“Breaking News! Code UFB!!!!
“Global sea surface temperatures yesterday spiked up to 21.06°C, bringing a new record anomaly of 0.77°C above the 1991-2020 mean. In other news… wait.
“No. There is no other news.”
https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1745858049875870184
“This El Niño isn’t quite as Super strong as the those of 1997-1998 and 2015-2016 were.
“But the global Sea Surface Temperatures don’t seem to be aware of that.”
https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1745907386685026540
““Astounding” ocean temperatures in 2023 supercharged “freak” weather around the world as the climate crisis continued to intensify, new data has revealed.
“The oceans absorb 90% of the heat trapped by the carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, making it the clearest indicator of global heating.”
“More heat is accumulating much faster in the Earth system. It seems like everyone agrees now(?).
“We should expect this to lead to faster surface warming too. Earth’s Energy Imbalance increased by about 0.4 W/m² per decade since 2005.”
https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1745814437297021403
“Scientists “Astonished” at 2023 Temperature Record.
“The year 2023 was the warmest on record, according to analyses of global temperatures from NASA and NOAA. Scientists aren’t sure why temperatures were so anomalous. “We’re frankly astonished,” said Gavin Schmidt [NASA]… Berkeley Earth’s report concluded that 2023 was the first year to breach the 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming limit…”
https://eos.org/articles/scientists-astonished-at-2023-temperature-record
“Chasing the light: Study finds new clues about warming in the Arctic.
“Sandia’s data analysis revealed a 20% to 35% decrease [from 2014 to 2019] in total reflectivity over the Arctic summer. According to microwave sea-ice extent measurements collected during the same period, one-third of this loss of reflectivity is attributed to fully melted ice.”
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-clues-arctic.html
“In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages…
“Across northern Sweden, companies have staked claims here for pioneering new carbon-free ways to mine iron and make steel. They also want to dig up a rich treasure trove of rare earth elements and precious metals to help power our mobile phones and electric cars.”
https://www.codastory.com/waronscience/sweden-climate-change-colonialism/
“Norway to allow mining waste to be dumped in fjords…
“After a 15-year dispute, the private company Nordic Mining has been given the go-ahead to dispose of 170m tonnes of mining waste at the bottom of the Førde fjord, which critics say will threaten marine life and put biodiversity at risk.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/12/norway-to-allow-mining-waste-to-be-dumped-in-fjords
“More than 1,000m underground is Britain’s deepest mine. But it’s not coal they’re mining in North Yorkshire. It’s a mineral [polyhalite] that could help fight climate change…
“On this week’s ClimateCast, Tom Heap …discovers how miners are extracting polyhalite, a fertiliser that emits 85% less emissions than its counterparts, and learns why a multi-billion pound project is under way to extract more.”
https://news.sky.com/story/mineral-mining-going-deep-underground-to-protect-whats-above-13047026
“Scotland’s terrestrial breeding bird numbers show effects of climate change.
“A new report from NatureScot has shown that the effects of hotter and wetter weather are creating significant changes to the numbers and species of birds thriving in urban, woodland, upland and farmland habitats.”
https://www.nature.scot/scotlands-terrestrial-breeding-bird-numbers-show-effects-climate-change
“Tesco to sell smaller vegetables after farmers hit by extreme flooding…
“It’s part of a move to keep British vegetables on shelves rather than imports and to reduce the risk of food shortages. Heavy rainfall and flooding have affected growers since October, with areas in Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Cornwall, and Scotland heavily affected.”
“Fuengirola [Spain] to reduce water pressure from Monday, leaving many homes and businesses without water overnight.
“The municipality is the first on the western strip of the Costa del Sol to take such a drastic measure to tackle the drought crisis, although it has announced that it will not apply on Saturday nights so as not to harm the hospitality sector.”
“Extraordinary warm spell in the Atlantic: MOROCCO: Exceptional day above summer average at Sidi Ifni… MIN 22.5 MAX 31.3 [88F] record for January.
“CANARY ISLANDS: 31 La Aldea de San Nicolas; 30 Gran Canaria AP record… MADEIRA 25.5, 0.1C from January territorial record.”
https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1745884726353953088
“Historic Floods in Congo Republic Prompt WHO Warning of Disease…
“Nine of Congo’s 12 regions have faced flooding, with the northern area and the banks of the Congo experiencing the worst damage. More than 336,000 people are in need of “urgent humanitarian assistance” after floods affected at least 64,000 homes, the WHO said Friday.”
“HISTORIC WARM SPELL: It’s the beginning of an event which will rewrite world climatic history with thousands records during 2 weeks in all East Asia.
“Insane NIGHT temperatures of +10C [50F] in SIBERIA; MONGOLIA: +9.3C Tugrug; +4.1C Tonkhil 2200m; TAJIKISTAN: crazy +20C at 1500m at Khovaling.”
https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1745425554537627975
“China broke the record for mid-January in a large area today.
