( Tomdispatch.com ) – Last September witnessed what used to be a truly rare weather phenomenon: a Mediterranean hurricane, or “medicane.” Once upon a time, the Mediterranean Sea simply didn’t get hot enough to produce hurricanes more than every few hundred (yes, few hundred!) years. In this case, however, Storm Daniel assaulted Libya with a biblical-style deluge for four straight days. It was enough to overwhelm the al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams near the city of Derna, built in the 1970s to old cool-earth specifications. The resulting flood destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, washing thousands of people out to sea, and displaced tens of thousands more.

Saliha Abu Bakr, an attorney, told a harrowing tale of how the waters kept rising in her apartment building before almost reaching the roof and quite literally washing many of its residents away. She clung to a piece of wooden furniture for three hours in the water. “I can swim,” she told a reporter afterward, “but when I tried to save my family, I couldn’t do a thing.” Human-caused climate change, provoked by the way we spew 37 billion metric tons of dangerous carbon dioxide gas into our atmosphere every year, made the Libyan disaster 50 times more likely than it once might have been. And worse yet, for the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world, that nightmare is undoubtedly only the beginning of serial disasters to come (and come and come and come) that will undoubtedly render millions of people homeless or worse.

“Libya Flood,” Digital, Dream / Abstract v. 2, 2024.

Failing Grades

In the race to keep this planet from heating up more than 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Centigrade) above the preindustrial average, the whole world is already getting abominable grades. Beyond that benchmark, scientists fear, the planet’s whole climate system could fall into chaos, severely challenging civilization itself. The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), which monitors the implementation of the Paris climate accords, presented its alarming conclusions in a late March report. The CCPI crew was so disheartened by its findings — no country is even close to meeting the goals set in that treaty – that it left the top three slots in its ranking system completely empty.

For the most part, the countries of the Middle East made a distinctly poor showing when it came to the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that are already heating the planet so radically. Admittedly, Morocco, with longstanding and ambitious green energy goals, came in ninth, and Egypt, which depends heavily on hydroelectric power and has some solar projects, ranked a modest 22nd. However, some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hit rock bottom in the CCPI’s chart. That matters since you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that the region produces perhaps 27% of the world’s petroleum annually and includes five of the 10 largest oil producers on the planet.

Ironically enough, the Middle East is at special risk from climate change. Scientists have found that it’s experiencing twice the rate of heating as the global average and, in the near future, they warn that it will suffer, as a recent study from the Carnegie Institute for International Peace put it, from “soaring heat waves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels.” And yet some of the countries facing the biggest threat from the climate crisis seem all too intent on making it far worse.

Little Sparta

The CCPI index, issued by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and the Climate Action Network (CAN), ranks countries in their efforts to meet the goals set by the Paris Agreement according to four criteria: their emissions of greenhouse gases, their implementation of renewable energy, their consumption of fossil-fuel energy, and their government’s climate policies. The authors listed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 65th place, calling it “one of the lowest-performing countries.” The report then slammed the government of President Mohammed Bin Zayed, saying: “The UAE‘s per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the highest in the world, as is its per capita wealth, while its national climate targets are inadequate. The UAE continues to develop and finance new oil and gas fields domestically and abroad.” On the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the UAE has a population of only about a million citizens (and about eight million guest workers). It is nonetheless a geopolitical energy and greenhouse gas giant of the first order.

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The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC, headquartered in that country’s capital and helmed by businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber (who is also the country’s minister of industry and advanced technology), has some of the more ambitious plans for expanding petroleum production in the world. ADNOC is, in fact, seeking to increase its oil production from four million to five million barrels a day by 2027, while further developing its crucial al-Nouf oil field, next to which the UAE is building an artificial island to help with its expected future expansion. To be fair, the UAE is behaving little differently from the United States, which ranked only a few spots better at 57. Last October, in fact, American oil production, which continues to be heavily government-subsidized (as does that industry in Europe), actually hit an all-time high.

The UAE is a major proponent of the dubious technique of carbon capture and storage, which has not yet been found to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions significantly or to do so safely and affordably. The magazine Oil Change International points out that the country’s carbon capture efforts at the Emirates Steel Plant probably sequester no more than 17% of the CO2 produced there and that the stored carbon dioxide is then injected into older, non-producing oil fields to help retrieve the last drops of petroleum they hold.

The UAE, which the Pentagon adoringly refers to as “little Sparta” for its aggressive military interventions in places like Yemen and Sudan, brazenly flouts the international scientific consensus on climate action. As ADNOC’s al-Jaber had the cheek to claim last fall: “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.”

Such outrageous denialism scales almost Trumpian heights in the faux grandeur of its mendacity. At the time, al-Jaber was also, ironically enough, the chairman of the yearly U.N. Conference of Parties (COP) climate summit. Last November 21st, he boldly posed this challenge: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” (In the world he’s helping to create, of course, even the caves would sooner or later prove too hot to handle.) This year the International Energy Agency decisively answered his epic piece of trolling by reporting that the wealthier nations, particularly the European ones, actually grew their gross national products in 2023 even as they cut CO2 emissions by a stunning 4.5%. In other words, moving away from fossil fuels can make humanity more prosperous and safer from planetary catastrophe rather than turning us into so many beggars.

“Absolutely Not!”

What could be worse than the UAE’s unabashedly pro-fossil fuel energy policy? Well, Iran, heavily wedded to oil and gas, is, at 66, ranked one place lower than that country. Ironically, however, extensive American sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports may, at long last, be turning that country’s ruling ayatollahs toward creating substantial wind and solar power projects.

But I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that dead last — with an emphasis on “dead” — comes that favorite of Donald (“drill, drill, drill“) Trump, Saudi Arabia, which, at 67, “scores very low in all four CCPI index categories: Energy Use, Climate Policy, Renewable Energy, and GHG Emissions.” Other observers have noted that, since 1990, the kingdom’s carbon dioxide emissions have increased by a compound yearly rate of roughly 4% and, in 2019, that relatively small country was the world’s 10th largest emitter of CO2.

