Satellite data shows up climate forecasts

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A detailed report by The Washington Post revealed that coastal communities across eight states in the U.S. are facing "one of the most rapid sea level surges on Earth." Since 2010, satellite data shows that the Gulf of Mexico has experienced twice the global average rate of rising sea levels, with more than a dozen tide gauges spanning from Texas to North Carolina registering sea levels that are at least six inches higher than they were 14 years ago.

While many understandably assume that extreme weather events like hurricanes are the source of these changes, experts revealed that rising water levels face a "newer, more insidious challenge" of accumulation caused by smaller-scale weather events.

"To me, here's the story: We are preparing for the wrong disaster almost everywhere," said Rob Young, a professor at Western Carolina University and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. "These smaller changes will be a greater threat over time than the next hurricane, no question about it."

Charleston, South Carolina recorded its fourth-highest water level since measurements began in 1899, with the city's average rising by seven inches since 2010. Jacksonville, Florida has seen an increase of six inches during that period, but Galveston, Texas experienced a whopping eight-inch increase in 14 years.

Last summer, marked by deadly extreme heat and devastating wildfires, was the warmest in at least 2,000 years, according to new research, which analyzed weather data and tree rings to reconstruct a detailed picture of the past.

The findings offer a stark insight into the “unparalleled” warming the world is experiencing today thanks to humans burning vast amounts of planet-heating fossil fuels, according to the authors of the study published Tuesday in the Journal Nature. And it’s an alarming signal as some scientists warn 2024 is on track to be even hotter still.

Global warming is currently tracked by comparing temperatures to the “pre-industrial era,” before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels, widely defined as the period between 1850 to 1900. Under the Paris Agreement in 2015, countries agreed to restrict global warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Last summer, the world temporarily breached this threshold, according to the report. Using data taken from temperature instruments during this period, the scientists found the Northern Hemisphere summer in 2023 was 2.07 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial period.

But observational data from this period is sparse, uncertain and skews warmer. So, for a fuller picture of how the climate varied naturally before the start of the pre-industrial era, the study authors looked much further into the past.

To do this, they used detailed sets of tree ring records from thousands of trees across nine regions of the Northern Hemisphere, including North America and Scandinavia, but excluding the Tropics which lack good tree data.

Trees act as time capsules. The patterns of their rings – affected by sunlight, rainfall and temperature – provide a climate history for each year of their lives, going back centuries or even thousands of years.

This complex tree ring data allowed the scientists to reconstruct annual temperatures for Northern Hemisphere summers between the years 1 and 1849 and compare them to last summer’s temperatures.

They found the summer of 2023 was warmer than any other summer during this period.

It was at least 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the warmest summer during this period, the year 246 – when the Roman Empire still ruled over Europe and the Mayan Civilization dominated Central America.

At the other end of the scale, last summer was nearly 4 degrees Celsius warmer than the coldest summer the study identified, the year 536 – when a volcanic eruption pumped out vast amounts of planet-cooling gases.

Using this 2,000-year data set, they calculated that the summer of 2023 was 2.2 degrees Celsius hotter than the long-term pre-industrial average, before robust networks of instruments could measure the weather.

The study follows a report published in November, which found humanity lived through the hottest 12-month period in at least 125,000 years. The study, and others like it, rely on data extracted from other proxies, such as ice cores and coral reefs, which don’t give the same detailed yearly evidence as tree rings.

India’s capital territory of Delhi sweltered to its highest-ever temperature of 49.9 degrees Celsius (121.8 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday, as an oppressive heat wave forced authorities to impose water rationing.

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said the new record was measured in the suburb of Mungeshpur, surpassing Delhi’s previous high of 49.2 degrees Celsius (120.5 degrees Fahrenheit), observed in May 2022.

Some areas of Delhi are struggling to access water, while others have none at all, said Atishi Marlena Singh, a senior minister in the Delhi government, at a news conference.

Areas that normally receive water supplies twice a day will now have their delivery cut to once a day to redirect resources to areas that have had little to no supply at all, Singh said.

The water shortages were caused by the “acute heatwave,” as well as a lack of water deliveries from the northern state of Haryana to Delhi, which are not being made as usual, Singh said.

Rivers and streams in Alaska are changing color – from a clean, clear blue to a rusty orange – because of the toxic metals released by thawing permafrost, according to a new study.

The finding surprised researchers from the National Park Service, the University of California at Davis and the US Geological Survey, who conducted tests at 75 locations in the waterways of Alaska’s Brooks Range. The rivers and streams in the range appeared to rust and became cloudy and orange over the past five to 10 years, according to the study published in the journal Communications: Earth & Environment.

