The Heat Is On ''Climate Change aka Global Warming'' is here to stay

Glenn Frey - The Heat Is On (From "Beverly Hills Cop" Soundtrack)




Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, mainly caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels.

Extreme heat spreads north and east as hospitalizations rise




Record-breaking temps make vivid the threat of deadly heat in a changed climate




‘It’s not off in the future. It’s here’: How climate change is driving record-breaking extreme heat




Millions of Americans continue to be impacted by extreme summer heat, with regions of the country experiencing prolonged periods of temperatures over 100 degrees. Climatologist Michael Mann joins Andrea Mitchell to discuss the causes of the record-breaking weather and the role climate change plays. “There's a little bit of extra juice because of an El Niño event, a natural warming in the Pacific that elevates global temperatures a little bit. But that's on top of this rising tide of warming from carbon pollution from the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, and those two things are now combining to give us truly unprecedented extreme weather events,” Mann tells Andrea. “Not just the heat domes, the heat waves, but the wildfires, the floods, the super storms. This is climate change. It's not off in the future. It's here, and we need to determine what we're going to do about it.”

Extreme heat heading to heartland, as last three weeks mark hottest ever recorded on Earth




Phoenix breaks record with 19 days of 110-degree heat




Asia - Heat Of The Moment (Official Music Video)




50 Cent - Heat (Official Music Video)

Nelly -  Hot In Here

Buster Poindexter- Hot Hot Hot

Madonna - Burning Up

Billy Idol - Hot In The City


NICK GILDER ☆ Hot Child in the City 【music video】

Nuovo Testamento - Heat (Official video)

SAVANT feat OMEGA SPARX - HEAT




Straplocked - All Day Heat (feat. Dana Jean Phoenix)

Frisky Dingo - Global Warming

Dangerous heat is spreading. See what it will be like in your city in 2030 and 2050.

WHERE DANGEROUS HEAT IS SURGING

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/extreme-heat-wet-bulb-globe-temperature?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f002


Phoenix, Ariz.
102 days with extreme heat in 2050

Belém, Brazil
222 days with extreme heat in 2050

Kolkata, India
188 days with extreme heat in 2050

The world is experiencing a surge in extremely hot days that put human health at risk, with the threat concentrated in some of the places least prepared to cope, according to an analysis of climate data by The Washington Post and CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that develops publicly available climate data and analytics.

By 2050, over 5 billion people — probably more than half the planet’s population — will be exposed to at least a month of health-threatening extreme heat when outdoors in the sun, the analysis shows, up from 4 billion in 2030 and 2 billion at the turn of the century.

The analysis calculated an approximate form of “wet-bulb globe temperature,” a metric that combines temperature, humidity, sunlight and wind. Scientists consider it the gold standard for evaluating how heat harms the human body.

The Post and CarbonPlan used a threshold of 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 32 degrees Celsius, to delineate extremely risky heat, which is equal to a temperature of 120 degrees if it’s dry, or in the mid-90s if it’s very humid. At that point, even healthy adults who are active outside for more than 15 minutes in an hour can suffer heat stress; many deaths have occurred at much lower levels.

There are huge new risks even for people who escape the sun’s radiation. By 2050, 1.3 billion people will be exposed unless they can find some sort of cooling, up from 500 million in 2030 and 100 million in 2000.

This new epidemic of extreme heat represents one of the gravest threats to humanity, scientists say, but it won’t affect the world in a uniform way. While certain parts of rich countries will see a surge in days, most of the danger will come in poor countries in already hot regions such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa that lack widespread air conditioning and other advantages like advanced health-care systems.

“The resources just look vastly different,” said Tamma Carleton, an assistant professor of environmental economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “The story of heat is inequality.”

For example, 80 percent of the population affected by extremely hot days will live in countries that have an estimated 2030 gross domestic product per capita of less than $25,000 — a quarter of the United States’ predicted GDP per capita — while just 2 percent will live in countries with a GDP per capita of $100,000 or greater.

The danger of climate change is often associated with huge disasters: floods, fires, hurricanes. Heat, on the other hand, is a creeping, quieter risk — but one that is already transforming lives around the world.

