Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point − once melting glaciers shut down the Gulf Stream, we would see extreme climate change within decades, study shows

  Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts, and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences.

  While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes, how abrupt and severe would the climate changes be?

2023’s billion-dollar disasters list shattered the US record with 28 big weather and climate disasters amid Earth’s hottest year on record

  National weather analysts released their 2023 “billion-dollar disasters list” on Jan. 9, just as 2024 was getting off to a ferocious start. A blizzard was sweeping across across the Plains and Midwest, and the South and East faced flood risks from extreme downpours.

  The U.S. set an unwelcome record for weather and climate disasters in 2023, with 28 disasters that exceeded more than US$1 billion in damage each.

How climate change intensifies the water cycle, fueling extreme rainfall and flooding – the Northeast deluge was just the latest

  A powerful storm system that hit the U.S. Northeast on July 9 and 10, 2023, dumped close to 10 inches of rain on New York’s Lower Hudson Valley in less than a day and sent mountain rivers spilling over their banks and into towns across Vermont, causing widespread flash flooding. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said he hadn’t seen rainfall like it since Hurricane Irene devastated the region in 2011.

  Extreme water disasters like this have disrupted lives in countries around the world in the past few years, from the Alps and Western Europe to Pakistan, India, and Australia, along with several U.S. states in 2022 and 2023.

  The role of climate change is becoming increasingly evident in these types of deluges.

Farmers face a soaring risk of flash droughts in every major food-growing region in coming decades, new research shows

  Flash droughts develop fast, and when they hit at the wrong time, they can devastate a region’s agriculture.

  They’re also becoming increasingly common as the planet warms.

  In a new study published May 25, we found that the risk of flash droughts, which can develop in the span of a few weeks, is on pace to rise in every major agriculture region around the world in the coming decades.

Heat waves + air pollution can be a deadly combination: The health risk together is worse than either alone

  On the morning news, you see the weather forecast is for high heat, and there is an “excessive heat watch” for later in the week. You were hoping the weather would cool down, but yet another heat wave is threatening human health and increasing the chance of wildfires. On top of these warm days and nights, air quality data has been showing unhealthy levels of pollution.

  Sound familiar? This scenario is increasingly the new normal in many parts of the world.

If you thought this summer’s heat waves were bad, a new study has some disturbing news

  As global temperatures rise, people in the tropics, including places like India and Africa’s Sahel region, will likely face dangerously hot conditions almost daily by the end of the century – even as the world reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, a new study shows.

  The mid-latitudes, including the U.S., Europe and China, will also face increasing risks. There, the number of dangerously hot days, marked by temperatures and humidity high enough to cause heat exhaustion, is projected to double by the 2050s and continue to increase.

The water cycle is intensifying as the climate warms, IPCC report warns – that means more intense storms and flooding

  The world watched in July 2021 as extreme rainfall became floods that washed away centuries-old homes in Europe, triggered landslides in Asia, and inundated subways in China. More than 900 people died in the destruction. In North America, the West was battling fires amid an intense drought that is affecting water and power supplies.

  Water-related hazards can be exceptionally destructive, and the impact of climate change on extreme water-related events like these is increasingly evident.

Four ways extreme heat hurts the economy

  Summer 2021 will likely be one of the hottest on record as dozens of cities in the West experience all-time high temperatures. The extreme heat being felt throughout many parts of the U.S. is causing hundreds of deaths, sparking wildfires, and worsening drought conditions in over a dozen states.

  How does all this broiling heat affect the broader economy?

New US climate pledge: Cut emissions 50% this decade, but can Biden make it happen?

  President Joe Biden announced an ambitious new national climate target at the world leaders’ climate summit on April 22. He pledged to cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by the end of this decade – a drop of 50-52% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels – and aim for net zero emissions by 2050.

