Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Abstract

Continuously operating Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) base stations in South Africa show a spatially coherent vertical displacement. While one hypothesis attributes this vertical motion to crustal deformation from mantle flow and dynamic topography (Hammond et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021jb022355), we propose an alternative explanation. Our evidence suggests that land water loss from multiple droughts is a major driver of the observed uplift. In this study, we analyze daily Global Positioning System (GPS) height time series from 2000 to 2021. We use singular spectral analysis (SSA) to separate long-term trends and annual and semi-annual signals from noise. The processed time series were inverted into water mass loading on a uniform grid, with the Earth's crust's rheological properties defined by the Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM). Our experimental approach show that a 2
2
grid resolution provides suitable results for most of South Africa. The GPS-derived total water storage change reconcile well with a GRACE-assimilated solution and a hydrological model at the monthly scale across different provinces, showing correlations of up to 90% and 94%, respectively. The long-term trend averaged over the country shows a considerable correlation of 46% and 53%, respectively. These long-term total water storage trends provide strong evidence that the observed land uplift in South Africa is primarily of hydrological origin.

Two US scientific associations put out a call on Friday for submissions for research that would have been used in the National Climate Assessment (NCA) report after President Donald Trump effectively canceled it.

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) said the research they were calling for would be to "sustain the momentum" of the next report.

"We are filling in a gap in the scientific process," AGU President Brandon Jones said. "It's more about ensuring that science continues."

The NCA is a comprehensive report on the impacts of climate change in the United States. The last report came out in 2023 when the effects of extreme weather incurred record costs of over $1 billion (€900 million).

The next report is due to come out in 2027.

Abstract

Climate injustice persists as those least responsible often bear the greatest impacts, both between and within countries. Here we show how GHG emissions from consumption and investments attributable to the wealthiest population groups have disproportionately influenced present-day climate change. We link emissions inequality over the period 1990–2020 to regional climate extremes using an emulator-based framework. We find that two-thirds (one-fifth) of warming is attributable to the wealthiest 10% (1%), meaning that individual contributions are 6.5 (20) times the average per capita contribution. For extreme events, the top 10% (1%) contributed 7 (26) times the average to increases in monthly 1-in-100-year heat extremes globally and 6 (17) times more to Amazon droughts. Emissions from the wealthiest 10% in the United States and China led to a two- to threefold increase in heat extremes across vulnerable regions. Quantifying the link between wealth disparities and climate impacts can assist in the discourse on climate equity and justice.

A Climate Central analysis of the past five years (2020-2024)

KEY FACTS

● Extreme heat presents dangerous risks to global maternal health and birth outcomes, and it’s becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change.

● Climate Central analyzed daily temperatures during the past five years (2020 to 2024)
in 247 countries, territories, and dependencies and 940 global cities to count the number of pregnancy heat-risk days. Pregnancy heat-risk days have maximum temperatures warmer than 95% of temperatures observed at a given location — a threshold associated with an increased risk of preterm birth.

● During 2020 to 2024, nearly one-third of analyzed countries (78 out of 247) experienced at least one additional month’s worth of pregnancy heat-risk days on average annually due to climate change.

● In most countries (222), climate change at least doubled the average annual number of pregnancy heat-risk days experienced during the past five years, compared to a world without climate change.

● The greatest increases in pregnancy heat-risk days due to climate change over the past five years occurred primarily in developing regions with limited access to healthcare — most notably in the Caribbean, and parts of Central and South America, the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Abstract

Mass loss from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica has quadrupled since the 1990s and now represents the dominant source of global mean sea-level rise from the cryosphere. This has raised concerns about their future stability and focussed attention on the global mean temperature thresholds that might trigger more rapid retreat or even collapse, with renewed calls to meet the more ambitious target of the Paris Climate Agreement and limit warming to +1.5 °C above pre-industrial. Here we synthesise multiple lines of evidence to show that +1.5 °C is too high and that even current climate forcing (+1.2 °C), if sustained, is likely to generate several metres of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and challenging the implementation of adaptation measures. To avoid this requires a global mean temperature that is cooler than present and which we hypothesise to be closer to +1 °C above pre-industrial, possibly even lower, but further work is urgently required to more precisely determine a ‘safe limit’ for ice sheets.