People are dying of heat in fields, on construction sites, and in apartments without air conditioning. Others, forced to labor outside in the hot sun, are struck by kidney disease. Still others face heart attacks, strokes and even mental illness exacerbated by high temperatures.

“It is going to be one of the biggest challenges we face as a human society,” said Matthew Huber, a professor of earth science at Purdue University.

Unlike better-known metrics such as the heat index, wet-bulb globe temperature illustrates how sun and wind also affect people’s ability to stay cool. Most metrics assess only temperature and humidity, which can help show how the body struggles to cool itself by sweating when the air is humid. But they don’t account for the sun pounding down on the skin, or the cooling from a light breeze — factors that can also affect how well a person can endure hot conditions.

“It’s a better indicator of heat stress,” said Dan Vecellio, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University.

Ninety degrees doesn’t sound like much, but when it comes to wet-bulb globe temperature, it indicates punishing heat. Elderly people and those with preexisting conditions can be vulnerable at lower wet-bulb globe temperatures — but at 90 degrees, researchers say, almost everyone is vulnerable.

Absolute temperature isn’t everything — over time, regions and cultures have adapted to even very hot conditions. But the analysis shows which places will face sudden increases in scorching temperatures, threatening people’s ability to cope even in places that have long been hot.

And many have died in heat events that barely touched that threshold. In 2021, hundreds of people died during a record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. In Portland, Ore., one of the key cities that was affected, wet-bulb globe temperatures reached only 90 degrees on one day. Dozens still died.

But while the impacts will be felt in developed countries, the biggest growth in high-risk days will be in low-income ones.

Many of the countries most affected have limited air conditioning. In India, for example, 270 million people will face extreme heat even indoors by 2030. But as of 2018, only about 5 percent of households in the country had air conditioning, according to the International Energy Agency.

Lucas Davis, a professor of environmental economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says research shows that once households in hot regions reach $10,000 in annual income, they tend to buy air-conditioning units. But in some of the poorest and hottest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, that level of income may remain unattainable for decades — leaving some of the world’s most vulnerable people at the mercy of dangerous heat.

Sierra Leone will soon face some of the hottest temperatures in the world. But according to one study by Lucas and other researchers, only 2 percent of the country’s households are expected to have air conditioning by 2030. Average income is less than $2,000 a year.

“In 2040, they still won’t be buying a lot of ACs – even if there’s good growth,” Davis said. “Sierra Leone just starts out so poor.”

People who labor outdoors are also often based in the hottest and most at-risk countries. In India and Pakistan — which are likely to face some of the most brutal hot days in the sun — outdoor workers make up 56 percent and 47 percent of the workforce, respectively, doing everything from agriculture to construction, according to data from the International Labor Organization. By contrast, outdoor workers account for only 10 percent of the U.S. workforce.

Even within single countries, those with fewer resources are at higher risk. Leonidas Ioannou, a researcher at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia who studies outdoor workers, has found that migrant workers are responsible for heavier and more demanding workloads — even at the same job site.

Experts recommend training outdoor workers to pace themselves and take rest breaks when the heat becomes untenable; some workers have experimented with ventilated vests with attached fans. Wearing white clothing has also been shown to reduce heat strain and skin temperature in people toiling outside.

Some of these interventions, Ioannou says, can help alleviate the strain of working in the heat — but legislation guaranteeing breaks and even containing prohibitions on working outdoors under particularly punishing conditions may also be needed. Only a few countries — Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar — have legislation preventing outdoor work under conditions that are too hot. The United States has no uniform standard, although President Biden has asked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to create one. In China, a law requires employers to pay more when temperatures rise above 95 degrees — but not to stop work in dangerous conditions.

People in developed countries aren’t immune. Researchers linked heat waves last year in Europe, where air conditioning is less prevalent than in the United States, to over 60,000 deaths. Globally, heat already claims about half a million lives every year, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health. And many more people are experiencing chronic health conditions triggered or exacerbated by extreme heat.

