Satellite data shows up climate forecasts

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What threatens us today isn’t the particular concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the precise temperature of the planet, alarming as those two metrics are. Instead, it’s the unprecedented rate at which we are increasing carbon pollution through fossil fuel burning, and the resulting rate at which we are heating the planet.

Consider the warming event that paleoclimatologists point to as the best natural comparison for the rapid greenhouse-driven trend we’re seeing now. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum happened 56 million years ago, roughly 10 million years after the demise of the dinosaurs, which itself was caused by climate change (a massive asteroid impact event led to a global dust storm and, in turn, rapid cooling). The PETM warming resulted from an unusually large and rapid injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Global temperatures increased by approximately 10 degrees Fahrenheit in as little as 10,000 years, rising from an already steamy baseline of 80 degrees Fahrenheit possibly up to a sauna-like 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

That warming rate of about 0.1 degree Fahrenheit per century is extremely rapid by geological standards. But it’s still roughly 10 times slower than the warming today.

Extinctions followed another warming period in our more recent past, when the last ice age ended about 18,000 years ago. Driven by Earth’s changing orbit relative to the sun, and boosted by a heightened greenhouse effect as warming oceans gave up their carbon dioxide in the same way an open bottle of warm soda loses carbonation, the planet warmed by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the subsequent 8,000 years.

That rate of warming — which, again, was about 10 times slower than the warming today — was rapid enough to wipe out entire species. Gone were the magnificent woolly mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths and saber-toothed cats that had roamed the plains of North America. A combination of climate change and overhunting by paleo-Americans did them in. A few of them got stuck in tar pits and are preserved — some at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

It’s only early spring in Australia and the country is already grappling with heat and fire, sparking fears of a potentially devastating summer.

Last weekend, more than 20 runners in the Sydney Marathon were hospitalized during a heat wave. Ski resorts, including Perisher, the country’s largest, have closed early amid a lack of snow after Australia’s warmest winter since records began in 1910.

Then, last week, dozens of bushfires broke out in the country, with more than 60 burning in the densely-populated state of New South Wales.

These are ominous signals for what large parts of the country can expect as spring rolls into summer. The confluence of natural climate phenomena, including El Niño, layered on top of human-caused global warming, is leading scientists to sound the alarm.

"The ominous signs pointing to extreme heat and fire in Australia this summer"

In a recent statement released by Hansen alongside two other scientists, Hansen predicted the warming of the planet to accelerate in the coming years, musing about a “new climate frontier.”

“There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts,” Hansen told the Guardian. “These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality — we knew it was coming.”

Speaking of the heat waves that have ravaged much of the Northern Hemisphere recently, Hansen told the Guardian he cannot help but feel “a sense of disappointment that we scientists did not communicate more clearly and that we did not elect leaders capable of a more intelligent response.”

Austria, France, Germany, Poland and Switzerland announced their hottest Septembers on record on Friday, in a year expected to be the warmest in human history as climate change accelerates.

The unseasonably warm weather in Europe came after the EU climate monitor said earlier this month that global temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere summer were the hottest on record.

French weather authority Meteo-France said the September temperature average in the country will be around 21.5 degrees Celsius (70.7 degrees Fahrenheit), between 3.5C and 3.6C above the 1991-2020 reference period.

Average temperatures in France have been exceeding monthly norms consistently for almost two years.

In neighbouring Germany, weather office DWD said this month was the hottest September since national records started, almost 4C higher than the 1961-1990 baseline.

Poland's weather institute announced September temperatures were 3.6C higher than average and the hottest for the month since records began more than 100 years ago.

National weather bodies in the Alpine nations of Austria and Switzerland also recorded their hottest-ever average September temperatures, a day after a study revealed Swiss glaciers lost 10 percent of their volume in two years amid extreme warming.

The Spanish and Portuguese national weather institutes warned abnormally warm temperatures were going to hit this weekend, with the mercury topping 35C in parts of southern Spain on Friday.