“A total of 109 stations broke or tied the record for mid-January, and 12 stations broke or tied the record for January! Tomorrow, the scope of China’s record-breaking record will be further expanded!”
https://twitter.com/yangyubin1998/status/1745770865441259795
“Endless record heat all over Oceania and Asia.
“Min. 28.9C [84F] Funafuti, TUVALU. Highest January TMIN again in MICRONESIA: 28.4C at Chuuk. Highest TMIN on record at Warburton AUSTRALIA with 32.6C. TMIN +3.8C Kalpa, INDIA Himalaya Highest in January. Record Tmax 36.2C Waingapu INDONESIA.”
https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1746019239671308399
“Residents in Western Australia urged to flee as wildfire rages…
“More than 40 bushfires were burning on Saturday in Australia’s largest state, with residents in the shire of Chittering, about 60 kilometres (37 miles) north of Perth, at risk from the uncontained blaze, according to fire authorities.”
“Driest year on record for parts of WA’s Gascoyne region, as pastoralists face dire drought conditions…
“At Challa Station, 600 kilometres north-east of Perth, Ashley and Debbie Dowden have been forced to start bottle feeding calves for the first time… pastoralists to the north-west in Murchison have reportedly been forced to shoot cattle to take pressure off their feed supplies.”
“Australia’s Dreaded Summer of Wildfires Soaked by Wet Weather…
“Vast areas of the country’s populous eastern states have been lashed by severe storms and flooding for several months, even after the onset of El Niño. The weather pattern typically brings hotter and drier conditions… “Climate change is distorting weather toward greater extremes, especially in rainfall and drought,” said David King…”
“Yesterday the Argentina station of Ingeniero Juarez (net Sinarame, government owned) had a MINIMUM temperature of 32.1C [89.8F].
“This is just 0.1C from the highest Min. ever recorded in January in all South America (Pampa del Infierno in 2022).”
https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1745467481064620317
“A severe storm swept Argentina’s wine country on January 11, dropping large hail and heavy rain across the province of Mendoza…
“Footage posted by X user @jonatangarcia shows large hailstones splashing by a window in south Mendoza. “After a wave of hail of around 4 cms accompanied by abundant rain, another wave of hail and more water follows. This is horrible for the producers in the area” he said.”
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/sudden-hailstorm-hits-argentinas-wine-155020148.html
“SOUTH AMERICA HEAT WAVE.
“Records are falling all over the Continent from North to South every day: yesterday record again in FRENCH GUIANA where St Laurent du Maroni tied its highest temperature on record in January with 34.0C [93.2F]. In BRAZIL >40C in western suburbs of Rio de Janeiro.”
https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1745627640923603068
“This is the horrific moment a mountain collapses in Colombia after heavy rain, killing at least 18 people and injuring many others.
“The landslide occurred around 4pm local time yesterday as vehicles waited on the road for it to reopen after it was blocked by falling rocks.”
“Eight people from the Caribbean island of Bonaire are suing the Netherlands, accusing it of violating their human rights by not doing enough to protect them from the climate crisis.
“The group, with Greenpeace Netherlands, filed a formal legal challenge against the Dutch government in The Hague on Thursday…”
“Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using ‘land bridge’ for Oceania cargo.
“The latest water level issues for the canal come as it is expected to receive additional vessel traffic as ocean carriers avoid the Red Sea due to the ongoing Houthi attack risk. Forty percent of all U.S. container traffic travels through the Panama Canal every year, which in all, moves roughly $270 billion in cargo annually.”
“Extreme heat wave in Central America: Records are falling in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and all Caribbean.
“In MEXICO >34C/94F even at Oaxaca at 1500m+ asl! 40C at low elevations. In FLORIDA 88F Fort Lauderdale January record tied.”
https://twitter.com/extremetemps/status/1745904005115777175
“More than a 100 wild animals including frogs, shrews and snakes were killed in a wildfire in Texas last summer, after becoming trapped behind the concrete border wall.
“Internal US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) memos obtained by an environmental group reveal that government scientists found scores of burned animals…”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/11/texas-border-wall-wildfire-trapped-wild-animals-dead
“A fossil fuel plant is leaving Louisiana families with ‘barely enough water for your toothbrush’…
“Public records obtained by the Guardian reveal that in some months between May and October of 2023, the liquefied natural gas (LNG) producer Venture Global used up to a quarter of all water in Mazarac’s beleaguered district.”