“Heat can create increased heart attacks, strokes, kidney diseases, mental illnesses,” said Kai Chen, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health. “Heatstroke is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Where heat could become ‘unlivable’ for weeks or months at a time

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/10/09/heat-waves-increased-temperatures-climate-change/

In the hottest parts of the world, high temperatures and humidity will, for longer stretches, surpass a threshold that even young and healthy people could struggle to survive as the planet warms, study says


Heat waves can already be deadly for the most vulnerable people — but in a warming world, temperatures and humidity will, for growing stretches of every year, surpass a threshold that even young and healthy people could struggle to survive, according to new research published Monday.

Lahore, Pakistan, already an epicenter of human ills linked to climate change, could surpass that survivability threshold for two or three weeks out of the year by the middle of the century, for example, the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found. Under the most dramatic global warming scenarios, it could last for months.

In the Red Sea port of Al Hudaydah, Yemen, such oppressive conditions are expected to last a month or two — or, at the highest levels of global warming projections, would endure for most of the year, scientists found.

The research is the latest to build upon the idea that there is a limit to how much heat and humidity the human body can withstand, that it is likely lower than once thought, and that exposure to it will increase dramatically in the coming decades. The hottest parts of the planet have already surpassed it for brief periods, at least.

That doesn’t mean those places are already “unlivable” for humans, said Daniel Vecellio, the study’s lead author. But they could soon be, if their changing climates mean long stretches without respite from intense heat and humidity, he said.

“It’s when you see these accumulations of weeks or months of this at a time that things become ‘too hot for humans,’” said Vecellio, a postdoctoral researcher at George Mason University’s Virginia Climate Center.

Research has already found increasing likelihood of heat waves that could overwhelm the body’s ability to cool itself. A similar study published in September found that some 200 weather stations around the world have already at times surpassed the threshold. In places like Europe and North America, where people aren’t acclimated to intense heat, temperatures and humidity could surpass the survivability threshold a couple of times a decade even under the most ambitious timelines of global warming.

If that happened in Europe, for example, where air conditioning is rare and heat acclimatization is low, “you could have mass fatalities or casualties,” said Carter Powis, that study’s lead author and a researcher at the University of Oxford.

Both studies are based on research Vecellio and a team conducted at Pennsylvania State University testing an understanding that, at some level of heat and humidity, the human body can no longer cool itself and its internal temperature rises uncontrollably. The human body sheds heat when sweat evaporates into the air, and also by radiating warmth into the surrounding environment.

Past research found that transfer of heat could no longer occur at 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) on what is known as the wet bulb temperature scale, which factors in both temperature and humidity. (Unlike the heat index, which also factors in both heat and humidity, the wet bulb temperature is not designed to be interpreted as a measure of how hot it feels outside.)

But, in a study published last year, the Penn State researchers found that threshold to be closer to a wet bulb temperature of 31 degrees Celsius (88 degrees Fahrenheit) for a sample of young and healthy research subjects who were not accustomed to such muggy conditions.

In their latest study, those researchers explored where and how often that threshold might be surpassed in future climate scenarios, in which average planetary temperatures rise above preindustrial levels by anywhere from 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) to 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). They project hundreds — if not thousands — of hours a year with such extreme conditions across parts of Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Lahore, for example, would surpass the heat and humidity threshold for 69.5 hours a year under the most conservative warming scenario — nearly nine days if the heat lasted eight hours a day, or more than two weeks if it lasted four hours a day. At 4 degrees Celsius of global warming, the wet bulb temperature would remain above the threshold for more than 1,000 hours a year.

In Al Hudaydah, where the study found the most enduring heat and humidity, conditions could remain at an unsurvivable extreme for more than 2,400 hours a year at the highest levels of global warming — equivalent to 100 straight days.

But if warming was limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a target global leaders agreed upon in Paris in 2015, the study projects the Yemeni city would experience less than 100 hours of such heat and humidity.

Vecellio said the data shows the planet can save countless lives by taking efforts to limit global warming.

“We can stave off some of the worst impacts,” he said.

