Global average temperatures compared to average. Yellows, oranges, and reds indicate warmer temps. Image: NASA |
The consequences of such a globally-disrupted climate are many, and it's understandably difficult to keep track. To help, here's a list of climate-relevant news that has transpired in 2019, from historically unprecedented disappearances of ice, to flood-ravaged cities. As more news comes out, the list will be updated.
1. Guess what? U.S. carbon emissions popped back up in a big way
Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / FRANK_PETERS |
"It’s trending in the wrong direction — it’s not encouraging," said Robert McGrath, the director of the University of Colorado Boulder's Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute who had no role in the report but reviewed it.
2. Antarctica’s once sleepy ice sheets have awoken. That's bad.
Image: GETTY IMAGES/FOTOSEARCH RF |
"People are beginning to recognize that East Antarctica might be waking up," said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that visits and measures Earth's melting glaciers.
"There’s growing evidence that eastern Antarctica is not just going to stay frozen and well-behaved in the next 50 to 100 years," he explained.
3. 60% of the planet's wild coffee species face extinction. What that means for your morning caffeine kick.
Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / AFRICA STUDIO |
"As farmers are increasingly exposed to new climate conditions and changing pest pressures, the genetic diversity of wild crop relatives may be essential to breeding new coffee varieties that can withstand these pressures," Nathan Mueller, an assistant professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine who researches global food security, said over email.
4. Extreme weather — not politicians — convinces Americans that climate change is real
Reds, oranges, and yellows show 2017 global temperatures warmer than the average. Image: NASA |
The results of a new survey — conducted in November 2018 by the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute and the research organization The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research — found that nearly half of Americans said today's climate science "is more convincing than five years ago, with extreme weather driving their views."
5. The polar vortex will return, this time with the coldest temps of the year
Temperature forecast for early February 2019. Image: UNIVERSITY OF MAINE/CLIMATE REANALYZER |
"We are seeing these events occurring more frequently as of late," said Jeff Weber, a meteorologist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Although this increase in polar vortex frequency is a hot area of study, one emerging theory blames significantly diminished Arctic sea ice. The Arctic is warming over twice as fast as the rest of the globe and sea ice cover is plummeting. As a result, recent climate research suggests that — without this ice cover — more heat escapes from the oceans. Ultimately, researchers found that this relatively warmer air interacts with and weakens the winds over the Arctic, allowing frigid polar air to more easily escape to southerly places like Cleveland and New York City.
6. It's damn cold, but heat records in the U.S. still dominate
Arctic air flowing south into the U.S. on January 31, 2019. Image: CLIMATE REANALYZER/UNIVERSITY OF MAINE |
In the past 10 years there have been 21,461 record daily highs and 11,466 lows.
"The trend is in exactly the direction we would expect as a result of a warming planet," said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University.
7. Don’t forget about the colossal Himalayan glaciers. They’re rapidly vanishing, too.
A weather station in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. Image: JITENDRA BAJRACHARYA/ICIMOD |
Under the most optimistic conditions, a new report found that over a third of the ice will vanish by the century's end. But under more extreme climate scenarios — wherein global climate efforts fail — two-thirds of these mighty glaciers could disappear, with overall ice losses of a whopping 90 percent.
"Glacier-wise, it's not a great story," Joseph Shea, one of the report's lead authors and an assistant professor of environmental geomatics at the University of Northern British Columbia, said in an interview.
8. House lawmakers finally let climate scientists set the record straight
The U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / NICOLAS AGUIAR |
Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, a veteran Democratic lawmaker from Texas, has become Chairwoman and called a hearing for Feb. 13 entitled "The State of Climate Science and Why it Matters," inviting four scientists to give testimony about major U.S. climate reports and the significance of the latest climate science.
"Climate change is real, it's happening now, and humans are responsible for it," Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and a coauthor of the congressionally mandated Fourth National Climate Assessment Kopp said in an interview, outlining critical points he planned to make to federal lawmakers.
9. Trump fails to block NASA's carbon sleuth from going to space
Half the Earth illuminated by the sun. Image: ESA |
Again, the refrigerator-sized space machine persisted.
Now, SpaceX is set to launch OCO-3 to the International Space Station in the coming months, as early as April 25. Using a long robotic arm, astronauts will attach OCO-3 to the edge of the space station, allowing the instrument to peer down upon Earth and measure the planet's amassing concentrations of carbon dioxide — a potent greenhouse gas.
"Carbon dioxide is the most important gas humans are emitting into the atmosphere," said Annmarie Eldering, the project scientist for OCO-3 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Understanding how it will play out in the future is critical."
10. Earth's coldest years on record all happened over 90 years ago
In 2017 Earth's temperatures were significantly warmer than compared to the average. Image: NASA |
The globe's 21st-century heating, however, becomes all the more stark when compared to the coldest years on record. As climate scientist Simon Donner, who researches human-induced climate change at The University of British Columbia, underscored via a list posted on Twitter, the planet's 20 coldest years all occurred nearly a century ago, between 1884 and 1929.
The coldest year on record occurred in 1904.