Abstract

Gaseous ammonia, while influential in atmospheric processes, is critically underrepresented in atmospheric measurements. This limits our understanding of key climate-relevant processes, such as new particle formation, particularly in remote regions. Here, we present highly sensitive, online observations of gaseous ammonia from a coastal site in Antarctica, which allows us to constrain the mechanism of new particle formation in this region in unprecedented detail. Our observations show that penguin colonies are a large source of ammonia in coastal Antarctica, whereas ammonia originating from the Southern Ocean is, in comparison, negligible. In conjunction with sulfur compounds sourced from oceanic microbiology, ammonia initiates new particle formation and is an important source of cloud condensation nuclei. Dimethylamine, likely originating from penguin guano, also participates in the initial steps of particle formation, effectively boosting particle formation rates up to 10000 times. These findings emphasize the importance of ecosystem processes from penguin/bird colonies and oceanic phytoplankton/bacteria on climate-relevant aerosol processes in coastal Antarctica. This demonstrates an important connection between ecosystem and atmospheric processes that impact the Antarctic climate, which is crucial given the current rate of environmental changes in the region.

André Corrêa do Lago says ‘answers have to come from the economy’ as climate policies trigger populist-fuelled backlash

The world is facing a new form of climate denial – not the dismissal of climate science, but a concerted attack on the idea that the economy can be reorganised to fight the crisis, the president of global climate talks has warned.

André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat who will direct this year’s UN summit, Cop30, believes his biggest job will be to counter the attempt from some vested interests to prevent climate policies aimed at shifting the global economy to a low-carbon footing.

“There is a new kind of opposition to climate action. We are facing a discredit of climate policies. I don’t think we are facing climate denial,” he said, referring to the increasingly desperate attempts to pretend there is no consensus on climate science that have plagued climate action for the past 30 years. “It’s not a scientific denial, it’s an economic denial.”

This economic denial could be just as dangerous and cause as much delay as repeated attempts to deny climate science in previous years, he warned in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.

As the climate crisis has gathered pace, temperatures have risen and the effects of extreme weather have become more obvious, scientists have been able to draw ever more clearly the links between greenhouse gas emissions and our impacts on the planet. So the argument has shifted, Corrêa do Lago believes, from undermining or misrepresenting the science to attempts to counter climate policy.

“It is not possible to have [scientific] denialism at this stage, after everything that has happened in recent years. So there is a migration from scientific denial to a denial that economic measures against climate change can be good for the economy and for people.”

The rise of populist politicians around the world has fuelled a backlash against climate policy, most clearly seen in the presidency of Donald Trump in the US, where he has set about cancelling policies intended to boost renewable energy and cut greenhouse gases, and dismantling all forms of government-sponsored climate-related institutions, including scientific research labs.

Corrêa do Lago wants to spur a new global effort to persuade people that remodelling the economy away from a reliance on fossil fuels and towards a clean energy future will reap benefits for all people. “The new populism is trying to show [that tackling the climate crisis does not work],” he said. “It’s the turn of those who believe in the fight against climate change to show and to prove that fighting climate change is possible, and that it can come with economic advantages and with a better quality of life.”

Corrêa do Lago is an economist by training – the youngest of five brothers, all of whom became economists. “My mother was horrified with our lack of originality,” he joked.

He has been a career diplomat, having joined Brazil’s foreign service in 1983 and serving previously as ambassador to India and Japan. He is also a veteran of the Cop talks – the annual “conference of the parties”, which will take place this year in Belém, near the mouth of the Amazon, in November.

“Most of the answers have to come from the economy,” said Corrêa do Lago. “Because we have now enough science, enough demonstration of how climate change can affect people’s lives. Now we need answers [in the form of policy measures]. We need economists to rally.”
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A sudden and dramatic decline in the amount of carbon being soaked up by European forests is causing alarm among scientists, with fears that the sharp downturn could undermine efforts to curb global warming.

For decades, Europe’s forests – which cover around 40 per cent of the continent’s land area – have been relied on as a source of timber and as a sink for carbon emissions. But that picture is rapidly changing as extreme weather pushes forests to the limits of their endurance.

“Many [European Union] countries will miss their [land use climate] targets because of this drop in the sink,” says Glen Peters at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway.

In January, authorities in Finland announced that the country’s forest biome has flipped from being a net sink for carbon to become a net source. The news came just a few months after Germany admitted that its forests are now a net source of carbon emissions, for the first time in the country’s history. Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, forests have been a net source of carbon emissions since 2018.

