Category Archives: Climate Change Science

Sophie Pinkham, Opinion | A Giant Crater in Siberia Is Belching Up Russia’s Past – The New York Times

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By Sophie Pinkham

Ms. Pinkham is a professor at Cornell. Her forthcoming book is a cultural history of the Russian forest.

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As the world warms, permafrost is thawing across two-thirds of Russia, threatening cities and towns that were constructed to house miners sent to dig up a subterranean trove of oil, gas, gold and diamonds. Even the roads are buckling, cracking and collapsing, as if in a slow-motion earthquake. And outside a small town called Batagay, deep in the Siberian hinterland, a crater is rapidly opening up — known to local residents as the gateway to the underworld.

From space, it resembles a stingray impressed on the coniferous forest. Already more than half a mile deep and about 3,000 feet wide, the Batagaika crater is growing as the ground beneath it melts. The cliff face retreats 40 feet every year, revealing buried treasures once locked in the ice.

The land is belching up the past and swallowing the present — creating a yawning hole even more dizzying than the huge open-pit mines that already scar the Siberian landscape. It should be a warning about the dangers of extraction, but Russia, like many other countries, continues to pillage its natural resources, undaunted by the threat of greater disruption still to come with climate change.

Russia is not the only country confronting the problems caused by dangerous permafrost melt. In Canada, slumps like Batagaika have transformed scenic forests into bleak mudscapes. In China, the Tibetan Plateau is collapsing. In Alaska houses in rural villages are sinking into the ground, as the shoreline falls into the sea.

Summer 2023 Was the Northern Hemisphere’s Hottest in 2,000 Years, Study Finds – Delger Erdenesanaa – The New York Times

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By Delger Erdenesanaa

“The summer of 2023 was exceptionally hot. Scientists have already established that it was the warmest Northern Hemisphere summer since around 1850, when people started systematically measuring and recording temperatures.

Now, researchers say it was the hottest in 2,000 years, according to a new study published in the journal Nature that compares 2023 with a longer temperature record across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The study goes back before the advent of thermometers and weather stations, to the year A.D. 1, using evidence from tree rings.

“That gives us the full picture of natural climate variability,” said Jan Esper, a climatologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and lead author of the paper.

Extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are responsible for most of the recent increases in Earth’s temperature, but other factors — including El Niño, an undersea volcanic eruption and a reduction in sulfur dioxide aerosol pollution from container ships — may have contributed to the extremity of the heat last year.” . . . .

Explainer: How data adjustments affect global temperature records – Carbon Brief

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This complicates matters for scientists putting together a long-term, consistent estimate of how global temperatures are changing. Scientists must adjust the raw data to take into account all the differences in how, when and where measurements were taken.

These adjustments have long been a heated point of debate. Many climate sceptics like to argue that scientists “exaggerate” warming by lowering past temperatures and raising present ones.

Christopher Booker, a climate sceptic writing in the Sunday Telegraph in 2015, called them “the greatest scientific scandal in history”. A new report from the rightwing US thinktank, the Cato Institute, even claims that adjustments account for “nearly all the warming” in the historical record.

But analysis by Carbon Brief comparing raw global temperature records to the adjusted data finds that the truth is much more mundane: adjustments have relatively little impact on global temperatures, particularly over the past 50 years.

In fact, over the full period when measurements are available, adjustments actually have the net effect of reducing the amount of long-term warming that the world has experienced.

Source: Explainer: How data adjustments affect global temperature records – Carbon Brief

January Temperatures Hit Record Highs on Land and at Sea – The New York Times

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By Raymond Zhong and Elena Shao

“The exceptional warmth that first enveloped the planet last summer is continuing strong into 2024: Last month clocked in as the hottest January ever measured, the European Union climate monitor announced on Thursday.

It was the hottest January on record for the oceans, too, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Sea surface temperatures were just slightly lower than in August 2023, the oceans’ warmest month on the books. And sea temperatures kept on climbing in the first few days of February, surpassing the daily records set last August.

The oceans absorb the great majority of the extra heat that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap near Earth’s surface, making them a reliable gauge of how much and how quickly we are warming the planet. Warmer oceans provide more fuel for hurricanes and atmospheric river storms and can disrupt marine life.

