Satellite data shows up climate forecasts

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My understanding is that climate change is happening faster now than ever before.

Huge climate change has happened before, and was not necessarily a good thing.

But this time it is happening faster than previous times. Making it a greater problem than previous times.

My understanding is that climate change is happening faster now than ever before.

Younger Dryas warming was not global. It was tens of thousands of years ago and does not appear to have big impact on carbon dioxide.

Some global warming impacts are worse than in 100,000 years. Some global warming affects are worse than in millions of years and affect carbon dioxide levels.

The coming U.S. retreat from leadership on global climate policy comes amid a dawning reality: For much of the world, China already calls the shots.

Beijing’s decades-long effort to dominate the world’s clean energy economy is enabling it to woo tight business alliances with governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America — without insisting on the labor and environmental safeguards that the United States and European Union typically demand. Those countries, in turn, are taking China’s side in disputes with the U.S. and Europe about trade policies or efforts to make rich nations step up their international climate aid.

And as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, promising to walk away from the Paris climate agreement, some diplomats at the U.N.-sponsored talks in Azerbaijan said they hope China will fill the void by championing steep cuts in greenhouse gas pollution. Trump has also pledged to shred Biden administration clean energy policies that were designed to weaken Chinese control of key technologies.

“We will need China’s continued leadership,” U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said midway through the two-week COP29 summit that is expected to wrap up this weekend, in a speech that sought to anoint the country as a preeminent climate powerbroker. He urged Beijing to demonstrate to other nations that “stronger targets drive investment” — a message that, in a different context, might have served as a sales pitch for President Joe Biden’s big-spending clean energy policies.

China said it was ready to answer, without spelling out exactly how.

“China has contributed in addressing climate change,” Chinese Vice Minister of Ecology and Environment Zhao Yingmin said in an interview. “But in the future, China will do our best to contribute more.”

Its efforts so far have only strengthened China’s hand around the world — not necessarily in ways that will advance Washington’s and Brussels’ climate goals.

Already, China’s stranglehold over the minerals and technology underlying electric cars, batteries, solar panels and other clean-energy infrastructure has made it the top supplier for other countries looking to move their economies away from fossil fuels. That’s on top of controlling an overwhelming majority of minerals key to clean technology: 86 percent of battery, 81 percent of solar, 64 percent of wind and 69 percent of electrolyzer technologies are made in China, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

This dominance has allowed China to cement its influence with developing nations, overwhelming the more meager efforts by the U.S. and Europe.

China also deploys far more renewable power at home than any other country, with twice as much capacity under construction as the rest of the world combined, even as it continues to burn heaps of coal.

These trends will only be accelerated by Trump’s anticipated retreat to an “America First” posture, and by the fiscal constraints suffocating European capitals, veterans of global climate diplomacy said. They predicted this will give China an advantage not only in climate policy but in broader economic and security disputes. And it could lead to global climate progress rolling out in a way that serves China’s goals, benefiting its clean-technology industries while allowing fossil fuels to stay dominant for decades to come.

“With the U.S. out, China will step up — but in a very different way,” said Jonathan Pershing, who was a State Department climate negotiator in the Obama and Biden administrations, during a recent call with reporters. He said China’s view on how to lead is more “parochial” than the United States’, which could lead to outcomes such as looser transparency around how countries lessen their carbon pollution.

Exiting the 2015 Paris climate agreement, as Trump has vowed to do for the second time, “would cede leadership to China, the very thing that he says we don’t want to do,” former Biden climate envoy John Kerry told Bloomberg last week. “He would diminish the ability of the world to be able to respond to this existential crisis.”

Pumping groundwater appears to have a greater consequence than ever previously thought. But now—thanks to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters—we can see that, in less than two decades, Earth has tilted 31.5 inches as a result of pumping groundwater. This equates to.24 inches of sea level rise.

“Earth’s rotational pole actually changes a lot,” Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University and study lead, says in a statement. “Our study shows that among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater actually has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole.”

Last year was the hottest on record, oceans boiled, glaciers melted at alarming rates, and it left scientists scrambling to understand exactly why.

They know the extraordinary heat was fueled by a number of factors, predominantly planet-heating pollution from burning fossil fuels and the natural climate pattern El Niño. But those alone did not explain the unusually rapid temperature rise.

Now a new study published Thursday in the journal Science says it has identified the missing part of the puzzle: clouds.

To be more specific, the rapid surge in warming was supercharged by a dearth of low-lying clouds over the oceans, according to the research — findings which may have alarming implications for future warming.

In simple terms, fewer bright, low clouds mean the planet “has darkened,” allowing it to absorb more sunlight, said Helge Goessling, a report author and climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

This phenomenon is called “albedo” and refers to the ability of surfaces to reflect the sun’s energy back into space.

The Earth’s albedo has been declining since the 1970s, according to the report, due in part to the melting of light-colored snow and sea ice, exposing darker land and water which absorb more of the sun’s energy, heating up the planet.

Low clouds also feed into this effect as they reflect away sunlight.

The scientists scoured NASA satellite data, weather data and climate models and found the decline in low clouds reduced the planet’s albedo to record lows last year. Areas including parts of the North Atlantic Ocean experienced a particularly significant fall, the study found.

Last year fits into a decade-long decline of low cloud cover, Goessling told CNN.

What the study can’t yet explain for certain is why this is happening. “This is such a complex beast and so hard to disentangle,” Goessling said.