Worse yet, though you wouldn’t know it from the way the leaders of both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are acting, the Arabian Peninsula (already both arid and torrid) is anything but immune to the potential disasters produced by climate change. The year 2023 was, in fact, the third hottest on record in Saudi Arabia. (2021 took the all-time hottest mark so far.) The weather is already unbearable there in the summer. On July 18, 2023, the temperature in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, al-Ahsa, reached an almost inconceivable 122.9° F (50.5° C). If, in the future, such temperatures were to be accompanied by a humidity of 50%, some researchers are suggesting that they could prove fatal to humans. According to Professor Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in England and his colleagues, that kind of heat can actually raise the temperature of an individual by 1.8° F. In other words, it would be as if they were running a fever and, worse yet, “people’s metabolic rates also rose by 56%, and their heart rates went up by 64%.”

While the Arabian Peninsula is relatively dry, cities on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden can at times be humid and muggy, which means that significant increases in temperature could sooner or later render them uninhabitable. Such rising heat even threatens one of Islam’s “five pillars.” This past year the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj, took place in June, when temperatures sometimes reached 118° F (48° C) in western Saudi Arabia. More than 2,000 pilgrims fell victim to heat stress, a problem guaranteed to worsen radically as the planet heats further.

Despite the threat that climate change poses to the welfare of that country’s inhabitants, the government of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is doing less than nothing to address the growing problems. As the CCPI’s authors put it, “Saudi Arabia’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are rising steadily. Its share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply (TPES) is close to zero.” Meanwhile, at the 2022 U.N. climate summit conference held in Egypt, “Saudi Arabia played a notably unconstructive role in the negotiations. Its delegation included many fossil fuel lobbyists. It also tried to water down the language used in the COP’s umbrella decision.”

At the next meeting in Dubai last fall, COP28, the final document called only for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Avoided was the far more relevant phrase “phase down” or “phase out” when it came to fossil fuels and even the far milder “transitioning away” was only included over the strenuous objections of Riyadh, whose energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, said “absolutely not” to any such language. He added, “And I assure you not a single person — I’m talking about governments — believes in that.” His assertion was, of course, nonsense. In fact, some leaders, like those of Pacific Island nations, consider an immediate abolition of fossil fuels essential to the very survival of their countries.

Abandoning the Logic of Small Steps

Although Saudi Arabia’s leaders sometimes engage in greenwashing, including making periodic announcements about future plans to develop green energy, they have done virtually nothing in that regard, despite the Kingdom’s enormous potential for solar and wind power. Ironically, the biggest Saudi green energy achievement has been abroad, thanks to the ACWA Power firm, a public-private joint venture in the Kingdom. The Moroccan government, the only one in the Middle East to make significant strides in combatting climate change, brought in ACWA as part of a consortium to build its epochal Noor concentrated solar energy complex near the ancient city of Ouarzazate at the edge of the Sahara desert. It has set a goal of getting 52% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. Though critics pointed out that it missed its goal of 42% by 2020, government boosters responded that, by the end of 2022, 37% of Morocco’s electricity already came from renewables and, just in the past year, it jumped to 40%, with a total renewables production of 4.6 gigawatts of energy.

Moreover, Morocco has a plethora of green energy projects in the pipeline, including 20 more hydroelectric installations, 19 wind farms, and 16 solar farms. The solar plants alone are expected to generate 13.5 gigawatts within a few years, tripling the country’s current total green energy output. Two huge wind farms, one retooled with a new generation of large turbines, have already come online in the first quarter of this year. The country’s expansion of green electricity production since it launched its visionary plans in 2009 has not only helped it make major strides toward decarbonization but contributed to the electrification of its countryside, where access to power is now universal. Just in the past two and a half decades, the government has provided 2.1 million households with electricity access. Morocco has few hydrocarbons of its own and local green energy helps the state avoid an enormous drain on its budget.

In contrast to the pernicious nonsense often spewed by Saudi and Emirati officials, the Moroccan king, Mohammed VI, is in no doubt about the severe challenges his poverty-ridden country faces. He told the U.N. COP28 climate conference in early December, “Just as climate change is inexorably increasing, the COPs must, from here on, emerge from the logic of ‘small steps,’ which has characterized them for too long.”

Large steps toward a Middle East (and a world) of low-carbon energy would, of course, be a big improvement. Unfortunately, on a planet they are helping to overheat in a remarkable fashion, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have largely taken steps — huge ones, in fact — toward ever more carbon dioxide emissions. Worse yet, they’re located in a part of the world where such retrograde policies are tantamount to playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.

Copyright Juan Cole 2024

Via Tomdispatch.com

Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders have twice warned of an “axis of evil” intent on harming us, whether the fantasy troika of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea cited by President George W. Bush early in 2002 or a new one — China, Russia, and North Korea — in the Indo-Pacific today. Predictably given that sort of threat inflation, this country is now closing in on a trillion dollars a year in “defense spending,” or close to two-thirds of federal discretionary spending, in the name of having a military machine capable of defeating “evil” troikas (as well as combatting global terrorism). A significant part of that huge sum is reserved for producing a new generation of nuclear weapons that will be quite capable of destroying this planet with missiles and warheads to spare.

My country, to be blunt, has long been addicted to war, killing, violence, and massive preparations for more of the same. We need an intervention. We need to confront our addiction. Yet when it comes to war and preparations for future conflicts, our leaders aren’t even close to hitting rock bottom. They remain in remarkable denial and see no reason to change their ways.

To cite two recent examples: Just before Easter weekend this year, President Biden swore he was personally devastated by Palestinian suffering in Gaza. At the same time, his administration insisted that a United Nations Security Council resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza that it allowed to pass was “non-binding” and, perhaps to make that very point, reportedly shipped 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs off to Israel, assumedly to be used in — yes! — Gaza.