“Arctic blast: Record-breaking cold weather forecast for many states…
“The average low temperature in Texas was forecast at 15F (-9C), prompting some concern among state energy suppliers… At the heel of the storms will be a bone-chilling cold arctic front that is already being felt in western Canada, where temperatures with the wind chill in near Whistler, British Columbia dipped around -58F (-50C) on Thursday.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67947335
“A polar vortex that has plunged Alberta into a deep freeze with record-breaking cold is tightening its grip on the province…
“WestJet said Friday the extreme cold weather and intermittent precipitation are affecting its operations, leading to the cancellations of 87 flights… Temperatures have dropped “below the threshold at which de-icing fluid is effective,” and other equipment is “inoperable,” the airline said.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-extreme-cold-winter-1.7082216
“As the permafrost melts, the houses in Nunapitchuk [Alaska] are breaking down…
“Not far from the Johnson River, Natalia “Edna” Chase’s two-room plywood home is one of the houses in especially urgent need. For the last decade, the ground beneath her house has been giving way. Gaps form between the plywood floor, letting in frigid wind and blowing snow.”
“Drought Touches a Quarter of Humanity, U.N. Says, Disrupting Lives Globally.
“The crisis, worsened partly by climate change, has been accompanied by soaring food prices and could have consequences for hunger, elections and migration worldwide… The many droughts around the world come at a time of record-high global temperatures and rising food-price inflation.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/climate/global-drought-food-hunger.html
“As a psychologist I have witnessed a surge in climate grief. This is what I tell my clients…
“I work closely with adolescents and young adults, and I have witnessed yet again this summer an alarming surge in feelings of anger and despair over the climate. The source of their distress is …an existential threat that looms larger every passing day. The concept of intergenerational theft and betrayal is a prevailing sentiment among the young people I support.”
“New estimate doubles likely deaths from fungal disease globally.
“The annual total of deaths from fungal disease worldwide has risen to 3.75 million, double the previous estimate, according to a new study… Previous estimates were imprecise, argues Professor Denning, as many fungal disease exacerbate an existing disorder, itself often severe, such as leukaemia or AIDS.”
“‘Disease X’ could cause the next pandemic, according to the WHO—or Ebola, SARS, or Nipah. 9 pathogens researchers are keeping a watchful eye on…
“The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum—to be held in Davos, Switzerland, next week—is on more radars than usual this year, thanks to the name of one of the sessions: “Preparing for Disease X.””
https://fortune.com/well/2024/01/12/what-is-disease-x-world-economic-forum-pandemic-planning/
You can read the previous “Climate” thread here. I’ll be back on Monday with an “Economic” thread.
If you found value in this content, please help me continue this work by becoming a patron of my work via Patreon. And if you are already a subscriber or have donated – thank you! It is an enormous help as the cost-of-living crisis ratchets up here in the UK.
I got a great laugh upon clicking on the story about the permafrost melt in Alaska. Right next to the headline and the picture of the house falling apart, appears an ad for Conoco Phillips with the catchline, “Investing in Alaska”! Wow. just wow. This stuff is commonplace and we collectively either don’t notice it, or just shrug it off. It’ a true tragicomedy!
The current governor of Alaska is a political conservative (read: corporate crony) and is doing everything he can to double down on fossil fuels.
Wait, it gets worse. The residents of Alaska get a dividend every year from the revenues the state receives from fossil fuels, mostly oil. It can be thousands of dollars in any given year, and the check conveniently arrives right around the holidays.
Everyone who lives in Alaska, including myself starting this year, literally gets paid to help destroy the future.
Hello Pan,
It’s still funny how ‘science’ twists itself into all sorts of corners….. it seems to be getting warm on Earth!!……. So work to do!!!
…..The 2023 anomaly should be a “wake-up call” for climate scientists that there is still much to learn about how the global climate works, Schmidt said.
“It remains to be seen whether 2023 is just an unusual outlier or an indication of unexpected changes in the future,” Robert Rohde, climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and author of the report, said in a statement.
“Our normal explanation for what is going on is not working this year, and I think much more work needs to be done to really understand what happened in 2023,” Schmidt said at a press conference…..
Much more work needs to be done!!! it’s to laugh your ass off….
Ah yes how do we tell our children, you had a nice discussion about that yesterday. it all doesn’t matter is my idea….. the prevailing view and it probably goes back a very long time….. God or science will ‘invent’ something and beyond that ….” que sera applies…. the future is n’t ours to see” and that is really true,
All you can do is teach yourself as many skills as possible…..and especially those you enjoy…and do it together with your children…. for example, i don’t have a green thumb at all, but i am oh so handy with restoration and working with wood and metal and some of that stuff….
“intergenerational theft and betrayal” Ouch! That hits close to home.
I once had a vivid dream that more or less paralleled the chapters of my life, except in a very brief and, of course, dream-like way. Things like living in a big shiny city that was SO brilliantly lit it couldn’t possibly be real.
Everything fit except the last chapter. I was sitting in a small dimly lit cabin with a younger couple. They looked to be “hippies” for want of a better word. We only had meager possessions, living out of our backpacks it would seem. I was shrugging my shoulders and trying to explain that, yes, we knew for decades just how badly we were fucking-up their future, but for some reason we did it anyway.