Other places the study estimates would endure days or weeks above the heat threshold:

Delhi, with 39 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 556.9 hours at 4 degrees of warming
Hanoi, with 37.7 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 602.1 hours at 4 degrees
Dammam, Saudi Arabia, with 223.6 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 804.7 hours at 4 degrees
Dubai, with 117.7 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 783.9 hours at 4 degrees
Bandar Abbas, Iran, with 175.5 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 958.6 at 4 degrees
The study does not project such extreme heat and humidity in Europe, and only relatively brief stretches in North America. About a day’s worth of it could occur each year, on average, in New York City and Chicago under the most aggressive global warming scenarios, the researchers found.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be summers where dangerous heat could hit such places for much longer stretches, though, Powis said.

September was the planet’s most anomalously hot month ever observed, about 1.7 to 1.8 degrees Celsius hotter than preindustrial levels. If such a departure from the norm occurred in July or August, “you’re looking at substantial risk” of unsurvivable heat, Powis said.

The research underscores how the most severe impacts of climate change will be felt in countries that have done the least to create it, said Fahad Saeed, a Pakistan-based climate scientist with the German think tank Climate Analytics. It shows much of the worst and most lasting heat occurring in densely populated and underdeveloped parts of southern and southeastern Asia and Africa.

And while data has shown massive death tolls from heat waves in Europe, for example, the toll of the impacts in those hardest-hit regions is likely dramatically underestimated because of a lack of research and reporting, Saeed said.

“They are the ones who are bearing the brunt,” he said.

Why many scientists are now saying climate change is an all-out ‘emergency’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/10/30/climate-emergency-scientists-declaration/


Escalating rhetoric comes as new study shows there’s just six years left to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius at current CO2 emissions rate.




Bill Ripple had never been an activist.

The Oregon State University ecologist had spent his career wandering through the hills and canyons of Yellowstone National Park, tracking the health of wolves and other large carnivores. Nor was he particularly outspoken: As a college student, he was so concerned about taking a debate class that he considered dropping out and returning to his family farm.

But then, in 2018, Ripple saw pictures of a town called Paradise, Calif., completely destroyed by wildfire. Houses had disappeared in the blaze; all that remained were twisted hunks of metal and glass. Ripple started writing a new academic paper. He called it: “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” He sent it to colleagues to see if anyone wanted to sign on. By the time the paper was published in the journal Bioscience in 2019, it had 11,000 signatures from scientists around the world — it now has more than 15,000.

“My life completely changed,” Ripple said. He is the subject of a 30-minute Oregon State University documentary; he gets constant media requests and calls to collaborate from scientists around the world. Last week, he published a new paper on the state of the climate system.

It was called “Entering Uncharted Territory.”

“Scientists are more willing to speak out,” Ripple said. “As a group, we’ve been pretty hesitant, historically.” But, he added, “I feel like scientists have a moral obligation to warn humanity.”

After a few years of record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather events, Ripple’s experience is a sign of how climate scientists — who once refrained from entering the public fray — are now using strident language to describe the warming planet. References to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” once used primarily by activist groups like the U.K.-based Extinction Rebellion or the U.S.-based Sunrise Movement, are spiking in the academic literature. Meanwhile, scientists’ communication to the media and the public has gotten more exasperated — and more desperate.

On Monday, scientists released a paper showing that the world’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas emissions the world can still emit without boosting global temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — has shrunk by a third. The world only has 6 years left at current emissions levels before racing past that temperature limit.

“There are no technical scenarios globally available in the scientific literature that would support that that is actually possible, or can even describe how that would be possible,” Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, told reporters in a call.

Tim Lenton, one of the co-authors on Ripple’s most recent paper and a professor of earth system science at the University of Exeter, said that 2023 has been filled with temperatures so far beyond the norm that “they’re very hard to rationalize.” “This isn’t fitting a simple statistical model,” he said.

Lenton said he isn’t afraid to use terms like “emergency” or “climate and ecological crisis.” “If you say ‘urgent’ to a politician … that isn’t really enough,” he said.

The language has spilled into academic publications as well. As recently as 2015, only 32 papers in the Web of Science research database included the term “climate emergency.” In 2022, 862 papers contained the phrase.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 2000s and even early 2010s, most scientists shied away making any statements that could be seen as “political” in nature. Jacquelyn Gill, a professor of climate science and paleoecology at the University of Maine, said that when she was doing her PhD in the late 2000s, senior academics warned her against deviating at all from the science when interacting with the media or the public.

