather pattern allowed storms to park over Spain, Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria. In southern China, the tail of Typhoon Haikui collided with monsoons. In Libya, as much as 16 inches of rain across desert landscapes overwhelmed reservoirs and dams.

But the globe’s remarkable warmth — especially of its oceans, most of which have been running several degrees warmer than normal for months — served as a backdrop for all of the floods.

It’s too soon to know the degree to which global warming, driven by humans’ use of fossil fuels, contributed to any single deluge. But scientists said there is no question that warmer water is more prone to evaporation, and warmer air can carry more water vapor, factors that can produce more intense rains and storms.

Little more

How rising water vapour in the atmosphere is amplifying warming and making extreme weather worse

The northern summer of 2023 has seen a string of record-breaking disasters related to climate change. These range from major wildfires in Canada, Maui, Greece and elsewhere, to catastrophic flooding from Beijing to Vermont, extensive prolonged heatwaves with temperatures over 100°F in the U.S., and rapidly developing hurricanes such as Hilary, Idalia and Saola (typhoon). Earlier in the year there was major flooding and damage in New Zealand associated with a rain bomb (January 27, 2023), and cyclone Gabrielle in February 2023. Sea temperatures have been at record high levels and July 2023 is the hottest month on record. Antarctic sea ice is at record lows for southern winter. To many, this seems like an acceleration of the human-induced climate change. And it is. But it is not unexpected by scientists.

Climate change is brought on by human activities, most notably burning of fossil fuels putting increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, this is not what has caused the acceleration in disasters. Rather it is the well-known positive feedbacks within the climate system that play off the changes otherwise forced on the climate system and amplify the changes. They depend on the temperature changes and heating already going on. Most notable is water vapour feedback.

As the Earth and its oceans warm up, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases at a rate of about 7% per degree Celsius (or about 4% per degree Fahrenheit). And the record high sea temperatures ensure that there is more moisture in the form of water vapour in the atmosphere as a result. Estimates are 5 to 15% relative to prior to the 1970s, when global temperature increases began in earnest.

But water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas. The increases have likely increased global heating by an amount comparable to that from increases in carbon dioxide. And we are seeing the consequences!

Water Vapour: the other greenhouse gas

Many people are unaware that water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas. In many ways, it is the most important greenhouse gas as it makes living on Earth viable. But human-induced climate change is primarily caused by increases in long-lived greenhouse gases (GHGs): carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons).

As a general rule, molecules with three or more atoms are greenhouse gases, owing to the way the atoms can vibrate and rotate within the molecule. A greenhouse gas in the atmosphere absorbs and re-emits thermal (infrared) radiation and has a blanketing effect, as the emitted radiation is usually at a lower temperature than the Earth’s surface. Accordingly, water vapour (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) are greenhouse gases. Clouds have a blanketing effect similar to that of greenhouse gases but clouds are also bright reflectors of solar radiation and thus also act to cool the surface by day. In the current climate, for average all-sky conditions, water vapour is estimated to account for 50% of the greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide 19%, ozone 4%, and other gases 3%; while clouds make up a quarter of the greenhouse effect.

The main greenhouse gases of carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, and nitrous oxide do not condense and precipitate as water vapour does. The result is orders of magnitude differences in the lifetime of these gases (decades to centuries) compared with about nine days for water vapour. Hence, they serve as a stable backbone of the atmospheric heating, and the resulting temperature is what enables the observed levels of water vapour. In this regard, carbon dioxide is the single most important greenhouse gas. [ed note: See also Richard Alley’s great 2009 AGU talk about this, The biggest control knob, which explains how carbon dioxide maintains the level of water vapor in our atmosphere].

Carbon dioxide increases do not depend on weather, but arise primarily from human activities burning fossil fuels. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased from pre-industrial levels of 280 ppmv to 420 ppmv now, an increase of 50%. About half of that increase has occurred since 1985. It produces global heating and accounts for about 75% of the anthropogenic heating. The rest is mainly from methane and nitrous oxide, while offset by pollution aerosols. However, as temperatures increase with warming, the amount of water vapour also increases and results in further warming as a positive feedback. Since the mid-1970s this extra heating from water vapour is on a par with that from increased carbon dioxide.

