Rising temperatures and ecological breakdown
James Hansen, a renowned NASA climate scientist, reports that 1.5 degrees C of human-caused global heating is locked in and that we have already breached the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement.
Hansen reports that global warming is accelerating because of decreasing aerosols, continued burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, and an increasing earth energy imbalance. Earth’s energy imbalance measures how much sunlight is being trapped and absorbed within earth’s atmosphere verse sunlight that’s radiated back into space. Hansen also reports that climate sensitivity is higher than scientists previously thought, which will result in warming that’s faster than projected. Some climate scientists disagree with Hansen’s analysis about climate sensitivity.
Global warming is causing extreme heatwaves and heat domes that are threatening human health and survival. Mexico City just hit a record 93.7 F degrees in May, resulting in several deaths, while 37 cities in India hit 113 degrees F. New Dehli may have hit a record breaking 52.9 degrees C.
On top of rising temperatures, critical ecosystems are being thrown off balance and are at risk of collapse. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is weakening and could completely stop if we continue to burn oil, coal, and natural gas. The Amazon rainforest, an important carbon sink, is another critical ecosystem that will collapse if we continue on our current trajectory. The Arctic is yet another ecosystem that’s at risk. As global temperatures increase, permafrost is beginning to melt. As permafrost melts, it releases methane, a heat-trapping gas that accelerates global warming and is 80x more potent than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere.
We know what the solutions are - transition away from coal, oil, and natural gas to renewable forms of energy, end chemical and plastic pollution, protect at least 30% of the land and water in its natural state, and reduce energy use and consumption in order to respect planetary boundaries.
If we don’t make these changes, individually and systemically, we will experience worsening crop failures, drinking water shortages, extreme weather events, disease outbreaks, floods, droughts, and increasingly deadly heatwaves. Given our current trajectory, it seems that people in developed countries aren’t going to change until we suffer the negative effects of climate breakdown and feel it viscerally instead of as an intellectual abstraction.
Read a roundup of the headlines:
“It's still spring but hundreds of millions of people across South and Southeast Asia have already faced scorching hot temperatures. The summer heat has arrived early, setting records and even claiming lives, and it's expected to get much worse through May and June as summer actually begins.
At the beginning of May, severe heat waves were already blamed for nearly three dozen deaths across the vast region. Schools have been forced to close weeks ahead of summer vacations and huge swaths of new crops have withered in parched farmland.
Scientists warn of wide-ranging impacts in some of the world's most densely populated regions, and they're urging governments to take immediate action to prepare for the impact of climate change and do whatever is possible to mitigate human-caused global warming.”
“Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health.
Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1C higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels…
However the sharp increase in temperatures over the past year has surprised many scientists, and prompted concerns about a possible acceleration of heating.”
The Guardian, Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists
“A new study affirms that a critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents that shunt warm and cold water between the poles is “on course” to a tipping point. If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation fails because of increasing freshwater inflows from melting ice sheets and rivers swelled by global warming, the authors said it would disrupt the climate globally, shifting Asian monsoon rainfall patterns and even reversing the rainy and dry seasons in the Amazon…
“This leads to a lot of dynamic sea level rise, up to a meter in the North Atlantic under an AMOC collapse,” he said. “And you need to add that on top of the sea level rise already caused by global warming. So the problems are really severe.”…
Without warm water flowing toward the Arctic, he added, winter sea ice could expand as far south as England, and some regions of Europe would quickly dry out and cool by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius per decade.
Some of the projected impacts would be nearly impossible to adapt to, said Peter Ditlevsen, an ice and climate researcher with the University of Copenhagen Niels Bohr Institute and the author of a 2023 paper in Nature Communications that warned of a mid-century AMOC tipping point.”
Inside Climate News, Extreme Climate Impacts From Collapse of a Key Atlantic Ocean Current Could be Worse Than Expected, a New Study Warns
“Kim Stanley Robinson’s apocalyptic novel, Ministry for the Future, starts in an Indian town where many have not survived a summer night. By day, the survivors are choked with the fumes of generators powering air conditioners. The air is “like breathing through the exhaust pipe of an old bus”, he writes.
We’re not there, yet. But extreme heat, far less visually dramatic than hurricanes or floods, is claiming lives and livelihoods with a stealth that belies its impact. Climate change is dramatically increasing the probability that we will see a mass fatality extreme heat disaster soon.”
Al Jazeera, Extreme heat is the silent assassin of climate change
“The record-breaking heatwave that scorched the Philippines in April would have been impossible without the climate crisis, scientists have found. Searing heat above 40C (104F) struck across Asia in April, causing deaths, water shortages, crop losses and widespread school closures.
The extreme heat was made 45 times more likely in India and five times more likely in Israel and Palestine, the study found. The scientists said the high temperatures compounded the already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where displaced people are living in overcrowded shelters with little access to water.
The results of the latest study to assess the role of human-caused global heating in worsening extreme weather shows how severe the impacts are already, with only 1.2C of average heating above preindustrial levels over the past four years.”
The Guardian, ‘Impossible’ heatwave struck Philippines in April, scientists find
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