“We were actively told if we start to talk about solutions, if we start to talk about the policy implications of our work, we will have abandoned our supposed ‘scientific neutrality,’” Gill said. “And then people will not trust us anymore on the science.”

Susan Joy Hassol, a science communication expert who has worked with climate researchers for years, says that even a decade ago, climate scientists were uncertain what their role was in communicating the dangers of rising temperatures. “I think at least some of them felt that scientists communicate through IPCC reports,” Hassol said, referring to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “‘We do our science, we publish, we put together these reports, and it’s kind of up to other people to listen.’”

Now, she said that has changed. “We have reached this stage of crisis,” she said.

It isn’t just the fact that emissions still aren’t going down — or that policy hasn’t responded quickly enough to the challenge. (Carbon dioxide emissions related to energy use have continued to climb, even following the brief downturn of the covid-19 pandemic.) As the impacts of climate change escalate, scientists say that their language has changed to meet the moment.

When it comes to terms like “climate emergency,” Gill says, “it’s a little bit of strategy and a lot of honesty.” While climate scientists are still discussing whether warming is accelerating, she added, “it’s clear the impacts are becoming more noticeable and in-your-face.”

Hassol said that the shift is simple. In the 2000s, she said, climate change wasn’t yet at the level of an emergency. She recalls a 2009 report called the Copenhagen Diagnosis, which analyzed climate science to date and made suggestions for how to reach net-zero carbon emissions. If world governments had acted swiftly, the world would have only had to cut emissions by a bit over 3 percent per year. “We called that the bunny slope,” Hassol recalled.

If, on the other hand, governments didn’t start the transition until 2020, cuts would have to be much steeper — up to 9 percent per year. “We called that the double-black diamond,” she said. Despite the brief respite in CO2 emissions during the pandemic, humanity’s trajectory has veered closer to the double-black diamond path.

At the same time, many scientists realize that even the best communication in the world isn’t enough to overcome the inertia of a fossil-fuel based system — and the resistance of various oil and gas companies.

“The problem is not that scientists haven’t been communicating clearly enough,” Hassol said. “We communicated pretty darn clearly. Anyone who wanted to hear the message — it was there.”

Earth breached a feared level of warming over the past year. Are we doomed?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/08/1-5-celsius-global-warming-record/





It’s official: For the past 12 months, the Earth was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than in preindustrial times, scientists said Thursday, crossing a critical barrier into temperatures never experienced by human civilizations.

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the past 12 months clocked in at a scorching 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) higher on average compared with between 1850 and 1900.

At some level, that’s not surprising — the past 12 months have been scorching, as a warm El Niño cycle combined with the signal of human-caused warming generated heat waves and extreme weather events around the globe.

“This El Nino maximum is riding on top of a base climate that is continuously warming due to climate change,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said in an email. “The combination of them is what’s giving us such hot global temperatures.”

But does this mean that the world’s most famous climate goal is out of reach? Not ... exactly.

Here’s what you need to know:

Where did the 1.5 Celsius goal come from?

In the 2016 Paris climate agreement, almost 200 nations agreed to keep the global average temperature from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — and to “pursue efforts” to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latter addition largely came from pressure from small-island states, who are at risk of disappearing under rising seas if temperatures get much higher.

Scientists have shown that holding the temperature rise to 1.5C could mean the survival of coral reefs, the preservation of Arctic sea ice and less deadly heat waves.

Momentum has gathered around that more ambitious goal — even as carbon emissions continue to rise. Activists and environmentalists have chanted “1.5 to stay alive” and pointed out that emissions will have to be cut dramatically by 2030 to meet that target.

Does this mean we have missed the 1.5C climate goal?

No. There’s actually some disagreement about what exactly counts as breaching that threshold — but scientists and policymakers agree that it has to be a multiyear average, not a single 12-month period. Scientists estimate that without dramatic emissions reductions, that will happen sometime in the 2030s. But there could be other single years or 12-month periods that cross the line before then.