Skip

Precipitation is vitally important, as it nourishes vegetation and supports various ecosystems, but mainly if the rate is moderate, as deluges can cause erosion and extensive damage. As the climate warms, increasing environmental moisture raises the potential for heavier rainfall or snowfall amounts, increasing the risk of flooding. Moreover, the latent energy that went into evaporation in the first place is given back, adding to the heating and making the air more buoyant, causing it to rise, so that it invigorates the storm which then precipitates even more. Climate change makes the extremes greater and less manageable.

__________

Looking ahead. A preview of the September (half way in) number……..

**S Landreth** · 20-09-2023, 07:03 AM

Berkeley Earth – August 2023 was the warmest August recorded

Summer (JJA) 2023 was the warmest Summer recorded

Likelihood of final 2023 ranking: 1st place (>99 %)

Antarctic sea ice extent

August 2023 Temperature Update - Berkeley Earth

________

Earth ‘well outside safe operating space for humanity’, scientists find

Earth’s life support systems have been so damaged that the planet is “well outside the safe operating space for humanity”, scientists have warned.

Their assessment found that six out of nine “planetary boundaries” had been broken because of human-caused pollution and destruction of the natural world. The planetary boundaries are the limits of key global systems – such as climate, water and wildlife diversity – beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing.

The broken boundaries mean the systems have been driven far from the safe and stable state that existed from the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, to the start of the industrial revolution. The whole of modern civilisation arose in this time period, called the Holocene.

The assessment was the first of all nine planetary boundaries and represented the “first scientific health check for the entire planet”, the researchers said. Six boundaries have been passed and two are judged to be close to being broken: air pollution and ocean acidification. The one boundary that is not threatened is atmospheric ozone, after action to phase out destructive chemicals in recent decades led to the ozone hole shrinking.

The scientists said the “most worrying” finding was that all four of the biological boundaries, which cover the living world, were at, or close to, the highest risk level. The living world is particularly vital to the Earth as it provides resilience by compensating for some physical changes, for example, trees absorbing carbon dioxide pollution.

The planetary boundaries are not irreversible tipping points beyond which sudden and serious deterioration occurs, the scientists said. Instead, they are points after which the risks of fundamental changes in the Earth’s physical, biological and chemical life support systems rise significantly. The planetary boundaries were first devised in 2009 and updated in 2015, when only seven could be assessed.

Prof Johan Rockström, the then director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre who led the team that developed the boundaries framework, said: “Science and the world at large are really concerned over all the extreme climate events hitting societies across the planet. But what worries us, even more, is the rising signs of dwindling planetary resilience.”

The assessment, which was published in the journal Science Advances and was based on 2,000 studies, indicated that several planetary boundaries were passed long ago. The boundary for biosphere integrity, which includes the healthy functioning of ecosystems, was broken in the late 19th century, the researchers said, as destruction of the natural world decimated wildlife. The same destruction, particularly the razing of forests, means the boundary for land use was broken last century.

The boundary for synthetic pollution, such as pesticides, plastics and nuclear waste, was shown to have been passed by a 2022 study. The Richardson-led analysis assessed air pollution for the first time, which affects plant growth and monsoon rains. It found air pollution has passed the planetary boundary in some regions such as south Asia and China, but not yet globally. Ocean acidification is also assessed as getting worse and being close to exceeding the safe boundary.

The scientists said: “This update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.”

Rockstrom said: “If you want to have security, prosperity and equity for humanity on Earth, you have to come back into the safe space and we’re not seeing that progress currently in the world.”

Phasing out fossil fuel burning and ending destructive farming are the key actions required.

The planetary boundaries are set using specific metrics, such as the level of CO2 in the atmosphere for climate change. The Earth’s systems are resilient to some level of change, so most of the boundaries have been set at a level higher than that which persisted over the last 10,000 years. For example, CO2 was at 280 parts per million until the industrial revolution but the planetary boundary is set at 350ppm.