The Biden administration refuses to see the slightest contradiction in such a stance. Men like Joe Biden and his chief diplomat Antony Blinken confess to being disturbed, even shocked, by the devastation our bombs deliver. Who knew Israel would use them to kill or wound more than 100,000 Palestinians? Who knew that they’d reduce significant parts of Gaza to rubble? Who knew that a blank check of support for Israel would enable that country to — it’s hard not to use the phrase — offer a final solution to the Gaza question?

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Not to be outdone by the Democrats, Republican Congressman Tim Walberg of Michigan recently cited the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in seeking a “quick” end to the conflict in Gaza (before walking his comments back somewhat). For him, Israel remains America’s greatest ally, whatever its actions, even as he argues that Palestinians in Gaza merit no humanitarian aid from the United States whatsoever.

With that horrifying spectacle — and given the TV news and social media, it truly has been a spectacle! — of genocide in Gaza, America’s leaders have embraced the very worst of Machiavelli, preferring to be feared rather than loved, while putting power first and principle last. Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, recently deceased, rightly vilified for pursuing a Bismarckian Realpolitik, and deeply involved in the devastation of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, might even have blanched at the full-throttled support for war (and weapons sales) now being pursued by this country’s leaders. Dividing the world into armed camps based on fear seems basic to our foreign policy, a reality now echoed in domestic politics as well, as the Democratic blue team and the MAGA Republican red team attack each other as “fascistic” or worse. In this all-American world of ours, all is conflict, all is war.

When asked about such an addiction to war, your average government official will likely claim it’s not our fault. “Freedom isn’t free,” so the bumper sticker says, meaning in practice that this country stands prepared to kill others without mercy to ensure its “way of life,” which also in practice means unbridled consumption by an ever-shrinking portion of Americans and unapologetic profiteering by the richest and greediest of us. Call it the “moderate” bipartisan consensus within the Washington Beltway. Only an “extremist” would dare call for restraint, tolerance, diplomacy, and peace.

A Common Cause to Unify Humanity

Short of an attack on Earth by aliens, it’s hard to imagine the U.S. today making common cause with “enemies” like China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. What gives? Isn’t there a better way and, if so, how would we get there?

In fact, there is a common foe — or perhaps a common cause — that should unite us all as humans. That cause is Earth, the health of our planet and all the life forms on it. And that foe, to state the obvious (even if it regularly goes unsaid), is war, which is unhealthy in the extreme not just for us but for our planet, too.

War turns people into killers — of our fellow humans, of course, but also of all forms of life within our (often very large) blast radii. In addition, war is a mass distraction from what should truly matter to us: the sacredness of life and the continued viability of our planet and its ecology. Call it a cliché but there’s no way to deny it: there is indeed only one Spaceship Earth. As far as we know now, our planet is the sole body in the universe teeming with life. Of course, the universe is incomprehensibly vast and there could well be other forms of life out there, but we don’t know that, not with certainty anyway.

Imagine, in a dystopic future, America’s “best and brightest” (or the “best and brightest” of another country) acting in a nuclear fury, employing the very weaponry that continues to proliferate but hasn’t been used since the destruction of two Japanese cities on August 6 and 9, 1945, and so crippling Spaceship Earth. Imagine also that our planet is truly the universe’s one magnificent and magical spot of life. Wouldn’t it be hard then to imagine a worse crime, not just against humanity, but life itself cosmically? There would be no recompense, no forgiveness, no redemption — and possibly no recovery either.

Of course, I don’t know if God (or gods) exists. Though I was raised a Catholic, I find myself essentially an agnostic today. Yet I do believe in the sacredness of life in all its diversity. And as tenacious as life may be, given our constant pursuit of war, I fear the worst.

If you’re of a certain age, you may recall when the astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed earthrise as their spaceship orbited the moon in 1968. The crew read from Genesis, though in truth it could have been from any creation story we humans have ever imagined to account for how we and our world came to be. Specific religions or creeds didn’t truly matter at that moment, nor should they now. What mattered was the sense of awe we felt as we first viewed the Earth from space in its full glory but also all its fragility.

For make no mistake, this planet is fragile. Its ecosystems can be destroyed. Not for nothing did the inventor of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, turn to the Hindu scriptures to intone, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” when he saw the first atomic device explode and expand into a mushroom cloud during the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945.

In the febrile postwar climate of anti-communism that would all too soon follow, America’s leaders would decide that atomic bombs weren’t faintly destructive enough. What they needed were thermonuclear bombs, 1,000 times more destructive, to fight World War III against the “big fat commie rat.” Now nine (9!) nations have nuclear weapons, with more undoubtedly hankering to join the club. So how long before mushroom clouds soar toward the stratosphere again? How long before we experience some version of planetary ecocide via a nuclear exchange and the nuclear winter that could follow it?

Genocide and Ecocide on a Planetary Scale

The genocide happening in Gaza today may foreshadow one possible future for this planet. The world’s lone superpower, its self-styled beacon of freedom, now dismisses U.N. Security Council resolutions to stop the killing as “non-binding.” Meanwhile, Israel, whose founding was a response to a Holocaust inflicted during World War II and whose people collectively said Never Again, is now killing, starving, and displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the name of righteous vengeance for Hamas’s October 7th attack.

If the U.S. and Israel can spin mass murder in Palestine as not just defensible, but even positive (“defeating Hamas terrorists”), what hope do we have as a species? Is this the future we have to look forward to, an endless echoing of our murderous past?

I refuse to believe it. It truly should be possible to imagine and work toward something better. Yet, in all honesty, it’s hard to imagine new paths being blazed by such fossilized thinkers as Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

“Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was a telling catchphrase of the 1960s. Now, we’re being told as Americans that we’ll have to place our trust in one of two men almost at or exceeding 80 years of age. Entrusting and empowering political dinosaurs, however, represents an almost surefire path toward future extinction-level events.