  The new goal is a big deal because it formally brings together the many different ideas on infrastructure, the budget, federal regulatory policy, and disparate actions in the states and industry for transforming the U.S. economy into a highly competitive, yet very green giant. It also signals to the rest of the world that “America is back” and prepared to work on climate change.

The Arctic hasn’t been this warm for 3 million years – and that foreshadows big changes for the rest of the planet

  Every year, sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean shrinks to a low point in mid-September. This year, it measures just 1.44 million square miles (3.74 million square kilometers) – the second-lowest value in the 42 years since satellites began taking measurements. The ice today covers only 50% of the area it covered 40 years ago in late summer.

  As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has shown, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher than at any time in human history. The last time that atmospheric CO2 concentrations reached today’s level – about 412 parts per million – was 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch.

A military perspective on climate change could bridge the gap between believers and doubters

  As experts warn that the world is running out of time to head off severe climate change, discussions of what the U.S. should do about it are split into opposing camps. The scientific-environmental perspective says global warming will cause the planet severe harm without action to slow fossil fuel burning. Those who reject mainstream climate science insist either that warming is not occurring or that it’s not clear human actions are driving it.

Climate change is really about prosperity, peace, public health and posterity – not saving the environment

  The story of climate change is one that people have struggled to tell convincingly for more than two decades. But it’s not for lack of trying.

  The problem is emphatically not a lack of facts and figures. The world’s best scientific minds have produced blockbuster report after blockbuster report, setting out in ever more terrifying detail just how much of an impact we humans have had on the Earth since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Many people believe anthropogenic climate change – rapid and far-reaching shifts in the climate caused by human activity – is now the story that will define the 21st century, whether anyone’s good at telling it or not.

John Podesta: Battling climate change in the time of Trump

  There is no way to sugarcoat the outcome of the 2016 election for anyone who cares about the health of our planet. President Donald Trump has made clear that he intends to pursue a special interest-driven agenda that would make climate change worse. Since the start of his administration, he has taken steps to increase America’s dependence on oil, including foreign oil; eliminate limits on carbon pollution; and weaken vehicle efficiency standards at the expense of American families. His budget decimates scientific research and he selected an administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, who denies that carbon pollution is a main cause of climate change.

Eric Alterman: The mainstream media and the slowly boiling frog

  Late August is when Americans tend to take their relatively meager vacations—workers in other social democracies tend to enjoy six paid weeks of vacation rather than just two weeks, a tendency that American news rarely recognizes. Since the vacation-bound mainstream media is preoccupied with Egypt, Syria, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Obamacare, and a possible government shutdown, the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report was leaked to Reuters and The New York Times will almost certainly fall through the cracks.

Sally Steenland: Are we finally nearing the tipping point on climate change?

  If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will shriek and frantically try to escape. Drop that same frog into a pot of warm water, however, and gradually turn up the heat, and it will drift off to sleep and die.

  Some version of that second scenario is happening to us right now. I’m not saying we’re on the brink of perishing, but on a range of issues—from climate change to gun violence to women’s reproductive health—incremental changes have lulled us into complacency, relaxing our sense of danger and weakening our response reflexes.

Eric Alterman: The Media and climate science: ADHD or deliberate deception?

  Dr. François Gonon, a neurobiologist at the University of Bordeaux, together with his colleagues recently published an article in The Public Library of Science, taking a foray into media criticism. Using attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, for his experiment metaphor, Gonon and company searched the databases PubMed and Factiva for articles on ADHD. They found that 47 papers on ADHD received coverage in 347 articles in English-language newspapers during the 1990s. From these, The Economist reports, Gonon’s team picked 10 papers that had enjoyed fully 223 of the news articles.

  What happened next, if you’ll forgive me, turned out to be a case of journalistic ADHD. While 67 later studies examined those selected 10, the second batch received attention in only 57 newspaper articles total, with most of them focusing on only two such studies. Gonon’s conclusion: An “almost complete amnesia in the newspaper coverage of biomedical findings.”