Mashable - Mark Kaufman
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| Global average temperatures compared to average. Yellows, oranges, and reds indicate warmer temps. Image: NASA |
Earth is now the warmest it's been in
some 120,000 years. Eighteen of the last 19 years have been the
warmest on record. And concentrations of carbon dioxide — a potent greenhouse gas — are likely the highest they've been in
15 million years.
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
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| Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / FRANK_PETERS |
In early 2019, the Rhodium Group — a research institution that analyzes global economic and environmental trends — released a
report
finding that in 2018 carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. rose 3.4
percent from the prior year. That's the second largest gain in the last
two decades.
"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.
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| Image: GETTY IMAGES/FOTOSEARCH RF |
Antarctica — home to the greatest ice sheets on Earth — isn't just
melting significantly faster than it was decades ago. Great masses of
ice that scientists once presumed were largely immune to melting are
losing ample ice into the sea.
"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.
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| Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / AFRICA STUDIO |
A triple whammy of disease, climate change, and deforestation has
threatened around 60 percent of the planet's wild coffee species. While
this hasn't yet imperiled the world's coffee supply, it jeopardizes your
favorite coffee's resiliency in the face of
profound planetary change.
"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
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| Reds, oranges, and yellows show 2017 global temperatures warmer than the average. Image: NASA |
Americans find today's climate science increasingly convincing, and a damaging mix of
exceptional drought,
storms, and
record-breaking heat is the reason why.
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
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| Temperature forecast for early February 2019. Image: UNIVERSITY OF MAINE/CLIMATE REANALYZER |
The polar vortex has become a popular phenomenon for good reason:
This weakening of the polar vortex and the subsequent spillover of
frigid air has become more common over the last two decades.
"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
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| Arctic air flowing south into the U.S. on January 31, 2019. Image: CLIMATE REANALYZER/UNIVERSITY OF MAINE |
While certain portions of the winter sure felt frigid, overall, the
number of daily cold records set in the U.S. has been consistently
dwarfed by the number of warm or high temperature records. The score
isn't even close. High records over the last decade are outpacing low
records by a rate of two to one.
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.
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| A weather station in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region. Image: JITENDRA BAJRACHARYA/ICIMOD |
Beyond the continually grim news from the north and south poles is
the melting of the "third pole," known as the Hindu Kush Himalaya
region. Spreading over 2,000 miles across eight nations (from
Afghanistan to Myanmar), these mountainous lands are home to the
third-largest stores of ice on the planet and provide water to hundreds of millions of people.
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
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| The U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / NICOLAS AGUIAR |
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and
Technology is no longer under the leadership of the Republican party,
which is
candidly opposed to globally-accepted climate science.
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
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| Half the Earth illuminated by the sun. Image: ESA |
In early 2017, the Trump Administration
tried to ax NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, or OCO-3. It didn't work. Then, again in 2018, the White House
sought to terminate the earth science instrument.
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
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| In 2017 Earth's temperatures were significantly warmer than compared to the average. Image: NASA |
Here's a statistic: On Earth, 18 of the last 19 years have been the warmest in recorded history.
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
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| Green areas show increases in areas covered by green leaves. Image: NASA |
Two NASA satellites have watched Earth grow greener over the last 20
years — in large part because China is hellbent on planting millions of
trees.
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
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| A New Deal project: the Chickamauga Dam. Image: SHUTTERSTOCK / EVERETT HISTORICAL |
The scope of a Green New Deal — if such a program ever truly comes to
match the scale of the original New Deal — wouldn’t just put millions
of Americans to work, but could very well transform the mood, culture,
and spirit of the United States in the 21st century.
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
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| Higher CO2 concentrations swirling around Earth (shown by yellows and reds). Image: NASA |
Princeton physicist and carbon dioxide-advocate William Happer has
been selected to head the brand new Presidential Committee on Climate
Security,
reports The Washington Post. Happer maintains that the planet's atmosphere needs significantly more CO2, the
potent greenhouse gas that U.S. government scientists — and a bevy of independent scientists — have
repeatedly underscored is stoking
accelerating climate change.
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
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| 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 |
A potent atmospheric river — a long band of water vapor that often
transports ample amounts of moisture to the western U.S. like
"rivers in the sky"
— deluged portions of Northern California in late February. The Russian
River, which winds through the Sonoma County town of Guerneville,
reached over 45-feet high and swamped the area, prompting the Sheriff to announce on Twitter that the town had been
surrounded by water — with no way in or out.
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
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| Satellite imagery of the mostly ice-free Bering Strait on Feb. 28. 2019. Image: SENTINEL HUB EO BROWSER/SENTINEL 3 |
During winter, the Bering Strait has historically been blanketed in
ice. But this year, the ice has nearly vanished [by late February].
"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
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| Sunlight reflecting off the Earth. Image: NASA |
Solar geoengineering is widely viewed as risky business.
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?
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| Image: Getty Images/WIN-Initiative RM |
With no benefit to itself, Earth's vast sea has gulped up
around 30 percent
of the carbon dioxide humans emitted into Earth's atmosphere over the
last century. Critically, scientists have now confirmed that the ocean
in recent decades has continued its steadfast rate of CO2 absorption,
rather than letting the potent greenhouse gas further saturate the
skies.
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.
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