Can we still avoid passing 1.5C?

Most scientists say passing 1.5C is inevitable. “The 1.5-degree limit is deader than a doornail,” Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen said in a call with reporters late last year.

Scientists and economists use complicated models to try to predict how fast the world can transition away from fossil fuels. The Washington Post analyzed 1,200 modeled pathways for the world to shift to clean energy and found that only four of them showed the world hitting the 1.5C target without substantially overshooting or using speculative technology (like large-scale carbon capture) that doesn’t yet exist. At this point, many experts believe that the economy is too stuck on fossil fuels to transition fast enough for 1.5 degrees.

Does that mean we’ll pass catastrophic tipping points?

That’s a more difficult question. Scientists don’t know exactly when certain tipping points — like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost — will occur. It’s very hard to predict and model these types of catastrophic changes.

And 1.5C isn’t a magic threshold; it’s not as though as soon as we pass that number, Antarctic ice sheets will collapse and ocean circulations will grind to a halt. But one thing is certain: For every tenth of a degree of warming, tipping points are more likely. Two degrees is worse than 1.9 degrees, which is worse than 1.8 degrees, and so on.

And at each tenth of a degree, the infrastructure and systems that the world has built — electric grids, homes, livelihoods — will become more strained. Our modern world simply was not designed for temperatures this high. At some level, the final temperature of the planet isn’t what matters most. It’s where countries can actually get carbon emissions to zero — and stop contributing to future warming altogether.

Global warming threatens Antarctica’s meteorites

The continent is home to Earth’s largest concentration of the objects from outer space

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/04/27/warming-climate-antarctica-meteorite-melt/





Antarctica is home to Earth’s largest concentration of meteorites — so many that over 60 percent of meteorite finds originate there. But global warming is endangering Antarctica’s meteorites, and a new analysis forecasts that close to three-quarters of the continent’s meteorites could disappear from the ice sheet surface by century’s end, making it nearly impossible to spot or retrieve the precious space rocks.

The research, published in Nature Climate Change, used a machine-learning algorithm to project how Antarctic meteorites will fare under simulated climate conditions. Antarctica’s meteorites built up in stranding zones on the continent thousands of years ago, becoming embedded in ice. Today, they are usually found in “blue ice” areas — pockets where wind reveals older ice that looks blue in contrast with the continent’s large expanses of white.

Meteorites are particularly sensitive to temperature, the researchers explain, and when they are exposed to the sun, their darker surface warms, which can melt the ice beneath and cause them to sink away from the ice surface.

The researchers project that in all emissions scenarios, at least 5,000 meteorites a year will disappear from the surface. Every tenth of a degree of temperature increase is correlated with a loss of between 5,100 and 12,200 meteorites, and under a high-emissions scenario, 76 percent of the areas currently covered by meteorites will be lost.

This would represent a catastrophic loss to space scientists, who prize meteorites because of the information they contain about the development of our solar system. Since they formed up to billions of years ago, the space rocks offer important clues about stars, planetary formation, and even Earth’s geologic history.

As a result, the researchers say, it’s important to “rapidly and purposefully” collect as many such specimens as possible before they become inaccessible to science.

“We need to accelerate and intensify efforts to recover Antarctic meteorites,” Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist who led the research while working at ETH Zurich’s department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering, said in a news release. “The loss of Antarctic meteorites is much like the loss of data that scientists glean from ice cores collected from vanishing glaciers — once they disappear, so do some of the secrets of the universe.”

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory just captured ominous signals about the planet’s health

Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/05/10/carbon-dioxide-record-mauna-loa/





Hawaii’s Mauna Loa’s Observatory just captured an ominous sign about the pace of global warming.

Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren’t just on their way to yet another record high this year — they’re rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations.

Carbon dioxide levels were 4.7 parts per million higher in March than they were a year earlier, the largest annual leap ever measured at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration laboratory atop a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. And from January through April, CO2 concentrations increased faster than they have in the first four months of any other year. Data from Mauna Loa is used to create the Keeling Curve, a chart that daily plots global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, tracked by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.