________

Climate change and insurance: The alarm bell we can't afford to ignore

While the world's attention is often drawn to potential tipping points within the physical climate system, such as the rapid disintegration of ice sheets, changes in the carbon cycle, or a sudden slowdown of the ocean circulation, there’s also a pressing need to recognize that climate change can also trigger tipping points within our economic systems.

In fact, we may be far closer to socio-economic tipping points than we are to physical tipping points. A prime example comes from the insurance market. Insurance companies are pulling out of regions most susceptible to the impacts of climate change, including California, Florida, and Louisiana.

The insurance companies that are moving away from these places aren’t bleeding-heart environmentalists; these are hard-nosed businesses. They’ve crunched the numbers and concluded that the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events—driven by climate change—have made some places effectively uninsurable.

As insurance gets more expensive and harder to get, property values will begin to decline. This, in turn, erodes the property tax base that local governments rely on to fund essential public services like schools and emergency response. As services degrade, even more residents may leave, amplifying the decline in property values. Eventually, banks, gas stations, and grocery stores leave and the only residents remaining will be those too poor to leave.

The end result of this feedback loop is a deeply entrenched economic crisis that could affect us all. Everyone will be affected, even if your house is not particularly vulnerable to climate impacts.

**S Landreth** · 24-09-2023, 01:39 PM

NASA – August 2023 was the warmest August recorded

Summer (JJA) 2023 was the warmest Summer recorded

This new record comes as exceptional heat swept across much of the world, exacerbating deadly wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, and searing heat waves in South America, Japan, Europe, and the U.S., while likely contributing to severe rainfall in Italy, Greece, and Central Europe.

“Summer 2023’s record-setting temperatures aren’t just a set of numbers – they result in dire real-world consequences. From sweltering temperatures in Arizona and across the country, to wildfires across Canada, and extreme flooding in Europe and Asia, extreme weather is threatening lives and livelihoods around the world,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “The impacts of climate change are a threat to our planet and future generations, threats that NASA and the Biden-Harris Administration are tackling head on.”

NASA

________

Lijing Cheng - Update: The global upper 2000m ocean heat content in August 2023 is a record high and 224.8 ZJ higher than the 1991-2020 level. https://twitter.com/Lijing_Cheng/sta...32940316418202

And global mean sea surface temperature (SST) in August 2023 is crazily high in August 2023, 0.48 degree celsius above the 1991-2020 level.

________

‘Humanity has opened the gates to hell’ warns Guterres as climate coalition demands action

“Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects”, the UN chief declared on Wednesday, as a broad global coalition of “movers and doers” politicians, business and civil society gathered in New York for the first ever Climate Ambition Summit.

Front and centre was an urgent call to action, to prevent cascading climate disasters through a just and equitable energy transition – before it’s too late.

In his impassioned address on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to politicians, business, activists and civil society leaders, Secretary-General António Guterres issued a stark warning about the dire consequences of inaction.

With extreme weather events accelerating, “humanity has opened the gates to hell,” said the Secretary-General, describing distressing scenes of farmers helplessly watching crops washed away by floods, the emergence of virulent disease due to rising temperatures, and the mass exodus of people fleeing historic wildfires.

Race for solutions

“Our focus here is on climate solutions – and our task is urgent”, he said.

He warned that climate action was being “dwarfed by the scale of the challenge”, with humanity heading towards a 2.8°C temperature rise, increasing danger and instability.

But “the future is not fixed” he added and the Paris Agreement target of limiting temperature rise as close as possible to 1.5°C is still attainable.

“We can still build a world of clear air, green jobs, and affordable clean power for all,” he said, addressing the high-level gathering of “first movers and doers”.

**malmomike77** · 01-10-2023, 04:14 PM

i noted Morrisons only had Onions from NZ for about a month a few months back - they were awful too, just have been cheap.

Plant more crops to cope with climate change, Tesco farmers told

Agreement aims to prevent supply shortages caused by sudden weather changes

By
Hannah Boland
30 September 2023 • 4:00pm

Empty fruit and vegetable shelves in a Tesco supermarket
The hot dry summer last year and the wet cooler one this year have damaged harvests CREDIT: Matthew Horwood/Getty
Farmers supplying Tesco have agreed to plant more crops this year over fears that climate change will spoil more of their harvest.