These are just the most extreme cases. In other countries, the annual carbon drawdown of forests is rapidly declining, even if, overall, they remain a net sink for emissions. In France, for example, the amount of carbon removed by forests has almost halved in just 14 years, from a 2008 peak of 74.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year to 37.8 million tonnes in 2022, according to research published last month. In Norway, forest removal of CO2 dropped from 32 million tonnes in 2010 to 18 million tonnes in 2022.

“The general trend was quite stable until about 2013-2015-ish, where we see a clear start of the decline of the [forest] sink,” says Anu Korosuo at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Belgium. “It is quite a general trend. It’s not just because of one or two countries – we can see a similar trend in basically all countries that have forests.”

Much of Europe’s forested land is privately owned and managed commercially. Some of the decline in the sink is attributed to an increase in harvesting, particularly in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the subsequent sanctions applied to Russian timber imports into the EU. In Finland, for example, “the driver is demand for timber and a high level of harvest”, says Raisa Mäkipää from the Natural Resources Institute Finland.

But in other parts of the continent, scientists point to escalating climate impacts as the main reason for the sudden downturn in carbon storage.

Swathes of Europe have been struck by several droughts in recent years, including severe ones in 2018 and 2022, points out Wouter Peters at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. His research shows that the 2022 drought triggered a sharp decline in carbon uptake by European forests over the summer months. “We are seeing the instantaneous effects. The trees are stressed,” he says.

Even though researchers expected some decline in the European forest sink as the world warms, the scale of the recent downturn has still come as a surprise. Researchers didn’t think the sink would decline so sharply at this level of warming, says Wouter Peters. “The impact seems to be larger than we expected.”

That could be down to the compound effects of repeated droughts occurring in the space of just a few years, alongside other extreme events such as storms that can also wreak havoc in forests. “You don’t just have the 2018 drought, but then one in 2021 and another one in 2022,” says Wouter Peters. “Our models were not very good at doing the sum of all of them in such a short period.”

Rising temperatures are also driving more frequent and widespread bark beetle outbreaks across Europe, causing huge damage in spruce forests. In the Czech Republic, one of the hardest-hit countries, there have been seven major outbreaks of bark beetles between 2018 and 2021.

A waning forest carbon sink threatens the EU’s climate goals, which rely on trees to absorb a large portion of ongoing emissions from other sectors of the economy. The EU has even been planning to expand this carbon sink to help in the push towards its climate ambitions, aiming for land and forests to remove 310 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year in 2030, up from about 230 million tonnes of removals in 2021.

But according to analysis published in April, Europe’s forest carbon sink is expected to fall short of the 2030 goal by about 29 per cent, with the researchers warning that the capacity of Europe’s forests to remove carbon is “progressively deteriorating”.

There are actions that can be taken to stem the decline. Reducing harvest rates, for example, and banning the clear cutting of plantations, would help to preserve carbon stocks. Meanwhile, diversifying tree species and leaving some deadwood in forests can improve the health of woodlands, making them more resilient to pests and droughts.

But Wouter Peters says policy-makers are overestimating the amount of carbon that forests can absorb in a warming climate. “For greenhouse gas emissions specifically, our reliance on forests was probably overoptimistic,” he says. To deliver on Europe’s climate goals, other sectors of the economy will need to cut emissions more rapidly, he argues. “It means we will have to step up in other areas.”

A global problem

Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are now rising at the fastest rate in history, despite an overall plateauing of greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists blame this acceleration on the weakening of the global land sink, with forests, wetlands and peatlands around the world absorbing carbon at a slower rate than expected, in part due to deforestation, increased emissions from wildfires, and drought.

The problem is most acute in the mid-latitudes. Alongside Europe, boreal forests in Alaska and Canada have also registered a significant decline in their carbon sink capacity. But tropical forests have seen a decline in their carbon-storing capacity too, largely due to deforestation and wildfires.

That is a worry for the world’s plans to reach net-zero emissions. “In the big global picture, the whole concept of net zero works around forests and ocean taking up a lot of carbon,” says Glen Peters at CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway. “If they start to stop taking up the carbon, then that means more of it stays in the atmosphere, and global warming would accelerate.”

Copernicus data shows month was 1.4C above estimated 1850-1900 average used to define pre-industrial level

It has been an exceptionally dry spring in north-western Europe and the second warmest May ever globally, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Countries across Europe, including the UK, have been hit by drought conditions in recent months, with water shortages feared unless significant rain comes this summer, and crop failures beginning to be reported by farmers.