Let me turn instead to a 25-year-old who did imagine a better future, even as he protested in the most extreme way imaginable the genocide in Gaza. This February, fellow airman Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. He sacrificed his life in a most public way to challenge us to do something, anything, to stop genocide. America’s “leaders” answered him by ignoring his sacrifice and sending more bombs, thousands of them, to Israel.

Aaron Bushnell did, however, imagine a better world. As he explained last year in a private post:

“I’ve realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I’ve imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.

“What I’m trying to say is, it’s so important to imagine a better world. Let your thoughts run wild with idealistic dreams of what the world should look like and let the pain and anger at how it’s not that way flow through you. Let it free your mind and fuel your rage against the machine.

“It’s not too late for you or anyone. We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.”

His all-too-public suicide was a fiery cry of despair, but also a plea for a better future, one free of mass murder.

Earlier this week, millions of people across America witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. It’s awe-inspiring, even a bit alarming, to see the sun disappear in the middle of the day. Those watching took comfort in knowing that it would reappear from behind the moon in a matter of seconds or minutes and so gloried in that fleeting moment of preternatural darkness.

But imagine if the moon and sun were somehow to become permanently stuck in place. Imagine that darkness was our future — our only future. Sadly enough, however, it’s not the moon but we humans who can potentially cast the Earth into lasting darkness. Via the nuclear winter that could result from a nuclear conflict on this planet, we could indeed cast a shadow between the sun and life itself, a power of destruction that, tragically, may far exceed our current level of wisdom.

We know from history that it’s far easier to destroy than to create, far easier to kill than to preserve. Yet when countries make genocide or ecocide (from nuclear winter) possible and defensible (as a sign of uncompromising “toughness” and perhaps the defense of “freedom”), you know that their leaders are, in some sense, morally obtuse monsters. And who or what are we if we choose to follow such monsters?

As human populations rise, as vital resources like water, food, and fuel shrink, as this planet grows ever hotter thanks to our intervention and our excesses, we’ll need to cooperate more than ever to ensure our mutual survival. Far too often, however, America’s strategic thinkers dismiss cooperation through diplomacy or otherwise as naïve, unreliable, and impractical. “Competition” through zero-sum games, war, or other hyperviolent urges seems so much more “reasonable,” so much more “human.”

To the victor goes the spoils, so it’s said. But a planet despoiled by thermonuclear war, cast into darkness, ravaged by radiation, disease, and death, would, of course, offer no victory to anyone. Unless we put our efforts into ending war, rather than continuing to war on one another, such conflicts will, sooner or later, undoubtedly put an end to us.

In reality, our worst enemy isn’t some “axis” or other combination of imagined foes from without, it’s within. We remain the world’s most dangerous species, the one capable of wiping out most or all of the rest, not to speak of ourselves, with our folly. So, as Aaron Bushnell wrote, free your mind. Collectively, there must be a better way for all creatures, great and small, on this fragile spaceship of ours.

Copyright 2024 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

Just 57 companies and nation states were responsible for generating 80% of the world’s CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and cement over the last seven years, according to a new report released by the thinktank InfluenceMap. This finding suggests that net zero targets set by the Paris climate change agreement in 2015 are yet to make a significant impact on fossil fuel production.

The report uses the Carbon Majors database, established in 2013 by Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute, to provide fossil fuel production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers.

The InfluenceMap report tells a sobering but informative story of the state of production in these high-emitting industries. Cement and fossil fuel production has reached unprecedented levels, with most of the emission growth traceable to a relatively small number of large companies.

The troubling reality is that the lack of progress of these large fossil fuel companies means the world will need to undertake ever more stringent and steep decarbonisation trajectories if countries are to meet the Paris agreement goal of keeping warming well below 2°C.

The Carbon Majors database highlights how critical it is for companies and countries to be held accountable for their lack of progress on emission reductions. Companies need to define exactly how best to align with the Paris goals, and then monitor and track their progress.

To address this need, our team of researchers from the Universities of Queensland, Oxford and Princeton developed a framework that outlines strict science-based requirements for tracking the progress of companies against Paris-aligned pathways.

By applying this framework to the Carbon Majors database in a follow-up study, our team mapped production budgets for 142 fossil fuel companies against several Paris-aligned global scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Surreal Oil Rigs,” Digital, Dall-E, 2024.

We considered the “middle-of-the-road” future scenario whereby business carries on as usual – this is commonly used by investors to evaluate a company’s climate risks. With this scenario, we found that between 2014 and 2020, the coal, oil and gas companies produced 64%, 63% and 70% respectively more than their budgets allow. Further details can be found on the Are You Paris Compliant? website.

Transparency is crucial

Over the seven-year period covered by the InfluenceMap report, nation states and state-owned companies are responsible for most of this growth. It is not yet clear whether such government-run companies will move towards improved reporting against climate standards, but further interventions by governments will clearly be required to meet stated national emission-reduction goals.

Fortunately, more transparency will be available for investor-owned companies. In 2023, a non-profit that aims to standardise global accounting, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, released new climate-related disclosure standards. These should provide investors, politicians and the public with access to more transparent and consistent data, making it much easier for them to accurately judge companies’ climate performance – or lack thereof.

It will be interesting to read the climate reporting of the 57 companies identified by InfluenceMap in coming years. The release of the Carbon Majors data, along with the new climate-related disclosure standards, will hopefully make a huge difference. Companies being more accountable for their emissions should help reduce greenwashing in corporate sustainability reports.

Quantifying fossil fuel and cement production, and associated emissions, is a crucial step. But companies also need to act. Achieving net zero by reducing the emissions of a relatively small number of companies will be much easier than persuading 8 billion people to take collective action on climate.

Such drastic reductions in fossil fuel production must also be matched by investment in abundant and increasingly cheap sources of clean renewable energy. Without these steps, the Paris goals will be unachievable – and that’s very risky for all of us.