They were glaring at me with naked resentment.
Powerful. You don’t forget a dream like that.
That article on Swedish mining is excellent! It’s long, so I will finish reading it tonight but check out these morsels:
“It’s a way of working which always puts the reindeer herding society in a situation where you are almost forced to say yes, and if you don’t, you are an enemy to society,” said Nils Johan Labba, a Sami politician who I met in Anna Sarri’s village.
“It is a good question. LKAB, along with its partners — a steelmaking and hydropower company — is currently testing out a new way of making steel, which leaves behind the traditional blast furnace but requires a phenomenal amount of electricity. How much exactly? “We would need approximately 70 terawatt hours of electricity a year,” said LKAB’s Lindberg. He explained this would amount to roughly half the electricity that all of Sweden’s population of 10 million consumes in a year.
How could that much electricity be generated here in a planet-friendly way? Imagine 3,000 new wind turbines. That’s what must be built, according to Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson, Sweden’s former minister for business who now advises SSAB, the steelmaking company partnering with LKAB on their new fossil-free steel venture. Thorwaldsson is all for it, because the consequences of not doing it, he said, are too grave to think about. “It must, must work,” Thorwaldsson said. “There are no jobs on a dead planet.”” [LOLOL]
“Henrik Blind, councilor of the nearby town of Jokkmokk, said he feels the green transition has been “hijacked by the industry” that has continued to take away and exploit Indigenous land, but this time with a climate-saving label slapped on top. When I met Tor Lennart Tuorda, a Sami photographer who works as an archivist at the Sami museum, he put it more bluntly.
“It’s only shit talk, this green transition,” he said. “It’s only a way to extract even more. You can call it green colonialism instead. That’s more true.” [Truthteller!]
It also described how much of the mining equipment there is run via remote – a woman using an Xbox controller! Wow. Wild. FOUR MILES down. Humans are insane.
“It’s only shit talk, this green transition,” he said. “It’s only a way to extract even more. You can call it green colonialism instead. That’s more true.”
Truth-teller indeed! How sad there are not more people to listen. Even sadder they didn’t listen decades ago when we might have actually still been able to go another direction.
Thanks for posting!
Yes nice article, there is a run on lithium and ‘rare’ metals all over Europe.
France they call the ‘sleeping’giant in that respect. The question is whether this green imperialist industry will actually take off.
In countries like the Netherlands, for example, it is becoming increasingly clear that the whole ‘electrification’ and associated infrastructure is really not going to get off the ground…. The same goes for green hydrogen that France is betting on. Funding is a bit stuck in pilot projects without too much meaning, with indeed a lot of mostly very subsidy money…. but that will come to an end.
By the way, it won’t matter much at all… let’s see what summer will bring in the northern hemisphere….
“…let’s see what summer will bring in the northern hemisphere…” My goodness, that is going to keep me busy.
It used to be that my lead stories most often related to an extreme weather event somewhere on the planet. I realised recently that that has changed and now, more often than not, it is our collective trajectory catching the eye, with global data points like air/sea surface temps or Earth Energy Imbalance taking precedence.
Who knows? Perhaps localised events will start being so extreme over the next year that it changes back again.
Nothing is going to get anyone’s attention until there is no food on store shelves & no water coming out of municipal faucets. It is happening around the world just not too extreme in the 1st world nations,yet. Everyone gets a NTHE trophy.
I always wait to take action until it’s too late while the consequences FMTT.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nobody-nowhere-safe-experts-cant-183005813.html
Go ahead parents & tell me how much you love your children.
The link didn’t say anything about microplastics & forever chemicals. So your children are immune to those. The hypocrisy takes my breath.
“… researchers found that children who live near fracking sites in Pennsylvania have higher rates of leukemia than children who don’t live near fracking sites, as an ICN article summarizes. Kids who live within one mile of natural gas production sites are also seven times more likely to develop lymphoma, as another ICN article notes.”
“The vast body of scientific studies now published on hydraulic fracturing in the peer-reviewed scientific literature confirms that the public health and climate risks from fracking are real and the range of environmental harms wide,” the compendium says. “The only method of mitigating its grave threats to public health and the climate is a complete and comprehensive ban on fracking. Indeed, a fracking phase-out is a requirement of any meaningful plan to prevent catastrophic climate change.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/researchers-disturbing-connection-between-serious-100000514.html
Each of the 8 billion virus cells only cares about itself. In layman’s terms:
Fuck the habitat & everything that lives in it.
U.S.A.! U.S.A! U.S.A.! Showing the world how it’s done.
Lake Tahoe would make a great garbage dump.
“The first study of large pieces of plastic waste in Lake Tahoe produced disconcerting results.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/scientists-worrying-discovery-while-investigating-013000579.html