January makes eight months in a row that average air temperatures, across both the continents and the seas, have topped all prior records for the time of year. All in all, 2023 was Earth’s hottest year in over a century and a half.

The principal driver of all this warmth is no mystery to scientists: The burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities have driven the mercury steadily upward for more than a century. The current El Niño weather cycle is also allowing more ocean heat to be released into the atmosphere.

Yet precisely why Earth has been this hot, for this long, in recent months remains a matter of some debate among researchers, who are waiting for more data to come in to see whether other, less predictable and perhaps less understood factors might also be at work around the margins.

“Rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are the only way to stop global temperatures increasing,” Samantha Burgess, Copernicus’s deputy director, said in a statement.

According to Copernicus’s data, temperatures in January were well above average in eastern Canada, northwestern Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, though much of the inland United States was colder than usual. Parts of South America were warmer than normal and dry, contributing to the recent forest fires that devastated central Chile.

The intensity of recent underwater heat waves prompted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in December to add three new levels to its system of ocean heat alerts for indicating where corals might be bleaching or dying.

An El Niño pattern like the one currently observed in the Pacific is associated with warmer years for the planet, as well as a swath of effects on rainfall and temperatures in specific regions.

But as humans heat up the planet, the effects that forecasters could once confidently expect El Niño to have on local temperatures are no longer so predictable, said Michelle L’Heureux, a NOAA scientist who studies El Niño and its opposite phase, La Niña.

“For regions that previously tended to have below-average temperatures during El Niño, you almost never see that anymore,” Ms. L’Heureux said. “You see something that’s more near-average, or even still tilting above average.” ” -30-

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Climate Information on Trial: Michael Mann’s Defamation Trial Wraps Up – The New York Times

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By Delger Erdenesanaa

“One July morning in 2012, climate scientist Michael Mann woke up to a terse email from a fellow scientist.

“Holy crap,” read the message, from Phil Plait, an astronomer and science communicator. “This is truly the most awful thing I’ve ever seen said about a climate scientist. If someone wrote this about me, I’d be calling a lawyer.”

A conservative media outlet and a right-leaning research organization had published commentaries comparing Dr. Mann, then a professor at the Pennsylvania State University, with Jerry Sandusky, the onetime Penn State football coach convicted of sexually assaulting multiple children. The writers claimed that Dr. Mann had created fraudulent graphs, and accused the university of mishandling investigations into both the coach’s crimes and the scientist’s research.

Dr. Mann did indeed call a lawyer. He sued the writers and their publishers for libel and slander. Now, 12 years later — after a pinball journey through the obstacle course of free speech and defamation law — the case is being tried in District of Columbia Superior Court. Only the two writers as individuals are on trial. A verdict is expected as soon as Wednesday.” . . . . .

Scientists Use Sea Sponges to Study Global Warming Back to 1700 – The New York Times

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By Raymond Zhong

“Since the dawn of the industrial age, our species has warmed the planet by considerably more than today’s most widely accepted estimates imply, according to a team of scientists who have gleaned detailed new information about Earth’s past climate from an unusual source: centuries-old sponges living in the Caribbean Sea.

Networks of satellites and sensors have measured the rising temperatures of recent decades with great precision. But to assess the full arc of global warming, scientists typically combine this data with 19th-century thermometer readings that were often spotty and inexact.

This is where the sponges come in. By examining the chemical composition of their skeletons, which the creatures built up steadily over centuries, the researchers have pieced together a new history of those earliest decades of warming. And it points to a startling conclusion: Humans have raised global temperatures by a total of about 1.7 degrees Celsius, or 3.1 Fahrenheit, not 1.2 degrees Celsius, the most commonly used value.

“It’s a bit of a wake-up call,” said Malcolm T. McCulloch, a geochemist at the University of Western Australia and one of the scientists who worked on the new research.” . . . .

Climate: A new era in global heat – By Manuela Andreoni Senior Newsletter Writer, Climate Forward

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“It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.

Average temperatures were 1.48 degrees Celsius, or 2.66 Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels, according to an announcement this morning by Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitor. The previous record was in 2016.