Last month was the hottest September on record by an "extraordinary" margin as the world flirts dangerously with breaching a key warming limit, the EU climate monitor said on Thursday.

Much of the world sweltered through unseasonably warm weather in September, in a year expected to be the hottest in human history and after the warmest-ever global temperatures during the Northern Hemisphere summer.

September's average surface air temperature of 16.38 degrees Celsius (61.5 degrees Fahrenheit) was 0.93C above the 1991-2020 average for the month and 0.5C above the previous 2020 record, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a report.

Temperature records are normally broken by much smaller margins closer to one-tenth of a degree.

It’s no secret that our warming atmosphere has resulted in extreme weather all over the world, but there’s also a less noticeable consequence at work as well. Rising ambient temperatures mean that thousands of coniferous forests in California will be unable to replenish their numbers once they die

A lot of commentary uses the framing of a “new normal,” as if our climate has undergone a step change to a new state. This is deeply misleading and downplays the danger. The unspoken implication of “new normal” is that the change is past and we can adjust to it as we did to the “old normal.”

Unfortunately, warming won’t stop this year or next. The changes will get worse until we stop putting more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the planet can remove.

The excess carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere raises the temperature – permanently, as far as human history is concerned. Carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for a long time, so long that the carbon dioxide from a gallon of gasoline I burn today will still be warming the climate in thousands of years.

The effects of our overheating planet have been wreaking havoc on people’s lives for years, and now they’ve taken a new victim: air travel.

In a video interview with CBS News, Amanda Hoover, a staff writer for Wired magazine, explained how Earth’s rising temperature keeps airplanes grounded.

What’s happening?

Travelers worldwide are experiencing one of the worst travel seasons on record, with CBS reporting that data from Flight Aware showed more than 20,000 flights affected in one week alone.

As our planet heats up, extreme weather events have become more frequent and more intense. Storms, wildfires, and heat waves have worsened, and they have all affected air travel.

“There are a lot of ways climate change can affect air travel,” Hoover said in the video. “Thunderstorms are an obvious one. When there is more heat in the air, there is more moisture, more thunderstorms.”

Increased smoke from intense wildfires has also been an issue. “Plane navigation systems aren’t really designed to work well through wildfire smoke,” said Hoover.

She also cited invisible turbulence and high heat as reasons for delays and cancellations. In extremely high temperatures — that’s anything over 100 degrees — planes need more time and distance to take off to fight gravity.

Extreme heat can also cause runways to buckle, and Hoover even spoke of one instance when a plane’s wheel got stuck to a runway that had melted due to extreme heat.

Why are these cancellations concerning?

The reasons behind these delays and cancellations aren’t going away, meaning travel won’t only be affected this summer, but every summer, prompting CBS to warn that travelers may need to get used to it.

"Researchers are discovering ‘zombie forests’ in new places across the western U.S. — here’s what makes that so concerning

With the planet already 1.2C warmer than pre-industrial times, scientists are predicting the Arctic could be ice-free in summers by 2030s. Concerns that the hotter climate will release trapped greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere as the region’s permafrost melts have been well-documented, but dormant pathogens are a lesser explored danger. Last year, Claverie’s team published research showing they’d extracted multiple ancient viruses from the Siberian permafrost, all of which remained infectious.

“With climate change, we are used to thinking of dangers coming from the south,” Claverie said in an interview at his laboratory in the Luminy campus of Aix-Marseille University, France, referring to the spread of vector borne diseases from warmer tropical regions. “Now, we realize there might be some danger coming from the north as the permafrost thaws and frees microbes, bacteria and viruses.”

Ways in which this could present a threat are still emerging. A heat wave in Siberia in the summer of 2016 activated anthrax spores, leading to dozens of infections, killing a child and thousands of reindeer. In July this year, a separate team of scientists published findings showing that even multicellular organisms could survive permafrost conditions in an inactive metabolic state, called cryptobiosis. They successfully reanimated a 46,000-year-old roundworm from the Siberian permafrost, just by re-hydrating it.

