NOAA – September 2023 was the warmest September recorded




Year-to-date, January – September 2023 was the warmest recorded




NOAA

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Accelerated ice melt in west Antarctica is inevitable for the rest of the century no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, research indicates. The implications for sea level rise are “dire”, scientists say, and mean some coastal cities may have to be abandoned.

The ice sheet of west Antarctica would push up the oceans by 5 metres if lost completely. Previous studies have suggested it is doomed to collapse over the course of centuries, but the new study shows that even drastic emissions cuts in the coming decades will not slow the melting.

The analysis shows the rate of melting of the floating ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea will be three times faster this century compared with the previous century, even if the world meets the most ambitious Paris agreement target of keeping global heating below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Losing the floating ice shelves means the glacial ice sheets on land are freed to slide more rapidly into the ocean. Many millions of people live in coastal cities that are vulnerable to sea level rise, from New York to Mumbai to Shanghai, and more than a third of the global population lives within 62 miles (100km) of the coast.

The climate crisis is driving sea level rise by the melting of ice sheets and glaciers and the thermal expansion of sea water. The biggest uncertainty in future sea level rise is what will happen in Antarctica, the scientists say, making planning to adapt to the rise very hard. Researchers said translation of the new findings on ice melting into specific estimates of sea level rise was urgently needed.

“Our study is not great news – we may have lost control of west Antarctic ice shelf melting over the 21st century,” said Dr Kaitlin Naughten, at the British Antarctic Survey, who led the work. “It is one impact of climate change that we are probably just going to have to adapt to, and very likely this means some coastal communities will either have to build [defences] or be abandoned.”

Naughten said her research showed the situation was more perilous than previously thought. “But we shouldn’t give up [on climate action] because even if this particular impact is unavoidable, it is only one impact of climate change,” she added. “Our actions likely will make a difference [to Antarctic ice melting] in the 22nd century and beyond, but that’s a timescale that probably none of us today will be around to see.”

The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, used a high-resolution computer model of the Amundsen Sea to provide the most comprehensive assessment of warming in the region to date. The results indicated that increased rates of melting in the 21st century were inevitable in all plausible scenarios for the pace of cuts in fossil fuel burning.

Unavoidable future increase in West Antarctic ice-shelf melting over the twenty-first century | Nature Climate Change

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Climate change-driven disasters have caused damages equivalent to $391 million a day for 20 years, according to projections published in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers determined that between 2000 and 2019, climate disasters such as droughts and heatwaves did about $143 billion of damage annually. They attributed 63 percent of those damages — $90 billion — to loss of human lives, and the remainder predominantly to property damage.

Researchers noted that the projections also fail to capture indirect impacts that “may be significant.” As an example, they cited the impacts of air pollution in the northeastern U.S. from Canada’s 2023 wildfires, although those occurred outside the research’s date range. Their methodology cannot “account for these indirect losses, even though these could conceivably be orders of magnitude larger than the original damage wrought by these events (and were likely much larger in this specific case),” researchers wrote.

On a year-by-year basis, the highest costs from climate change were in 2008, when researchers put costs at $620 billion. Other high points occurred in 2003 and 2010. These peaks, the researchers noted, were driven by particularly high-casualty climate events in those years. For example, 2008 saw Tropical Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, which killed an estimated 84,537 people, while in 2003, a European heatwave caused an estimated 70,000 deaths.

Excluding loss of life from the equation changes the years when damages peaked. Under this formula, the peaks were in 2005, when Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma did $123 billion in financial damages, and 2017, when Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria did $139 billion in damages. Notably, all of these storms hit the United States, suggesting that while the U.S. has suffered some of the most expensive climate disasters, the deadliest occurred elsewhere.

The date range for the research ends before 2023, which saw the hottest summer ever recorded. Recent years have also seen further heatwaves in Europe, as well as similar extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest, which, like Europe, is not acclimated to such temperatures, meaning numerous residents do not have air conditioning.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41888-1#Sec8

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Family doctors in Canada, physicians in Brazil, GPs in Australia – and many other countries – joined forces at the WONCA World Conference to make an urgent call for governments to combat the growing health impact of climate change.

Gathering in front of media for ‘Green Day’, they voiced their support of an open letter with 40 signatories, including the RACGP, asking politicians to do more to protect their citizens from the health impacts of the crisis.

Speaking in front of a large international group of doctors who had donned green clothing in support of the message, RACGP Specific Interests Climate and Environmental Medicine Chair Dr Catherine Pendrey said that many attendees have directly treated patients impacted by climate change.

‘From the Black Summer bushfires to the Lismore floods, general practitioners and family doctors are on the front line of supporting their communities from climate change and its health impacts,’ she told reporters.

This is the reason health organisations representing three million health professionals have raised their concerns, according to Dr Pendrey.

The letter comes in the wake of new reports suggesting the Earth has seen the highest temperatures recorded for 100,000 years, while freak natural disasters have impacted millions, including record-breaking wildfires in Canada and the Amazon, unusual flooding in China, the Mediterranean and Australia’s east coast, and above average hurricane activity in the Atlantic.

It requests governments to take the following actions at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 28), which takes place from 30 November to 12 December:


  • Halt any expansion of new fossil fuel infrastructure and production
  • Phase out existing production and use of fossil fuels
  • Remove fossil fuel subsidies
  • Increase investment in renewable energy
  • Fast-track a just transition away from fossil fuel energy systems