Matthew Carl Ives, Senior Researcher in Economics, University of Oxford; Belinda Wade, Industry Professor, School of Business, The University of Queensland, and Saphira Rekker, Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Finance, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The IEA found that emissions from the advanced economies actually fell in 2023, although global emissions increased slightly, by 1.1%. The report says, “After falling by around 4.5% in 2023, emissions in advanced economies were lower than they were fifty years ago in 1973.”

Emissions have fallen in the advanced economies before, as with the 2020 COVID pandemic, the 2008-2009 deep recession, and during economic downturns in the 1970s and 1980s.

The reason the new findings are so heartening, however, is that in 2023 emissions from the advanced economies fell even though they experienced economic growth. A 4.5% fall in emissions from countries with an expanding GDP is unprecedented in the hydrocarbon era. The advanced economies grew by 1.7%.

The fall in emissions would have been even greater, but drought in China and elsewhere caused hydroelectric production to fall last year. This finding should reinforce for us how, the longer we leave the climate crisis unsolved, the harder it becomes to solve it.

This finding is a slap in the face to figures such as past COP chairman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber of the United Arab Emirates. In a testy exchange with Mary Robinson, chair of the Elders, last fall, Al-Jaber said, “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Mr. Al-Jaber, meet the IEA. In 2023, the advanced economies grew and developed, but they cut their carbon dioxide production by over 4% nevertheless. And that is the future of the world. Petroleum will still have a value, for instance in petro-chemicals such as fertilizer, but it will increasingly not be burned for fuel to power vehicles.

Carbon dioxide emissions are produced in lots of ways, from burning gasoline in vehicles, from heating homes and businesses, and from electricity production. Some 2/3s of the reduction in CO2 last year took place in the electricity sector. This is a testament to the vast build-out in the US, Europe, and China, of wind and solar power. Renewables accounted for over a third of electricity generation in 2023.

At the same time, coal fell to only 17% of electricity production. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel and needs to be phased out entirely. Some coal was replaced instead by fossil gas, which isn’t as good, but still cuts CO2 emissions by half. Replacing coal with solar and wind would cut them to almost zero.

A piece of very good news is that coal use in the advanced economies has fallen to 1900 levels. That is still way too high– we need to get back to 1750 and drop coal entirely. But it is a remarkable accomplishment compared even to a decade ago.

The figures for Europe are even more striking. There, CO2 emissions were reduced by nearly 9% last year! These countries, however, experienced weaker growth than the average of the OECD, at 0.7%. In Europe, fully half of the decline of carbon dioxide output was owing to growth in clean energy.

One takeaway from the finding that emissions fell in advanced countries but still rose by a percentage point globally is that the wealthier nations must now increasingly invest in green energy in the developing world. The climate doesn’t care where you live. The moment we hit 2.7° F. above the preindustrial average, there is some reason to think that there will be an immediate big crop failure. Greening our global energy isn’t an abstract ideal. We have to do it to keep our children and grandchildren from starving or becoming climate refugees.

Featured Image: “Clean Air and Earth,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3, 2024.

The average surface temperature of the US this past winter was 37.6°, which is 5.4° F. above the norm. A winter that is 5 degrees warmer than normal ought to be horrifying. This is not normal. And we are only at the beginning of this heating.

One way you could tell it was hot was that Wisconsin had its first February tornado on record. Wisconsin.

Another way you could tell that it was a hot, hot winter was that Texas experienced the largest and most destructive wildfires in the past 20 years, and likely in the state’s recorded history. The Smokehouse Creek Fire merged with another huge conflagration and burned 1,075,000 acres in Texas and Oklahoma, making it the second largest fire in US history. It is still only 75% contained. In the Texas Panhandle, at least 10,000 cattle have been killed or so badly injured they’ll have to be euthanized, while many grain production companies reported “total losses,” according to CBS News. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and two people killed.

Wildfires are common in Texas in the summer, and occur as early as March in the Panhandle, but to have so much of the state aflame in February is, let us say, unusual.

KFOR OKlahoma News 4 Video from Thursday: “Texas/ Oklahoma wildfires burn more than 1.3 million acres in a week”

But it isn’t just Texas. The United States of America was lit up like a Christmas tree in February, with unusually high temperatures. Consider this temperature map for February:

H/t NOAA

Then there were a series of atmospheric rivers that inundated California, causing widespread flooding and destruction. Phys.org notes, “At one point, weather agencies posted flood watches for nearly the entirety of California’s coast.” As we heat up the earth, we cause more water to evaporate from the oceans, making the atmosphere denser with moisture. Ribbons of moisture move from the equator up to the temperate zones and dump their water. Climate change increases the rainfall released and also changes the patterns of the atmospheric rivers.

In 2023, the US had twenty-eight disasters costing a billion dollars or more. During the past 40 years, the average number of billion-dollar climate disasters per annum was only 8.5. But in the past 5 years the average has been about 20 such very costly catastrophes. The rate of catastrophe is sky-rocketing.

This finding is yet another indication that global heating is proceeding at least as fast as climate scientists projected at the beginning of our century, and in many cases much faster. Climate risks becoming chaotic if we heat up the earth’s surface more than 2.7° F. (1.5° C.) above the preindustrial average. We’ve already heated it up to around 2.1° F. higher than that 18th century average, by spewing billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, into the atmosphere. We’re wrecking the earth by burning coal for heat and electricity, or fossil gas, or by burning petroleum in automobiles and trucks. We still aren’t reducing the amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere annually, though its increase has leveled off. We have to cut it out. Now.

As much of the Great Lakes region experiences its warmest winter on record, and more record high temperatures are expected in Michigan, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has reported record low levels of ice coverage on the Great Lakes, amid a steady, decades-long decrease in coverage.

While ice coverage on the Great Lakes usually peaks in the late February to early March, NOAA began reporting daily record-lows for Great Lakes ice coverage on Feb. 8, through Feb. 15. While there was a brief spike above historic lows after Feb. 15, those numbers quickly neared and tied low ice-coverage records, with historical lows recorded on Feb. 27 and 28, Jennifer Day, director of communications for NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory said in an email.

