Latest news with #BerkeleyEarth
Business Insider
3 days ago
- Health
- Business Insider
Top 10 African cities where people indirectly smoke the most cigarettes
Even while these engines have long propelled economic and industrial development, they today endanger life on Earth by contaminating the air we breathe. The presence of dangerous substances in the air, both indoors and outdoors, that can have an impact on ecosystems, human health, and the climate constitutes air pollution. Although dust storms and wildfires are examples of natural sources of air pollution, human activity is mostly to blame. Fossil fuel-powered engines in automobiles, factories, building sites, power generators, and, in certain areas, even home cooking systems are the main offenders. This point was highlighted in a report by HouseFresh, an independent platform that focuses on air quality and its solutions. 'Every day, the average adult inhales approximately 11,000 liters of air. But while getting outside and breathing in fresh air has numerous health benefits, the reality is that not all air is good for you,' the report states. "Airborne pollutants are one of the greatest sources of toxic exposure known to humankind, and according to one estimate from the World Health Organization, air pollution contributes to seven million premature deaths worldwide every year,' it adds. Fine particulate matter (PM2.5), which is airborne particles smaller than 0.033 the diameter of a human hair and originating from engines and other sources, is of particular concern, the report further explains. A controlled investigation by Tobacco Control showed that cigarette smoke emits 10 times more PM2.5 matter than diesel vehicle exhaust. It is more difficult to avoid the poisons that contaminate the air both inside and outdoors, even if stopping smoking lowers exposure to toxins and enhances general health. 'Breathing air pollution of 22 μg/m3 for one day is the equivalent of smoking one cigarette, according to Berkeley Earth. But some global cities had average PM2.5 levels of up to 108.3 in 2024, the equivalent of smoking 1,797 cigarettes in a year,' the report states. With that said, here are the 10 cities in Africa where people indirectly smoke the most cigarettes. Top 10 African cities where people indirectly smoke the most cigarettes Rank City Yearly cigarettes indirectly Country 1. N'Djamena 1,523 Chad 2. Kinshasa 966 Democratic Republic of Congo 3. Abuja 700 Nigeria 4. Kampala 680 Uganda 5. Kigali 677 Rwanda 6. Basse Santa Su 672 Gambia 7. Bujumbura 669 Burundi 8. Cairo 662 Egypt 9. Centurion 614 South Africa 10. Accra 602 Ghana
20-06-2025
- Science
After the puzzling warmth of Earth in 2023 and 2024, what could 2025 have in store?
After 12 consecutive months with temperatures 1.5 C above the 1850-1900 average, Earth's temperature has now fallen — thanks in part to the end of a natural cycle. According to Berkeley Earth, a non-profit climate analysis organization, the global average temperature was 1.33 C above the pre-industrial average (new window) in the month of May, and the European Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) found that the monthly average was 1.40 C (new window) above the pre-industrial average. (Climate agencies around the world use different methods to analyze global temperatures, hence the difference). While that may seem like good news, the fact is that 2025 is still on track to be one of the top three warmest years on record, according to Zeke Hausfather from Berkeley Earth. With El Niño being firmly over, it is very unlikely at this point that 2025 is going to set a new record, but I still think it's the odds-on favourite to be the second-warmest on record, and it is virtually certain to be a top three warmest year, Hausfather said. Global surface air temperature anomalies for May. Photo: C3S, ECMWF (CBC) El Niño, a natural, cyclical warming in a region of the Pacific Ocean that, coupled with the atmosphere, can cause global temperatures to rise, began in the middle of 2023 and then peaked in 2024, which could account for some of the record warmth that puzzled climate scientists (new window) . What was particularly interesting about the month of May is that land surface temperatures dropped quite a bit compared to the months prior. However, it was still the second warmest on record, after 2024. Hausfather said the sharp drop could have been some internal variability that had kept the land surface temperatures elevated and that perhaps last month was a result of the end of that variability. An important thing to also keep in mind when it comes to what we can expect in terms of 2025 making the record books, winter is when we see the greatest temperature anomalies, Hausfather said. So that could push 2025 even higher than what we're seeing now. On the road to warming trend of 1.5 C Ocean temperatures have decreased in part due the end of El Niño, but remain near record highs. In May, the average ocean temperatures were 0.99 C above the 1850-1900 average, according to Berkeley Earth. At the moment, we are seeing, or we have just seen, a significant ocean heat wave in the North Atlantic, said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) (new window) . [Ocean temperatures are] cooler than last year and the previous one, but it's warmer than any other years we have in the record. So this is one of these things where it depends [whether] we like to see the glass half full or half empty. It's still a very warm ocean. Though Earth did hit a 12-month average of 1.5 C, that doesn't necessarily mean failure on the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global warming below a threshold of 1.5 C. That would have to happen over a longer period, though there is no set timeframe set out in the agreement. Climate is looked at over long periods, typically spanning 20 or 30 years (new window) . Carbon budget running out However, a study published