The discoloration and cloudiness are being caused by metals such as iron, zinc, copper, nickel and lead, the researchers found – some of which are toxic to the river and stream ecosystems – as permafrost thaws and exposes the waterways to minerals locked away underground for thousands of years.

“We’re used to seeing this in parts of California, parts of Appalachia where we have mining history. This is a classic process that happens in rivers here in the continental US that have been impacted for over 100 years since some of the mining rushes in the 1850s,” said Brett Poulin, a co-author of the study and a professor of environmental toxicology at UC Davis.

“But it’s very startling to see it when you’re on some of the most remote wilderness and you’re far from a mine source.”

Arctic soils naturally contain organic carbon, nutrients and metals, such as mercury, within their permafrost, the study says. High temperatures have caused these minerals and the water sources around them to meet as permafrost melts.

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, studies have shown.

“What we believe we’re seeing is this thawing of soil that’s happening faster there than it would happen elsewhere,” said Poulin. “It’s really an unexpected consequence of climate change.”

Animals collapsed, people jumped on water tankers with buckets amid shortages and government employees changed their work hours as blistering summer heat kept its grip on north India on Thursday.

Although Thursday's readings were marginally lower in Delhi than the previous day when one area recorded an all-time high of 52.9 degree Celsius (127.22 Fahrenheit), the region still saw temperatures touching 47 C (116.6 F).

Delhi, which has a population of 20 million, recorded its first heat-related death on Wednesday, with a 40-year old labourer dying of heatstroke, local media reported. Authorities said they are investigating if the 52.9 C reading in the Mungeshpur neighbourhood on Wednesday was caused by a sensor error at the local weather station.

Television images showed people chasing water tankers or climbing on top of them in parts of the city to fill containers amidst an acute water shortage that the government blames on low levels in the Yamuna River - Delhi's primary source of water.

Along the river's banks, women in shanties endured stifling conditions in their homes as their cooking stoves aggravated the sweltering weather.

"The heat is worse this year. We work like this everyday so we get into the habit," said Seema, 19, who cooks for her family twice a day.

In the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, a policeman used CPR to revive a monkey that he said had fainted and fallen from a tree because of the heat, pumping its chest for 45 minutes, local media reported, and Delhi also saw cases of heatstroke among birds.

When a thunderstorm hits on a hot day, it can quickly reduce the temperature from 90 degrees Fahrenheit^32°C to 70^21°C, but to get much colder, you need hail -- and a lot of it.

Harry Weinman witnessed such a storm on Wednesday evening in Marathon, Texas. Weinman told AccuWeather that his car thermometer dropped from 93^34°C to 53^12°C degrees in a few minutes. Quarter-sized hail piled up several inches deep and stripped leaves from the trees, changing the landscape into what looked like a winter wonderland.

A rare weather condition called "hail fog" soon transpired, caused by the hail cooling the surrounding air to its dew point.

A nearby Ambient Weather station in the northeastern part of the town reported a drop from 84 F^29°C to 62 F^17°C -- 22 degrees -- in only five minutes. Thirty minutes later, that same station reported a chilly 55 degrees^13°C. Other weather stations in the area showed similar drops in a short amount of time, some as much as 37 degrees lower than before the storm.

I saw a video of I think it was Mexico where they were shoveling hail. o.o

As severe weather continued Thursday through the Great Plains, residents of a southwest Texas town reported a dramatic temperature drop on Wednesday and hail so deep they had to deploy snow plows to clear the streets.

The temperature in Marathon, Texas, fell more than 50 degrees on Wednesday afternoon as thermometers tumbled from around 105 degrees to the mid-50s in about an hour, Brian Curran, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service Midland, Texas, told ABC News.

Curran attributed the wild decline in temperature to the severe hail storm that hit Marathon.

"It was like an air conditioner," Curran said.

Brad Wilson, chief of the Marathon Fire Department, told ABC News that it was as if conditions turned from summer to winter in an hour.

"There was about two feet of hail on our main street right in the center of town. It looked like snow," Wilson said. "We went out there with a tape measure last night before the road crews came and plowed the roads."

The world's oceans have consistently been breaking daily heat records since early 2023, a yearlong fever that has climate scientists, coral reef experts and even hurricane forecasters concerned and dismayed.

In the main region of the Atlantic Ocean where hurricanes develop, water temperatures are "absolutely stunning," said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate studying hurricanes at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School.

Hotter oceans and sea surface temperatures are like an octane boost for hurricane season, cranking up the fuel that drives the formation and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms as they move over the ocean. Warmer-than-normal waters in the Atlantic, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico play starring roles in all the seasonal outlooks for the Atlantic hurricane season beginning June 1.