Ice coverage on the individual lakes has followed similar patterns, with Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron recording historic low coverage for the date on Feb. 28, while ice concentration for Lake Erie sat at 0% and concentration on Lake Ontario sat at less than half a percent.

NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory Ice Coverage Chart for Feb. 29, 2024. | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Ice concentration on Lake Superior sat at 1.74% on Wednesday, while NOAA recorded 3.6% concentration in Lake Michigan and 7.84% concentration in Lake Huron.

The total peak for ice concentration across the five lakes was recorded on Jan. 22, with 16% coverage. However, Lake Superior has since recorded a new maximum for the year on Feb.19, exceeding its January peak.

Ayumi Fujisaki-Manome, an associate researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research told the Michigan Advance the lack of ice is the result of anomaly conditions overlaid on long term warming trends. Alongside El Niño conditions contributing to a warmer and wetter winter than normal, the North Atlantic Oscillation — which describes atmospheric pressure patterns — is in a positive phase, which prevents cold arctic air from coming down into the Great Lakes region.

Day noted that the strong El Niño coupled with a warm December and above average air and water temperatures throughout winter did not create the conditions needed for ice to develop.

Low ice was also recorded in 2020 and 2023, Day said, with the annual maximum coverage near 20%, compared to the long-term average of 53%.

However, NOAA has also recorded very high ice years in the previous decade, in 2014, 2015 and 2019.

“Even though there’s a decreasing trend in max ice (5%/decade), there is a great deal of year to year variability,” Day said.

Although there has been a long-term decline in Great Lakes Ice Coverage, predicting those fluctuations from year to year remains a big question for researchers, Fujisaki-Manome said.

While a lack of ice may bring disappointment for those looking to ice fish in the Great Lakes, or visit ice caves near the coast, the lack of ice coverage also carries concerns for shoreline conditions, lake effect weather, and for various animal species in and around the Great Lakes.

Ice coverage serves as a barrier, protecting coastlines from high winds, high waves and storm surges. Without that barrier there will be long-term impacts, such as shoreline erosion, Fujisaki-Manome said.

A lack of ice to protect from waves makes shorelines more susceptible to coastal flooding and creates a higher potential for storm damage to shoreline infrastructure, Day said.

Additionally, less ice and more open water is the perfect set up for a lake effect snowstorm or an ice storm, Fujisaki-Manome said.

During late fall and winter cold air flowing over the warm waters of the Great Lakes leads to the production of lake effect snow leading to increased snowfall in areas downwind from the lakes. This effect usually diminishes late into the winter season, as the formation of lake ice reduces the supply of warm and moist air in the atmosphere.

Thick, stable ice also protects fish eggs that are deposited nearshore in the fall and incubate over winter, Day said. Ice cover can help minimize the effect of waves that would dislodge or break apart eggs from species like lake whitefish or lake herring, she said.

Ice cover also affects winter fishery harvests, especially in bays, drowned river mouth lakes and nearshore areas, Day said. During cold winters when ice is thick and lasts three to four months, harvests for panfish, whitefish, bass, walleye and yellow perch are high, with low harvests when coverage is low and unstable.

It is unlikely that total ice coverage across the Great Lakes will exceed its January peak, Day said.

Significant ice growth is not expected over the coming weeks, and longer term temperature trend predictions indicate that ice levels across the Great Lakes will likely remain below average for the next several weeks, Day said.

Kyle Davidson

A heat wave in Greenland and a storm in Antarctica. These kinds of individual weather “events” are increasingly being supercharged by a warming climate. But despite being short-term events they can also have a much longer-term effect on the world’s largest ice sheets, and may even lead to tipping points being crossed in the polar regions.

We have just published research looking at these sudden changes in the ice sheets and how they may impact what we know about sea level rise. One reason this is so important is that the global sea level is predicted to rise by anywhere between 28 cm and 100cm by the year 2100, according to the IPCC. This is a huge range – 70 cm extra sea-level rise would affect many millions more people.

Partly this uncertainty is because we simply don’t know whether we’ll curb our emissions or continue with business as usual. But while possible social and economic changes are at least factored in to the above numbers, the IPCC acknowledges its estimate does not take into account deeply uncertain ice-sheet processes.

Sudden accelerations

The sea is rising for two main reasons. First, the water itself is very slightly expanding as it warms, with this process responsible for about a third of the total expected sea-level rise.

Second, the world’s largest ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are melting or sliding into the sea. As the ice sheets and glaciers respond relatively slowly, the sea will also continue to rise for centuries.

Photo by Cassie Matias on Unsplash

Scientists have long known that there is a potential for sudden accelerations in the rate at which ice is lost from Greenland and Antarctica which could cause considerably more sea-level rise: perhaps a metre or more in a century. Once started, this would be impossible to stop.

Although there is a lot of uncertainty over how likely this is, there is some evidence that it happened about 130,000 years ago, the last time global temperatures were anything close to the present day. We cannot discount the risk.

To improve predictions of rises in sea level we therefore need a clearer understanding of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. In particular, we need to review if there are weather or climate changes that we can already identify that might lead to abrupt increases in the speed of mass loss.

Weather can have long-term effects

Our new study, involving an international team of 29 ice-sheet experts and published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, reviews evidence gained from observational data, geological records, and computer model simulations.

We found several examples from the past few decades where weather “events” – a single storm, a heatwave – have led to important long-term changes.

The ice sheets are built from millennia of snowfall that gradually compresses and starts to flow towards the ocean. The ice sheets, like any glacier, respond to changes in the atmosphere and the ocean when the ice is in contact with sea water.

These changes could take place over a matter of hours or days or they may be long-term changes from months to years or thousands of years. And processes may interact with each other on different timescales, so that a glacier may gradually thin and weaken but remain stable until an abrupt short-term event pushes it over the edge and it rapidly collapses.