on Wednesday (new window) in the journal Earth System Science Data, found that — if emissions continue at 2024 rates — we have only three years until we exhaust our carbon budget to keep warming below that 1.5 C threshold. Record-high greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly narrowing the chance of limiting warming to 1.5 C, Joeri Rogelj, professor of climate science and policy at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London and co-author of the report, said in a statement. The window to stay within 1.5°C is rapidly closing. Global warming is already affecting the lives of billions of people around the world. Though the that threshold may be breached, climate scientists like to stress that every tenth of a degree matters (new window) . Expect an above-average hurricane season, says NOAA (new window) But to keep warming below 2 C — the threshold initially set by the Paris Agreement — there needs to be a concerted effort to drastically cut CO2 emissions, as Antonio Gutteres, secretary-general of the United Nations, has continually stressed (new window) . Buontempo said that he's hopeful that the tools we have today will at least help us deal with dealing with the outcomes of rising temperatures. I'm an optimist. I've always been an optimist, and my feeling is that, you know, there are plenty of positives in this terrible situation, including the fact that we never had so much information about our planet, Buontempo said. We never had so much knowledge and tools to model the consequences of what's happening now. I mean, the decision is ours, right? Nicole Mortillaro (new window) · CBC News
Nahar Net
20-06-2025
- Science
- Nahar Net
Greenhouse gas accumulation accelerating, more extreme weather will come
by Naharnet Newsdesk 20 June 2025, 14:45 Humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas in less than three years that a key threshold for limiting global warming will be nearly unavoidable, according to a study to be released Thursday. The report predicts that society will have emitted enough carbon dioxide by early 2028 that crossing an important long-term temperature boundary will be more likely than not. The scientists calculate that by that point there will be enough of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere to create a 50-50 chance or greater that the world will be locked in to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times. That level of gas accumulation, which comes from the burning of fuels like gasoline, oil and coal, is sooner than the same group of 60 international scientists calculated in a study last year. "Things aren't just getting worse. They're getting worse faster," said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth. "We're actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there's a silver lining. I don't think there really is one in this one." That 1.5 goal, first set in the 2015 Paris agreement, has been a cornerstone of international efforts to curb worsening climate change. Scientists say crossing that limit would mean worse heat waves and droughts, bigger storms and sea-level rise that could imperil small island nations. Over the last 150 years, scientists have established a direct correlation between the release of certain levels of carbon dioxide, along with other greenhouse gases like methane, and specific increases in global temperatures. In Thursday's Indicators of Global Climate Change report, researchers calculated that society can spew only 143 billion more tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide before the 1.5 limit becomes technically inevitable. The world is producing 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) a year, so that inevitability should hit around February 2028 because the report is measured from the start of this year, the scientists wrote. The world now stands at about 1.24 degrees Celsius (2.23 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times, the report said. Earth's energy imbalance The report, which was published in the journal Earth System Science Data, shows that the rate of human-caused warming per decade has increased to nearly half a degree (0.27 degrees Celsius) per decade, Hausfather said. And the imbalance between the heat Earth absorbs from the sun and the amount it radiates out to space, a key climate change signal, is accelerating, the report said. "It's quite a depressing picture unfortunately, where if you look across the indicators, we find that records are really being broken everywhere," said lead author Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds in England. "I can't conceive of a situation where we can really avoid passing 1.5 degrees of very long-term temperature change." The increase in emissions from fossil-fuel burning is the main driver. But reduced particle pollution, which includes soot and smog, is another factor because those particles had a cooling effect that masked even more warming from appearing, scientists said. Changes in clouds also factor in. That all shows up in Earth's energy imbalance, which is now 25% higher than it was just a decade or so ago, Forster said. Earth's energy imbalance "is the most important measure of the amount of heat being trapped in the system," Hausfather said. Earth keeps absorbing more and more heat than it releases. "It is very clearly accelerating. It's worrisome," he said. Crossing the temperature limit The planet temporarily passed the key 1.5 limit last year. The world hit 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since preindustrial times for an entire year in 2024, but the Paris threshold is meant to be measured over a longer period, usually considered 20 years. Still, the globe could reach that long-term threshold in the next few years even if individual years haven't consistently hit that mark, because of how the Earth's carbon cycle works. That 1.5 is "a clear limit, a