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☆ Climate Change’s Effects Are Worsening Across U.S., but Solutions Are in Reach
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-14 | by ( Raymond Zhong | More About Raymond Zhong | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The report issued Tuesday, the National Climate Assessment, is the government’s premier compilation of scientific knowledge on what this means for the country and how Americans are responding. The new assessment, the fifth of its kind, shows “how climate change is affecting us here, in the places where we live, both now and in the future,” she said. Human-driven warming is intensifying wildfires in the West, droughts in the Great Plains and heat waves coast to coast. It is causing hurricanes to strengthen more quickly in the Atlantic and loading storms of all kinds with more rain. So far this year, the nation has experienced a record 25 billion-dollar weather disasters, many of them exacerbated by the hotter climate.

Persons: ”, Katharine Hayhoe Organizations: Texas Tech University Locations: United States, West, Great

☆ Window for Meeting Key Climate Goal Is Even Narrower Than Thought
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-30 | by ( Raymond Zhong | More About Raymond Zhong | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Already, human activity has raised average global temperatures by about 1.2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial conditions. The most promising paths for avoiding 1.5 degrees are clearly gone, Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who worked on the new projections, said at a news briefing. “And they have been gone for a while, to be honest,” he added. Even so, having an up-to-date picture of emissions and warming can still help governments figure out how to meet less ambitious climate goals, including the Paris pact’s second-best limit of 2 degrees Celsius. Every extra increment of warming increases the risk of dangerous heat waves, floods, crop failures, species extinctions and wildfires.

Persons: Joeri Organizations: Imperial College London, Paris Locations: Paris

For the better part of an hour, he might be the only person. Mr. Haugen has worked for more than half of his 52 years as a fire lookout, scanning the larch and pine wilderness from a one-room mountaintop cabin. More and more, he stands at another divide, too: between human jobs and automation. The chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Randy Moore, told lawmakers in March that the agency was moving away from humans in watchtowers. “We need to lean much further into the technology arena,” he said.

Persons: Leif Haugen, Haugen, mutt, Ollie, Randy Moore, ” Organizations: U.S . Forest Service Locations: Montana, West

☆ Hot Ocean Temperatures Could Give Hurricane Idalia a Boost
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-29 | by ( Raymond Zhong | More About Raymond Zhong | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

As Hurricane Idalia charges toward Florida, one factor that could amplify its effects on coastal communities is the unusually warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, which is partly the result of the sultry weather that has been smothering the South all summer. “Holy cow has it been hot down here,” said Brian Dzwonkowski, a marine scientist at the University of South Alabama and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. Really hot water. And that’s not a good combination for hurricane season.”Earth’s oceans have been hotter in recent months, by a considerable margin, than at any other time in modern history. In July, a buoy off the Florida coast reported a hot-tub-like reading of 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit, or more than 38 Celsius, a possible world record for sea surface temperatures.

Persons: ”, Brian Dzwonkowski Organizations: University of South Locations: Florida, Gulf of Mexico, University of South Alabama, Dauphin

☆ Warming Set the Stage for Canada’s Record Fires, Study Finds
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-22 | by ( Raymond Zhong | More About Raymond Zhong | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

So far this year, fires have ravaged 37 million acres across nearly every Canadian province and territory. That’s more than twice as large as the amount of Canadian land that burned in any other year on record. Tens of thousands of people — including most of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories — have fled their homes. The way fires spread and grow is shaped by the structure and composition of the forests and landscape. This likelihood is at least double what it would be in a hypothetical world without human-caused climate change, they said.

Organizations: Northwest, Northwest Territories — Locations: Canada, Canadian, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Atlanta

☆ A Tropical Storm in August? California’s Year of Extremes Grinds On
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-19 | by ( Raymond Zhong | More About Raymond Zhong | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For California, where punishing droughts over the past two decades have shriveled crops and caused wells to run dry, it has been another year of extremes. It started with winter storms that drenched cities and towns, buried the Sierra Nevada in snow and caused an enormous long-vanished lake to reappear in the Central Valley. All of this is quite a turnaround from the past three years, the state’s driest on record, when officials were imposing strict controls to save water. Hilary, which forecasters say could weaken to a tropical storm by the time it makes landfall in California, has no direct meteorological connection with the storms from early this year. But, taken together, they reinforce a key maxim about the weather in California: There’s no such thing as an average year — only very wet, or very dry.

Persons: Hilary Locations: California, Sierra Nevada, Central, Southern California

☆ This Looks Like Earth’s Warmest Month. Hotter Ones Appear to Be in Store.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-27 | by ( Raymond Zhong | More About Raymond Zhong | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Weeks of scorching summer heat in North America, Europe, Asia and elsewhere are putting July on track to be Earth’s warmest month on record, the European Union climate monitor said on Thursday, the latest milestone in what is emerging as an extraordinary year for global temperatures. Last month, the planet experienced its hottest June since records began in 1850. July 6 was its hottest day. And the odds are rising that 2023 will end up displacing 2016 as the hottest year. At the moment, the eight warmest years on the books are the past eight.

Persons: ” Petteri Taalas, El Niño Organizations: World Meteorological Organization Locations: North America, Europe, Asia, European

☆ Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-25 | by ( Raymond Zhong | More About Raymond Zhong | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium. That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end. It was a surprise even to the researchers that their analysis showed a potential collapse coming so soon, one of them, Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics at the University of Copenhagen, said in an interview. Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.

Persons: Susanne Ditlevsen Organizations: University of Copenhagen Locations: Europe, Denmark

☆ The Human Age Has a New Symbol. It’s a Record of Bomb Tests and Fossil Fuels.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-11 | by ( Raymond Zhong | More About Raymond Zhong | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For almost 15 years, a panel of scholars has been chewing over a big question: Has our species transformed the planet so much that we have plunged it into a new interval of geologic time? On Tuesday, the panel announced a key part of its case for declaring that we had. The group said it had chosen a secluded lake in Ontario to represent the start of Anthropocene epoch, a potential new chapter in Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history that could soon sit alongside the Cambrian, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous in marking periods of momentous planetary change. The scientists picked Crawford Lake over 11 other candidate sites because it contained the clearest and most pronounced evidence of humankind’s influence on the global geologic record, representatives for the group said at a news briefing in Lille, France. This evidence includes sharp changes in plutonium and radiocarbon from nuclear detonations, and in fly ash from accelerated burning of fossil fuels.

Persons: Crawford Organizations: Crawford Lake Locations: Ontario, Earth’s, Lille, France

Since the mid-20th century, the ground between the city surface and the bedrock has warmed by 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit on average, according to a new study out of Northwestern University. “All around you, you have heat sources,” said the study’s author, Alessandro F. Rotta Loria, walking with a backpack through Millennium Station, a commuter rail terminal underneath the city’s Loop district. “These are things that people don’t see, so it’s like they don’t exist.”It isn’t just Chicago. In big cities worldwide, humans’ burning of fossil fuels is raising the mercury at the surface. But heat is also pouring out of basements, parking garages, train tunnels, pipes, sewers and electrical cables and into the surrounding earth, a phenomenon that scientists have taken to calling “underground climate change.”

Persons: ”, Alessandro F, Rotta Organizations: Northwestern University . Locations: “, Chicago

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