11. Earth is greener than it was 20 years ago, but not why you think
Green areas show increases in areas covered by green leaves. Image: NASA |
Earth's greening — meaning the increase in areas covered by green leaves — has made the greatest gains in China and India since the mid-1990s. "The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries," NASA wrote as it released maps of the planet-wide changes.
China kickstarted its tree-planting mobilizations in the 1990s to combat erosion, climate change, and air pollution. This dedicated planting — sometimes done by soldiers — equated to over 40 percent of China's greening, so far.
12. The Green New Deal: Historians weigh in on the immense scale required to pull it off
A New Deal project: the Chickamauga Dam. Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / EVERETT HISTORICAL |
The New Deal wasn’t just paying people to build things. People were doing fulfilling, nation-improving work. They planted three billion trees. They built many of the nation’s bridges and roads. Today, we drive under their tunnels and walk through their parks.
“Those men at the end of their lives would take their families back to show them what they had done — because they were quite proud of it,” said Gray Brechin, a historical geographer and New Deal scholar.
13. Trump's climate expert is wrong: The world's plants don't need more CO2
Higher CO2 concentrations swirling around Earth (shown by yellows and reds). Image: NASA |
Because plants use carbon dioxide to live, Happer has said "more CO2 is actually a benefit to the Earth," asserted that Earth is experiencing a "CO2 famine," and concluded that "If plants could vote, they would vote for coal."
Earth and plant scientists disagree.
"The idea that increased CO2 is universally beneficial [to plants] is very misguided," said Jill Anderson, an evolutionary ecologist specializing in plant populations at the University of Georgia.
14. A powerful atmospheric river pummeled California, and the pictures look unreal
Rich Willson paddles through the miniature golf course after the flooding in in Guerneville, California. Image: KARL MONDON/MEDIANEWS GROUP/THE MERCURY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES |
While California relies heavily on these wintertime atmospheric rivers for its water, scientists expect these storms to grow dramatically wetter as Earth's climate heats up.
"We're likely to see rain in increasingly intense bursts," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
15. The Bering Strait should be covered in ice, but it's nearly all gone
Satellite imagery of the mostly ice-free Bering Strait on Feb. 28. 2019. Image: SENTINEL HUB EO BROWSER/SENTINEL 3 |
"The usually ice-covered Bering Strait is almost completely open water," said Zack Labe, a climate scientist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Irvine.
"There should be ice here until May," added Lars Kaleschke, a climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.
16. Geoengineering might not be as ludicrous if we gave Earth the right dose
Sunlight reflecting off the Earth. Image: NASA |
The somewhat sci-fi concept — to use blimps, planes, or other means to load Earth's atmosphere with particles or droplets that reflect sunlight and cool the planet — has crept into the mainstream conversation as a means of reversing relentless climate change, should our efforts to slash carbon emissions fail or sputter. But geoengineering schemes come with a slew of hazards. A number of studies have cited the ill consequences of messing with Earth's sun intake, including big falls in crop production, the likelihood of unforeseen adverse side effects, and critically, a weakened water cycle that could trigger drops in precipitation and widespread drought.
Yet new research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, acknowledges these problems but finds a potential fix: only deploying enough reflective specks in the atmosphere to reduce about half of Earth's warming, rather than relying on geoengineering to completely return Earth to the cooler, milder climate of the 19th century. In other words, giving Earth a geoengineering dose that would reverse a significant portion of the warming, but not enough to stoke the problematic side effects.
"Solar engineering might not be a good choice in an emergency," said David Keith, a solar engineering researcher at Harvard University and study coauthor. "If it makes any sense at all, it makes sense to gradually ramp it up."
17. The ocean keeps gulping up a colossal amount of CO2 from the air, but will it last?
Image: Getty Images/WIN-Initiative RM |
But a weighty question still looms: How much longer can we rely on the ocean to so effectively store away carbon dioxide, and stave off considerably more global warming?
"At some point the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon will start to diminish," said Jeremy Mathis, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate scientist who coauthored the study. "It means atmospheric CO2 levels could go up faster than they already are."
"That's a big deal," Mathis emphasized.
Links
- Guess what? U.S. carbon emissions popped back up in a big way
- Antarctica’s once sleepy ice sheets have awoken. That's bad.
- 60% of the planet's wild coffee species face extinction. What that means for your morning caffeine kick.
- Extreme weather — not politicians — convinces Americans that climate change is real
- The polar vortex will return, this time with the coldest temps of the year
- It's damn cold, but heat records in the U.S. still dominate
- Don’t forget about the colossal Himalayan glaciers. They’re rapidly vanishing, too.
- House lawmakers finally let climate scientists set the record straight
- Trump fails to block NASA's carbon sleuth from going to space
- Earth's coldest years on record all happened over 90 years ago
- Earth is greener than it was 20 years ago, but not why you think
- The Green New Deal: Historians weigh in on the immense scale required to pull it off
- Trump's climate expert is wrong: The world's plants don't need more CO2
- A powerful atmospheric river pummeled California, and the pictures look unreal
- The Bering Strait should be covered in ice, but it's nearly all gone
- Geoengineering might not be as ludicrous if we gave Earth the right dose
- The ocean keeps gulping up a colossal amount of CO2 from the air, but will it last?
No comments :
Post a Comment