political limit for which countries have decided that beyond which the impact of climate change would be unacceptable to their societies," said study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. The mark is so important because once it is crossed, many small island nations could eventually disappear because of sea level rise, and scientific evidence shows that the impacts become particularly extreme beyond that level, especially hurting poor and vulnerable populations, he said. He added that efforts to curb emissions and the impacts of climate change must continue even if the 1.5 degree threshold is exceeded. Crossing the threshold "means increasingly more frequent and severe climate extremes of the type we are now seeing all too often in the U.S. and around the world — unprecedented heat waves, extreme hot drought, extreme rainfall events, and bigger storms," said University of Michigan environment school dean Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn't part of the study. Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist who wasn't part of the study, said the 1.5 goal was aspirational and not realistic, so people shouldn't focus on that particular threshold. "Missing it does not mean the end of the world," Dessler said in an email, though he agreed that "each tenth of a degree of warming will bring increasingly worse impacts."
CBC
20-06-2025
- Science
- CBC
After the puzzling warmth of Earth in 2023 and 2024, what could 2025 have in store?
After 12 consecutive months with temperatures 1.5 C above the 1850-1900 average, Earth's temperature has now fallen — thanks in part to the end of a natural cycle. According to Berkeley Earth, a non-profit climate analysis organization, the global average temperature was 1.33 C above the pre-industrial average in the month of May, and the European Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) found that the monthly average was 1.40 C above the pre-industrial average. (Climate agencies around the world use different methods to analyze global temperatures, hence the difference). While that may seem like good news, the fact is that 2025 is still on track to be one of the top three warmest years on record, according to Zeke Hausfather from Berkeley Earth. "With El Niño being firmly over, it is very unlikely at this point that 2025 is going to set a new record, but I still think it's the odds-on favourite to be the second-warmest on record, and it is virtually certain to be a top three warmest year," Hausfather said. El Niño, a natural, cyclical warming in a region of the Pacific Ocean that, coupled with the atmosphere, can cause global temperatures to rise, began in the middle of 2023 and then peaked in 2024, which could account for some of the record warmth that puzzled climate scientists. What was particularly interesting about the month of May is that land surface temperatures dropped quite a bit compared to the months prior. However, it was still the second warmest on record, after 2024. Hausfather said the sharp drop could have been some "internal variability" that had kept the land surface temperatures elevated and that perhaps last month was a result of the end of that variability. An important thing to also keep in mind when it comes to what we can expect in terms of 2025 making the record books, winter is when we see the greatest temperature anomalies, Hausfather said. So that could push 2025 even higher than what we're seeing now. On the road to warming trend of 1.5 C Ocean temperatures have decreased in part due the end of El Niño, but remain near record highs. In May, the average ocean temperatures were 0.99 C above the 1850-1900 average, according to Berkeley Earth. "At the moment, we are seeing, or we have just seen, a significant ocean heat wave in the North Atlantic," said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). "[Ocean temperatures are] cooler than last year and the previous one, but it's warmer than any other years we have in the record. So this is one of these things where it depends [whether] we like to see the glass half full or half empty. It's still a very warm ocean." Though Earth did hit a 12-month average of 1.5 C, that doesn't necessarily mean failure on the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global warming below a threshold of 1.5 C. That would have to happen over a longer period, though there is no set timeframe set out in the agreement. Climate is looked at over long periods, typically spanning 20 or 30 years. Carbon budget running out However, a study published on Wednesday in the journal Earth System Science Data, found that — if emissions continue at 2024 rates — we have only three years until we exhaust our carbon budget to keep warming below that 1.5 C threshold. "Record-high greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly narrowing the chance of limiting warming to 1.5 C," Joeri Rogelj, professor of climate science and policy at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London and co-author of the report, said in a statement. "The window to stay within 1.5°C is rapidly closing. Global warming is already affecting the lives of billions of people around the world." Though the that threshold may be breached, climate scientists like to stress that every tenth of a degree matters. But to keep warming below 2 C — the threshold initially set by the Paris Agreement — there needs to be a concerted effort to drastically cut CO2 emissions, as Antonio Gutteres, secretary-general of the United Nations, has continually stressed. Buontempo said that he's hopeful that the tools we have today will at least help us deal with dealing with the outcomes of rising temperatures. "I'm an optimist. I've always been an optimist, and my feeling is that, you know, there are plenty of positives in this terrible situation, including the fact that we never had so much information about our planet," Buontempo said.