Temperature records started being shattered in June. From then on, every month has been the warmest on record.

Climate scientists aren’t surprised that unabated emissions of greenhouse gases caused global warming to reach new highs, my colleagues Raymond Zhong and Keith Collins reported. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you shouldn’t be surprised, either.

But they are still trying to understand whether 2023 foretells many more years in which heat records are not merely broken, but smashed. In other words, they are asking whether the numbers are a sign that the planet’s warming is accelerating.” . . . .

Source: Climate: A new era in global heat

Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm? – The New York Times

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By Raymond Zhong

“Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years, and very likely the past 125,000.

Unyielding heat waves broiled Phoenix and Argentina. Wildfires raged across Canada. Flooding in Libya killed thousands. Wintertime ice cover in the dark seas around Antarctica was at unprecedented lows.

This year’s global temperatures did not just beat prior records. They left them in the dust. From June through November, the mercury spent month after month soaring off the charts. December’s temperatures have largely remained above normal: Much of the Northeastern United States is expecting springlike conditions this week.

That is why scientists are already sifting through evidence — from oceans, volcanic eruptions, even pollution from cargo ships — to see whether this year might reveal something new about the climate and what we are doing to it.

One hypothesis, perhaps the most troubling, is that the planet’s warming is accelerating, that the effects of climate change are barreling our way more quickly than before. “What we’re looking for, really, is a bunch of corroborating evidence that all points in the same direction,” said Chris Smith, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds. “Then we’re looking for causality. And that will be really interesting.”

What This Year’s ‘Astonishing’ Ocean Heat Means for the Planet
The world’s oceans are the hottest they have been in modern history, by an unusually wide margin.

As extreme as this year’s temperatures were, they did not catch researchers off guard. Scientists’ computational models offer a range of projected temperatures, and 2023’s heat is still broadly within this range, albeit on the high end.

On its own, one exceptional year would not be enough to suggest something was faulty with the computer models, said Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University. Global temperatures have long bobbed up and down around a steady warming trend because of cyclical factors like El Niño, the climate pattern that appeared in spring and has intensified since, possibly signaling more record heat to come in 2024.

“Your default position has to be, ‘The models are right,’” Dr. Dessler said. “I’m not willing to say that we’ve ‘broken the climate’ or there’s anything weird going on until more evidence comes in.”

One thing researchers will be watching is whether something unexpected might be happening in the interplay of two major climate influences: the warming effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and the cooling effect of other types of industrial pollution.

For much of the past 174 years, humans have been filling the skies with both greenhouse gases and aerosols, or tiny particles from smokestacks, tailpipes and other sources. These particles are harmful to the lungs when inhaled. But in the atmosphere, they reflect solar radiation, partly offsetting the heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide.

In recent decades, however, governments have begun reducing aerosol pollution for public-health reasons. This has already caused temperature increases to speed up since 2000, scientists estimate.

And in a much-discussed report last month, the climate researcher James E. Hansen argued that scientists had vastly underestimated how much more the planet would warm in the coming decades if nations cleaned up aerosols without cutting carbon emissions.

Not all scientists are persuaded.

Have Climate Questions? Get Answers Here.
What’s causing global warming? How can we fix it? This interactive F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions big and small.

Arguments like Dr. Hansen’s have been hard to square with patterns in recent decades, said Reto Knutti, a climate physicist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich. In recent years, scientists have also discovered that global warming is shaped not just by how much heat is trapped near Earth’s surface but also by how and where this heat is distributed across the planet.

This makes it even harder to conclude with confidence that warming is poised to accelerate, Dr. Knutti said. Until the current El Niño is over, “it’s unlikely we’ll be able to make definitive claims,” he said.

Pinning down the precise scale of aerosols’ effect has been difficult, too.

Part of how aerosols cool the planet is by making clouds brighter and deflecting more solar radiation. But clouds are devilishly complex, coming and going and leaving few traces for scientists to examine, said Tianle Yuan, a geophysicist with NASA and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “That’s fundamentally why it’s a hard problem,” he said.