According to a new study published in Nature Communications, climate change is affecting the taste and quality of beer, with hops, a key beer ingredient, impacted by global warming. This could lead to more expensive beer and changes in brewing methods.

The study predicts that hop yields in Europe could drop by 4% to 18% by 2050 because of hotter and drier conditions. Additionally, the alpha acids in hops, responsible for beer's distinct flavor and aroma, are expected to decrease by 20% to 31%.

Beer quality hinges on hops cultivated under specific climatic conditions. The demand for quality hops has surged with the rise in craft beer production. But increased greenhouse gas emissions are threatening hop production.

According to a new analysis from researchers at Penn State and Purdue Universities, if Earth's temperature climbs beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius past pre-industrial levels — which would be roughly one more degree Celsius from its current temperature — "billions" of humans across vast swaths of the globe will be subject to heat so extreme that their bodies will no longer be able to naturally cool, leaving them at escalating risk of heat-induced illness and death.

As heatwaves become more common, intense, and longer-lasting, "the question of breaching thermal limits becomes pressing," reads the paper, which was published Monday in the journal PNAS. Ominously, the researchers add that if we continue on our current climate path, future "heat extremes will lie outside the bounds of past human experience and beyond current heat mitigation strategies for billions of people."

In other words, if current climate trends continue, growing areas of the planet will become uninhabitable for their residents — who could perish as the result of the extreme heat or otherwise be forced to flee.

Songbirds like cardinals and sparrows follow the same schedule every year. In spring, they build nests and raise their young from nestlings to fledglings — but as springtime temperatures get warmer due to climate change, scientists have observed bird populations struggling to keep their offspring alive.

A study published Thursday in the journal Science examined over 150,000 nesting attempts from 1998 to 2020 and found that warmer-than-average temperatures during nesting seasons significantly hampered the reproductive success of over 50 bird species, particularly songbirds.

For birds nesting in agricultural spaces with little tree cover or shade, the probability of successfully raising at least one nestling dropped by 46% when temperatures were abnormally high.

Billions of snow crabs have disappeared from the ocean around Alaska in recent years, and scientists now say they know why: Warmer ocean temperatures likely caused them to starve to death.

The finding comes just days after the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced the snow crab harvest season was canceled for the second year in a row, citing the overwhelming number of crabs missing from the typically frigid, treacherous waters of the Bering Sea.

The study, published Thursday by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found a significant link between recent marine heat waves in the eastern Bering Sea and the sudden disappearance of the snow crabs that began showing up in surveys in 2021.

In the past eight years, sea ice in Antarctica has reached a new record low four times, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reports. The first three times, ice levels that have dropped in the summer have rebounded in the winter.

But this year — during what is currently winter in Antarctica — scientists have confirmed that the ice is not re-forming, leaving long stretches of the Antarctic coastline bare.

What’s happening?

According to physical oceanographer Edward Doddridge, this is the first time an event like this has been observed, the ABC reports — and it’s extremely unlikely to have happened on its own.

“To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Doddridge told the ABC. “This is a five-sigma event. … Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years. … There are people saying it could be natural variability … but it’s very unlikely.”

According to Doddridge and others, the most likely cause is human activity. People create air pollution through activities like burning fuel, and that pollution traps heat on our planet, heating up the atmosphere and the ocean. Some combination of warmer water and higher-energy weather patterns is likely what’s melting the ice, scientists told the ABC.

Why does the loss of Antarctic ice matter?

Polar ice is a major factor in the Earth’s “albedo,” which is the amount of light reflected from the surface instead of being absorbed. When there’s more ice, the planet’s albedo is higher, and the sun doesn’t warm it as quickly. When ice melts, the planet starts absorbing more heat.