Because of these different timescales, we need to coordinate collecting and using more diverse types of data and knowledge.

Historically, we thought of ice sheets as slow-moving and delayed in their response to climate change. In contrast, our research found that these huge glacial ice masses respond in far quicker and more unexpected ways as the climate warms, similarly to the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and heatwaves responding to changes with the climate.

Ground and satellite observations show that sudden heatwaves and large storms can have long-lasting effects on ice sheets. For example a heatwave in July 2023 meant at one point 67% of the Greenland ice sheet surface was melting, compared with around 20% for average July conditions. In 2022 unusually warm rain fell on the Conger ice shelf in Antarctica, causing it to disappear almost overnight.

These weather-driven events have long “tails”. Ice sheets don’t follow a simple uniform response to climate warming when they melt or slide into the sea. Instead their changes are punctuated by short-term extremes.

For example, brief periods of melting in Greenland can melt far more ice and snow than is replaced the following winter. Or the catastrophic break-up of ice shelves along the Antarctic coast can rapidly unplug much larger amounts of ice from further inland.

Failing to adequately account for this short-term variability might mean we underestimate how much ice will be lost in future.

What happens next

Scientists must prioritise research on ice-sheet variability. This means better ice-sheet and ocean monitoring systems that can capture the effects of short but extreme weather events.

This will come from new satellites as well as field data. We’ll also need better computer models of how ice sheets will respond to climate change. Fortunately there are already some promising global collaborative initiatives.

We don’t know exactly how much the global sea level is going to rise some decades in advance, but understanding more about the ice sheets will help to refine our predictions.

Edward Hanna, Professor of Climate Science and Meteorology, University of Lincoln and Ruth Mottram, Climate Scientist, National Centre for Climate Research, Danish Meteorological Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Action continues to fall far short of pledges, even as temperature and greenhouse gas records are repeatedly broken

Catherine Early

( China Dialogue ) – Countries must make far greater efforts to implement their climate strategies this decade to stand a chance of keeping global temperature rise within 1.5C (2.7F) of the pre-industrial average.

Continued delays will only increase the world’s reliance on uncertain carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDR), according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

In the most recent annual assessment of progress on global climate action, the Emissions Gap Report 2023, UNEP pointed to progress since the Paris Agreement. When it was adopted in 2015, greenhouse gas emissions were projected to rise 16% by 2030. Today, that increase is projected to be 3%.

But from now emissions must fall 28% by 2030 to keep temperature rise to 3.6F (2C), or 42% to stay within 2.7F (1.5C), and countries are failing to match this need with action, UNEP found.

Photo by Andreas Felske on Unsplash

Current climate policies will result in a rise of 3C this century. The increase will be limited to 5.2F (2.9C) if countries fully implement their national climate plans (known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs).

This could be kept to 4.5F (2.5C) if plans by developing countries, which are currently conditional on obtaining financial support, are carried out – since that would result in a 9% fall in emissions.  

In UNEP’s most optimistic scenario, where all conditional NDCs and net zero pledges are met, limiting temperature rise to 3.6F (2C) could be achieved, UNEP says. This scenario is considered to give at best a 14% chance of limiting warming to 2.7F (1.5C).

Now, 97 countries have pledged to meet net zero emissions, up from 88 last year. Pledges cover 81% of the world’s greenhouse gases (GHGs). However, the authors do not consider these pledges to be credible, pointing out that none of the G20 countries are reducing emissions at a pace consistent with their net-zero targets.

National net zero plans have several flaws, according to Anne Olhoff, chief scientific editor of the report. Many are not legally binding, or fail to have clear implementation plans, and there is a lack of targets between now and the dates when governments claim to be aiming for net zero, she says.

“But most importantly, emissions are still going up in countries that have put forward zero emission pledges. There are many ways to net zero, but at some point you need to peak and reduce. And the longer you wait until you peak, the more difficult it’s likely to be to actually get to net zero,” she says.

Under the Paris Agreement, ambition in the NDCs is designed to be ramped up over time. At COP28, which begins in Dubai at the end of November, countries will debate how to build new ambition under the first Global Stocktake. This will inform the next round of NDCs that countries should submit in 2025, which will have targets for 2035.

Countries should focus on implementing existing policies this decade, rather than pledging higher targets for 2030, says Olhoff.

“Whether or not the ambition of the 2030 targets is raised or not is less important than achieving those targets. If countries find that they can also strengthen ambition for 2030, that’s an added benefit,” she says.

The more action taken this decade, the more ambitious countries can be in their new targets for 2035, and the easier it will be to achieve those targets, she points out.

The report states that high-income and high-emitting countries among the G20 should take the most ambitious and rapid action, and provide financial and technical support to developing nations.

However, it adds that low- and middle-income countries already account for more than two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. Development needs in these countries need to be met with economic growth that produces low emissions, such as by reducing energy demand and prioritising clean energy, it says.

“This is an extremely large and diverse group of countries, and the opportunities for low-emissions growth depend a lot on national circumstances,” Ohloff says. Proposed reforms to international finance through multilateral development banks should improve access to finance and the ability of developing countries to attract investment. Borrowing often costs a lot more in these countries than in developed ones, she says. 

But some countries who suffer from corruption need to “get their own house in order” and improve governance to avoid this, she adds.

The role of carbon removal

The report points out that the world will also need to use carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which the authors see as having a role on three timescales.

It can already contribute to lowering net emissions, today.

In the medium term, it can contribute to tackling residual emissions from so-called hard-to-abate sectors, such as aviation and heavy industry.

And in the longer term, CDR could potentially be deployed at a large enough scale to bring about a decline in the global mean temperature. They stress that its use should be in addition to rapid decarbonisation of industry, transport, heat and power systems.

CDR refers to the direct removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and its durable storage in geological, terrestrial or ocean reservoirs, or in products. It is different to carbon capture and storage (CSS), which captures CO2 from emissions at their sources, such as a power station, and transfers it into permanent storage. While some CCS methods share features with CDR, they can never result in CO2 removal from the atmosphere.