This year, aerosols have been of particular interest because of a 2020 international regulation that restricted pollution from ships. Dr. Yuan and others are trying to identify how much the regulation might have increased global temperatures in recent years by limiting sunlight-reflecting aerosols.

Dr. Hansen’s argument for faster warming leans in part on reconstructions of climatic shifts between ice ages over the past 160,000 years.

Using Earth’s distant past to make inferences about climate in the coming years and decades can be tricky. Still, the planet’s deep history highlights how extraordinary the present era is, said Bärbel Hönisch, a scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Fifty-six million years ago, for instance, geologic turmoil added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in quantities comparable to what humans are adding today. Temperatures jumped. The oceans grew acidic. Species died en masse.

“The difference is that it took about 3,000 to 5,000 years to get there” back then, Dr. Hönisch said, compared with a few centuries today.

It then took Earth even longer to neutralize that excess carbon dioxide: about 150,000 years.

Nadja Popovich contributed reporting.

Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times. More about Raymond Zhong

How Much Can Forests Fight Climate Change? A Sensor in Space Has Answers. – The New York Times

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By Manuela Andreoni and Leanne Abraham

Andreoni reported from Rio de Janeiro and Abraham from New York

“Over the last century, governments around the world have drawn boundaries to shield thousands of the world’s most valuable ecosystems from destruction, from the forests of Borneo and the Amazon to the savannas of Africa.

These protected areas have offered lifelines to species threatened with extinction, supported the ways of life for many traditional communities and safeguarded the water supplies of cities.

But reserves are facing increasing pressure, their boundaries largely disregarded as people cut down trees and push deeper into the ecosystems set aside for protection.

Now, high in orbit, a new way of seeing forests is making it clear that, even when under assault, protected areas can still be a crucial buffer against climate change. Scientists are using laser technology to gauge the biomass of forests all around the world, which lets them calculate how much planet-warming carbon the trees are keeping out of Earth’s atmosphere.” . . . .

How Much Can Forests Fight Climate Change? A Sensor in Space Has Answers. – The New York Times

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By Manuela Andreoni and Leanne Abraham

Andreoni reported from Rio de Janeiro and Abraham from New York

“Over the last century, governments around the world have drawn boundaries to shield thousands of the world’s most valuable ecosystems from destruction, from the forests of Borneo and the Amazon to the savannas of Africa.

These protected areas have offered lifelines to species threatened with extinction, supported the ways of life for many traditional communities and safeguarded the water supplies of cities.

But reserves are facing increasing pressure, their boundaries largely disregarded as people cut down trees and push deeper into the ecosystems set aside for protection.

Now, high in orbit, a new way of seeing forests is making it clear that, even when under assault, protected areas can still be a crucial buffer against climate change. Scientists are using laser technology to gauge the biomass of forests all around the world, which lets them calculate how much planet-warming carbon the trees are keeping out of Earth’s atmosphere.

Quantifying the ability of protected ecosystems to store planet-warming carbon has long been a challenge for researchers. That’s largely because older, flat satellite imagery can’t distinguish how tall or wide trees were.

“We can use these new satellite data streams to monitor forest benefits in three dimensions and do the carbon piece of this in a way we never were able to before,” said Laura Duncanson, a remote sensing scientist at the University of Maryland and one of the authors of a study based on the new data.

In the past two decades, according to the research, protected areas around the world have helped stop deforestation and kept as much as a year’s worth of fossil fuel emissions from being released into the atmosphere.

The study, which was published this year, showed that policies designed to protect nature can also be important for mitigating global warming, Dr. Duncanson said. She called the findings “a beautiful side benefit” of global forest conservation.” . . .

Thank you Manuela Andreoni and Leanne Abraham. Here is a comment I particularly liked:

Erik Frederiksen
Asheville, NCDec. 8

Counting on trees to help us slow climate change is problematic because already we are seeing forests transitioning from carbon sinks to net emitters of carbon as the trees succumb to pests, drought and fires. Since we have significant further warming in the pipeline we can expect increasing rates of tree mortality. We need to transition our energy sector to renewables much more rapidly and begin a WWII type effort to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The climate changes that we are making will last for many thousands of years and the biodiversity loss will last for millions of years.

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