NDTV
20-06-2025
- Science
- NDTV
Rise In Greenhouse Gas Release Causing More Extreme Weather, Scientists Warn
Washington: Humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas in less than three years that a key threshold for limiting global warming will be nearly unavoidable, according to a study to be released Thursday. The report predicts that society will have emitted enough carbon dioxide by early 2028 that crossing an important long-term temperature boundary will be more likely than not. The scientists calculate that by that point there will be enough of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere to create a 50-50 chance or greater that the world will be locked in to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times. That level of gas accumulation, which comes from the burning of fuels like gasoline, oil and coal, is sooner than the same group of 60 international scientists calculated in a study last year. "Things aren't just getting worse. They're getting worse faster," said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth. "We're actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there's a silver lining. I don't think there really is one in this one." That 1.5 goal, first set in the 2015 Paris agreement, has been a cornerstone of international efforts to curb worsening climate change. Scientists say crossing that limit would mean worse heat waves and droughts, bigger storms and sea-level rise that could imperil small island nations. Over the last 150 years, scientists have established a direct correlation between the release of certain levels of carbon dioxide, along with other greenhouse gases like methane, and specific increases in global temperatures. In Thursday's Indicators of Global Climate Change report, researchers calculated that society can spew only 143 billion more tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide before the 1.5 limit becomes technically inevitable. The world is producing 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) a year, so that inevitability should hit around February 2028 because the report is measured from the start of this year, the scientists wrote. The world now stands at about 1.24 degrees Celsius (2.23 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times, the report said. Earth's energy imbalance The report, which was published in the journal Earth System Science Data, shows that the rate of human-caused warming per decade has increased to nearly half a degree (0.27 degrees Celsius) per decade, Hausfather said. And the imbalance between the heat Earth absorbs from the sun and the amount it radiates out to space, a key climate change signal, is accelerating, the report said. "It's quite a depressing picture unfortunately, where if you look across the indicators, we find that records are really being broken everywhere," said lead author Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds in England. "I can't conceive of a situation where we can really avoid passing 1.5 degrees of very long-term temperature change." The increase in emissions from fossil-fuel burning is the main driver. But reduced particle pollution, which includes soot and smog, is another factor because those particles had a cooling effect that masked even more warming from appearing, scientists said. Changes in clouds also factor in. That all shows up in Earth's energy imbalance, which is now 25% higher than it was just a decade or so ago, Forster said. Earth's energy imbalance "is the most important measure of the amount of heat being trapped in the system," Hausfather said. Earth keeps absorbing more and more heat than it releases. "It is very clearly accelerating. It's worrisome," he said. Crossing the temperature limit The planet temporarily passed the key 1.5 limit last year. The world hit 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since preindustrial times for an entire year in 2024, but the Paris threshold is meant to be measured over a longer period, usually considered 20 years. Still, the globe could reach that long-term threshold in the next few years even if individual years haven't consistently hit that mark, because of how the Earth's carbon cycle works. That 1.5 is "a clear limit, a political limit for which countries have decided that beyond which the impact of climate change would be unacceptable to their societies," said study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. The mark is so important because once it is crossed, many small island nations could eventually disappear because of sea level rise, and scientific evidence shows that the impacts become particularly extreme beyond that level, especially hurting poor and vulnerable populations, he said. He added that efforts to curb emissions and the impacts of climate change must continue even if the 1.5 degree threshold is exceeded. Crossing the threshold "means increasingly more frequent and severe climate extremes of the type we are now seeing all too often in the U.S. and around the world - unprecedented heat waves, extreme hot drought, extreme rainfall events, and bigger storms," said University of Michigan environment school dean Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn't part of the study. Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist who wasn't part of the study, said the 1.5 goal was aspirational and not realistic, so people shouldn't focus on that particular threshold. "Missing it does not mean the end of the world," Dessler said in an email, though he agreed that "each tenth of a degree of warming will bring increasingly worse impacts."