Some CDR is already being deployed, mainly through reforestation, afforestation and forest management. However, this is very small scale, with removals estimated at 2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) annually. Research and development into more novel technologies is increasing, with methods including sequestering carbon in soil; enhanced weathering, which speeds up the natural weathering of rocks to store CO2; and direct air capture and storage (DACC), where CO2 is extracted from the atmosphere.

There are multiple risks associated with scaling up CDR. These include competition with land for food, protection of tenure and rights, as well as public perception. In addition, the technical, economic and political requirements for large-scale deployment may not materialise in time, UNEP says. Some methods are very expensive, particularly DACC, which UNEP estimates at US$800 per tonne of CO2 removed.

Governments have tended not to specify the extent to which they plan to use CDR to achieve their emission-reduction targets, nor the residual emissions they plan to allow annually when achieving net-zero CO2 and greenhouse gas emission targets, UNEP found. Estimates of the implied levels of land-based removals in long-term strategies and net-zero pledges are 2.1-2.9 GtCO2 of removals per year by 2050, though this is based on an incomplete sample of 53 countries, the report notes.

Politicians need to coordinate the development of CDR, the report states. Dr Oliver Geden, lead author of the chapter on CDR, explains that governments need to clarify their role in national and global climate policy, and develop standards for measuring, reporting and verifying emissions reductions that can eventually be included in national GHG inventories under the UN climate change process.

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist. You can find her on X @Cat_Early76.

Via China Dialogue

Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY NC ND) licence

National weather analysts released their 2023 billion-dollar disasters list on Jan. 9, just as 2024 was getting off to a ferocious start. A blizzard was sweeping across across the Plains and Midwest, and the South and East faced flood risks from extreme downpours.

The U.S. set an unwelcome record for weather and climate disasters in 2023, with 28 disasters that exceeded more than US$1 billion in damage each.

While it wasn’t the most expensive year overall – the costliest years included multiple hurricane strikes – it had the highest number of billion-dollar storms, floods, droughts and fires of any year since counting began in 1980, with six more than any other year, accounting for inflation.

The year’s most expensive disaster started with an unprecedented heat wave that sat over Texas for weeks over the summer and then spread into the South and Midwest, helping fuel a destructive drought. The extreme heat and lack of rain dried up fields, forced ranchers to sell off livestock and restricted commerce on the Mississippi River, causing about US$14.5 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s conservative estimates.

Extreme dryness in Hawaii contributed to another multi-billion-dollar disaster as it fueled devastating wildfires that destroyed Lahaina, Hawaii, in August.

Other billion-dollar disasters included Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida in August; floods in the Northeast and California; and nearly two dozen other severe storms across the country. States in a swath from Texas to Ohio were hit by multiple billion-dollar storms.

NBC News: “New details of the devastating Lahaina wildfire that killed over 100 people”

El Niño played a role in some of these disasters, but at the root of the world’s increasingly frequent extreme heat and weather is global warming. The year 2023 was the hottest on record globally and the fifth warmest in the U.S.

I am an atmospheric scientist who studies the changing climate. Here’s a quick look at what global warming has to do with wildfires, storms and other weather and climate disasters.

Dangerous heat waves and devastating wildfires

When greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from vehicles and power plants, accumulate in the atmosphere, they act like a thermal blanket that warms the planet.

These gases let in high-energy solar radiation while absorbing outgoing low-energy radiation in the form of heat from the Earth. The energy imbalance at the Earth’s surface gradually increases the surface temperature of the land and oceans.

The most direct consequence of this warming is more days with abnormally high temperatures, as large parts of the country saw in 2023.

Phoenix went 30 days with daily high temperatures at 110 F (43.3 C) or higher and recorded its highest minimum nighttime temperature, with temperatures on July 19 never falling below 97 F (36.1 C).

Although heat waves result from weather fluctuations, global warming has raised the baseline, making heat waves more frequent, more intense and longer-lasting.

That heat also fuels wildfires.

Increased evaporation removes more moisture from the ground, drying out soil, grasses and other organic material, which creates favorable conditions for wildfires. All it takes is a lightning strike or spark from a power line to start a blaze.

How global warming fuels extreme storms

As more heat is stored as energy in the atmosphere and oceans, it doesn’t just increase the temperature – it can also increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.

When that water vapor condenses to liquid and falls as rain, it releases a large amount of energy. This is called latent heat, and it is the main fuel for all storm systems. When temperatures are higher and the atmosphere has more moisture, that additional energy can fuel stronger, longer-lasting storms.

Tropical storms are similarly fueled by latent heat coming from warm ocean water. That is why they only form when the sea surface temperature reaches a critical level of around 80 F (27 C).

With 90% of the excess heat from global warming being absorbed by the ocean, there has been a significant increase in the global sea surface temperature, including record-breaking levels in 2023.

Higher sea surface temperatures can lead to stronger hurricanes, longer hurricane seasons and the faster intensification of tropical storms.

Cold snaps have global warming connections, too

It might seem counterintuitive, but global warming can also contribute to cold snaps in the U.S. That’s because it alters the general circulation of Earth’s atmosphere.

The Earth’s atmosphere is constantly moving in large-scale circulation patterns in the forms of near-surface wind belts, such as the trade winds, and upper-level jet streams. These patterns are caused by the temperature difference between the polar and equatorial regions.

As the Earth warms, the polar regions are heating up more than twice as fast as the equator. This can shift weather patterns, leading to extreme events in unexpected places. Anyone who has experienced a “polar vortex event” knows how it feels when the jet stream dips southward, bringing frigid Arctic air and winter storms, despite the generally warmer winters.

In sum, a warmer world is a more violent world, with the additional heat fueling increasingly more extreme weather events.

This article, originally published Dec. 19, 2023, was updated Jan. 9, 2024, with NOAA’s disasters list.

Shuang-Ye Wu, Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.