The UK’s largest supermarket has struck new deals with two of its largest onion and carrot suppliers in response to growing fears about the impact of Britain’s changing weather.

Under the agreements, Tesco has lowered the forecasts for how much farmers will grow per hectare of land and is preparing to ask suppliers to plant more fields so that their output is the same.

The new agreement has been driven by expectations that climate change means sudden weather changes will become more common, which could prove damaging to crops. As a result, British farmers will struggle to produce as much from their land.

Supermarkets have already been hit by supply issues this year after sharp bursts of heat and frost. Farmers struggled with strawberry supplies this spring as a result of the colder snap in Britain and, more recently, grocers were grappling with a scarcity of artichokes.

Food rations

A hot dry summer last year and the wetter and cooler summer this year have both damaged harvests.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) this year said climate change was “one of the biggest threats to food production” in Britain.

The problems are not unique to the UK. Supermarkets were forced to ration tomatoes and peppers earlier this year after bad weather in Morocco and Spain.

Tesco is understood to have included clauses in the new contracts that mean it will take extra vegetables if farmers end up with a bumper crop to ensure nothing is going to waste.

Supporting farmers

Tom Mackintosh, director of fresh produce and horticulture at Tesco, said: “Supporting British farmers, growers and suppliers is vital in safeguarding the future of the food industry in the UK.

“We’re providing immediate support in the wake of recent inflationary challenges, as well as supporting suppliers, farmers and growers in tackling more long-term challenges such as climate change and nature loss.”

Ministers have previously claimed that climate change could be good for Britain’s food industry. Last year, then environment secretary George Eustice told the NFU conference: “Climate change is going to mean that water scarcity becomes an issue in parts of the world. And parts of the world that have good and the most versatile agricultural land today may find it harder to produce crops in future.

“That means that the temperate regions of the world, including here in the UK, will find that there is strong demand for the produce that they grow

Tesco farmers told to plant more crops to cope with climate change

**S Landreth** · 01-10-2023, 05:08 PM

Originally Posted by malmomike77

The National Farmers Union (NFU) this year said climate change was “one of the biggest threats to food production” .......

That’s nothing. One day those farmers will be knocking on your door.

Originally Posted by malmomike77

A hot dry summer......

In the states we have drought insurance. To date,…..152% return on investment.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

**S Landreth** · 01-10-2023, 05:52 PM

edit: wrong thread

**S Landreth** · 02-10-2023, 03:30 PM

Global warming ends Norwegian summit elevation debate

Jotunheimen of Norway is as majestic as are famed mountain ranges elsewhere. Though their summit elevations are lower, their topographic prominence, a measure of height relative to that of their lowest surrounding terrain, rivals that of the Rocky Mountains as viewed from the western edge of the Great Plains of North America.

The two loftiest summits of Jotunheimen are Galdhøpiggen (2,468 meters, or 8,100 feet summit elevation) and Glittertind (2,465 meters or 8,087 feet summit elevation). Galdhøpiggen is the highest mountain in mainland Norway and Northern Europe. Despite that topographic fact, Glittertind long had a glacier on its summit, and including the glacier, it was slightly higher than Galdhøpiggen. That slight difference once triggered debate as to whether or not a glacier should be considered part of a mountain. But over 100 years, from 1917 to 2017, global warming melted the glacier and settled the debate:

In 1910, Oslo photographer Anders Beer Wilse (1865-1949) took what became the iconic photo of the summit with its glacier.

In 1917, the elevation of the summit with its glacier was marked 2,481 meters (8,137 feet) on a quadrangle map of Jotunheimen.

In 1931, a survey corroborated the elevation marked on the quadrangle map.

In 1965, a survey measured the elevation of the summit with its glacier was 2,472 meters (8,108 feet), which indicated that the glacier was melting.

In 2017, the glacier was gone, and a survey of the bare summit set its elevation at 2,465 meters (8,087 feet)

How many tons?

Thread: Any doubts about Climate Change?

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