"The whole tropical Atlantic is warmer than its ever been for this time of year," McNoldy told USA TODAY on Thursday. It's sitting at temperatures normally not seen until mid-August. And, "the Caribbean is going crazy."

The record daily average temperatures in the Atlantic north of the equator have been broken only by a four day period between April and May, when the average water temperature dropped to a tenth of a degree below a daily record set last year.

"And all of that's coming on the heels of 2023, which was warmer than it ever was for this time of year," McNoldy said. "Now we're breaking 2023 records. So, not great."

It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming - it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet.

Tiny particles from the combustion of coal, oil and gas can reflect sunlight and spur the formation of clouds, shading the planet from the sun’s rays. Since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

And now, as society cleans up pollution, that cooling effect is waning. New regulations have cut the amount of sulfur aerosols from global shipping traffic across the oceans; China, fighting its own air pollution problem, has slashed sulfur pollution dramatically in the last decade.

The result is even warmer temperatures - but exactly how much warmer is still under debate. The answer will have lasting impacts on humanity’s ability to meet its climate goals.

Hurricane Beryl has intensified into a historic Category 5 storm and is now packing potentially catastrophic 165-mile-per-hour sustained winds as it churns towards Jamaica after making landfall on Grenada's Carriacou Island Monday.

The hurricane, the first to reach Category 5 status so early in the season, made history in several ways, and none of them are good news, experts say.

“The only other major hurricane to pass within 100 miles of where #Beryl is on Monday morning was Ivan in September 2004, and that was at Category 3 intensity,” Brian McNoldy, senior researcher on hurricanes, climatology and sea level rise at the University of Miami, wrote Monday in a post on X. “These islands have no experience with a Category 4 hurricane in recorded history.”

In fact, Beryl became the first Category 4 storm to form in the month of June in the Atlantic basin, and it strengthened in the shortest amount of time on record. On Monday night, it became the earliest Category 5 storm seen in the Atlantic Ocean.

“This is the fastest rate of strengthening ever observed in the satellite era (since 1966) for June,” Michael Lowry, meteorologist at WPLG in Miami, said, adding that Beryl “took just 42 hours to go from a tropical depression to a Category 3 storm.”

Avery Tomasco, meteorologist at CBS in Austin, Texas, joined a chorus of professionals who marveled over how quickly the storm had strengthened.

“Insane to see that kind of rapid intensification in JUNE,” he wrote in a post on X. Hurricane season begins on June 1 and lasts until Nov. 30, but the strongest storms usually don’t form until later in the season.

Hurricane intensification and climate change

While there is no concrete evidence to show that climate change is causing an increase in the number of hurricanes each year, numerous studies have linked rising global temperatures to a shortening of the time it takes hurricanes to ramp up into monster storms like Beryl. A 2024 study published in Nature found that average maximum intensification rates for tropical cyclones increased by 28.7% from the period between 1971 and 1990 to that between 2001 and 2020.

On Sunday, the Earth sizzled to the hottest day ever measured by humans, yet another heat record shattered in the past couple of years, according to the European climate service Copernicus Tuesday.

Copernicus' preliminary data shows that the global average temperature Sunday was 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the record set just last year on July 6, 2023 by .01 degrees Celsius (.02 degrees Fahrenheit). Both Sunday's mark and last year's record obliterate the previous record of 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit), which itself was only a few years old, set in 2016.

Without human-caused climate change, records would be broken nowhere near as frequently, and new cold records would be set as often as hot ones.

“What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” Copernius Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. "We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”

A record-breaking heat wave unfolding at what should be the coldest time in Earth’s coldest place has scientists concerned about what it could mean for the future health of the Antarctic continent, and the consequences it could inflict for millions of people across the globe.

Temperatures since mid-July have climbed up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal over parts of Antarctica and unseasonable warmth could continue through the first half of August.

The latest data shows high temperatures in portions of East Antarctica – where the most abnormal conditions are ongoing – that are typically between minus 58 and minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit are now closer to minus 13 to minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s cold, but Bismarck, North Dakota, has reached minus 20 degrees at least once a year in almost every year since 1875. Antarctica’s typical winter cold should be operating at a level unfathomable to most people in the US.

Summerlike heat in the dead of winter – even if much of the continent is still below freezing – is an alarming development for a place more capable than any other of generating catastrophic sea level rise as fossil fuel pollution continues to drive global temperatures upward.

Most of the planet’s ice is stored here, and were it all to melt, would raise average global sea levels by well over 150 feet. Even smaller icy features, like the so-called Doomsday Glacier, could raise sea levels by 10 feet if they were to melt – catastrophic amounts for the world’s coastal communities.