For decades, CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in the month of May have broken previous records. But the recent acceleration in atmospheric CO2, surpassing a record-setting increase observed in 2016, is perhaps a more ominous signal of failing efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and the damage they cause to Earth’s climate.

“Not only is CO2 still rising in the atmosphere — it’s increasing faster and faster,” said Arlyn Andrews, a climate scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

A historically strong El Niño climate pattern that developed last year is a big reason for the spike. But the weather pattern only punctuated an existing trend in which global carbon emissions are rising even as U.S. emissions have declined and the growth in global emissions has slowed.

The spike is “not surprising,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at Scripps Institution, “because we’re also burning more fossil fuel than ever.”

Why carbon dioxide levels keep rising

Carbon dioxide levels naturally ebb and flow throughout each year. At Mauna Loa, they peak in April and May and then decline until August and September. This follows the growth cycle of northern hemisphere plants: growing — and sequestering away carbon — during the summer months and releasing it during fall and winter as they die and decompose.

Once CO2 makes it into the atmosphere, it stays there for hundreds of years, acting as a blanket trapping heat. That blanket has been steadily thickening ever since humans turned materials that were once dense stores of carbon — oil and coal, primarily — into fuel to burn.

That means the Keeling Curve reaches new heights each May, forming a new peak in a sawtooth-like pattern.

The chart originated when Charles David Keeling, Ralph Keeling’s father, started recording atmospheric concentrations of CO2 atop the Mauna Loa volcano in the late 1950s. It was the first effort to measure the planet-warming gas on a continuing basis and helped alert scientists to the reality of the intensified greenhouse effect, global warming and its impact on the planet.

Each annual maximum has raised new alarm about the curve’s unceasing upward trend — nearing 427 parts per million in the most recent readings, which is more than 50 percent above preindustrial levels and the highest in at least 4.3 million years, according to NOAA. Atmospheric CO2 levels first surpassed 400 parts per million in 2014. Scientists said in 2016 that levels were unlikely to drop below that threshold again during the lifetime of even the youngest generations.

Since that year, carbon dioxide emissions tied to fossil fuel consumption have increased 5 percent globally, according to Scripps.

The increase in carbon dioxide from year to year is not precisely consistent. One factor that tends to cause levels to rise especially quickly: the El Niño climate pattern.

El Niño is linked to warmer-than-average surface waters along the equator in the eastern and central Pacific. That warmth affects weather patterns around the world, triggering extreme heat, floods and droughts.

The droughts in particular contribute to higher-than-normal spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, Keeling said.

Tropical forests serve as reliable stores of carbon because they don’t go through the same seasonal decay as plant life at higher latitudes. But El Niño-linked droughts in tropical areas including Indonesia and northern South America mean less carbon storage within plants, Keeling said. Land-based ecosystems around the world tend to give off more carbon dioxide during El Niño because of the changes in precipitation and temperature the weather pattern brings, Andrews added.

That can allow CO2 concentrations to rise especially quickly on the tail end of El Niño events — such as the current one, which NOAA scientists said Thursday is likely to end this month.

The increase observed at Mauna Loa over the past year is some five times larger than the average annual increases seen in the 1960s, and about twice as large as in the 2010s, according to NOAA data.

A record surge in early 2016 was also at the end of a historically strong El Niño.

It will take some four decades to stop the annual growth in CO2 concentrations, even if all emissions began declining now, Andrews said. Because Earth’s carbon cycle is so far out of its natural equilibrium, plants, soils and oceans would give off stores of extra CO2 in response to any reduction in humans’ emissions, she said.

And for CO2 concentrations to fall back below 400 parts per million, it would take more than two centuries even if emissions dropped close to zero by the end of this century, she added.

In the natural carbon cycle, the element passes through air, soil and water, and plants and animals, eventually making its way into deep ocean sediments and fossils deep underground. Carbon’s movement throughout Earth systems helps regulate our planet’s temperatures — unlike on Venus, for instance, where CO2 accounts for most of the atmosphere, making that planet’s surface hellishly hot.

But human emissions of CO2 throw that system out of balance. It’s like adding more and more trash to a dump, Andrews said. Even if each load of trash gets smaller, “it’s still piling up.”