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Sinar Daily
2 days ago
- Science
- Sinar Daily
Warning signs on climate flashing bright red
PARIS - From carbon pollution to sea-level rise to global heating, the pace and level of key climate change indicators are all in unchartered territory, more than 60 top scientists warned recently. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation hit a new high in 2024 and averaged, over the last decade, a record 53.6 billion tonnes per year -- that's 100,000 tonnes per minute -- of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases, they reported in a peer-reviewed update. A man fills bottles with water in New York City on June 24, 2025. A potentially life-threatening heat wave enveloped the eastern third of the United States on June 23 impacting nearly 160 million people, with temperatures this week expected to reach 102 degrees Fahrenheit (39 degrees Celsius) in the New York metropolitan area. Dangerously high temperatures are forecast through midweek in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Boston. (Photo by Leonardo Munoz / AFP) Earth's surface temperature last year breached 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time, and the additional CO2 humanity can emit with a two-thirds chance of staying under that threshold long-term -- our 1.5C "carbon budget" -- will be exhausted in a couple of years, they calculated. Investment in clean energy outpaced investment in oil, gas and coal last year two-to-one, but fossil fuels account for more than 80 percent of global energy consumption, and growth in renewables still lags behind new demand. Included in the 2015 Paris climate treaty as an aspirational goal, the 1.5C limit has since been validated by science as necessary for avoiding a catastrophically climate-addled world. The hard cap on warming to which nearly 200 nations agreed was "well below" two degrees, commonly interpreted to mean 1.7C to 1.8C. "We are already in crunch time for these higher levels of warming," co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, told journalists in a briefing. "The next three or four decades is pretty much the timeline over which we expect a peak in warming to happen." 'The wrong direction' No less alarming than record heat and carbon emissions is the gathering pace at which these and other climate indicators are shifting, according to the study, published in Earth System Science Data. Human-induced warming increased over the last decade at a rate "unprecedented in the instrumental record", and well above the 2010-2019 average registered in the UN's most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, in 2021. The new findings -- led by the same scientists using essentially the same methods -- are intended as an authoritative albeit unofficial update of the benchmark IPCC reports underpinning global climate diplomacy. They should be taken as a reality check by policymakers, the authors suggested. "I tend to be an optimistic person," said lead author Piers Forster, head of the University of Leed's Priestley Centre for Climate Futures. "But if you look at this year's update, things are all moving in the wrong direction." The rate at which sea levels have shot up in recent years is also alarming, the scientists said. After creeping up, on average, well under two millimetres per year from 1901 to 2018, global oceans have risen 4.3 mm annually since 2019. What happens next? An increase in the ocean watermark of 23 centimetres -- the width of a letter-sized sheet of paper -- over the last 125 years has been enough to imperil many small island states and hugely amplify the destructive power of storm surges worldwide. An additional 20 centimetres of sea level rise by 2050 would cause one trillion dollars in flood damage annually in the world's 136 largest coastal cities, earlier research has shown. Another indicator underlying all the changes in the climate system is Earth's so-called energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere and the smaller amount leaving it. So far, 91 percent of human-caused warming has been absorbed by oceans, sparing life on land an unlivable hell-scape. But the planet's energy imbalance has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and scientists do not know how long oceans will continue to massively soak up this excess heat. Dire future climate impacts worse than what the world has already experienced are already baked in over the next decade or two. But beyond that, the future is in our hands, the scientists made clear. "We will rapidly reach a level of global warming of 1.5C, but what happens next depends on the choices which will be made," said co-author and former IPCC co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte. The Paris Agreement's 1.5C target allows for the possibility of ratcheting down global temperatures below that threshold before century's end. Ahead of a critical year-end climate summit in Brazil, international cooperation has been weakened by the US withdrawal the Paris Agreement. President Donald Trump's dismantling of domestic climate policies means the US is likely to fall short on its emissions reduction targets, and could sap the resolve of other countries to deepen their own pledges, experts say. - AFP
Canada News.Net
5 days ago
- Politics
- Canada News.Net
EXCLUSIVE: 'World Will Be Watching' Carney's Fast-Tracked Megaprojects as Carbon Budget Shrinks
With a wave of new "nationally significant" projects on the way after the Carney government's Building Canada Act (Bill C-5) becomes law, the world will be watching how Canada meets its climate responsibilities, said the UK's former chief scientific advisor Sir David King. "Every country in the world is now wondering how to handle the new president in the United States. Every country feels under threat," King told The Energy Mix in an exclusive interview Friday. But "climate change is the biggest challenge humanity has ever had to face up to, and because it's a global problem, every country needs to handle the problem," he said. "It's not something we can just put aside for a period. This is an issue that is right up front, something we cannot abandon, and I do think Mark Carney is somebody who understand that." So "we over in the rest of the world are going to be watching how Canada handles that problem," added King, who said he knew Carney well during the prime minister's term as governor of the Bank of England. King was commenting after more than 60 of the world's top climate scientists warned that humanity is on track to exceed the available carbon budget to limit average global warming to 1.5C, in a paper published in the journal Earth System Science Data. By the beginning of this year, that budget "had shrunk to 130 billion tonnes," the British Broadcasting Corporation reports, "largely due to continued record emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming greenhouse gases like methane, but also improvements in the scientific estimates." If countries keep up their current pace of about 40 billion tonnes of emissions per year, "130 billion tonnes gives the world roughly three years until that carbon budget is exhausted," BBC adds. The remaining carbon budget for a 1.6 or 1.7 threshold could be exceeded within nine years, says. "Things are all moving in the wrong direction," warned lead author Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. "We're seeing some unprecedented changes and we're also seeing the heating of the Earth and sea-level rise accelerating as well." Those shifts "have been predicted for some time," he added, "and we can directly place them back to the very high level of emissions." "Under any course of action, there is a very high chance we will reach and even exceed 1.5C and even higher," added study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London. "We are currently already in crunch time for higher levels of warming." The news prompted an urgent call to action from King, now chair of the 18-member Climate Crisis Advisory Group. The findings "make one thing clear-there is effectively no carbon budget remaining for either CO2 or methane emissions if humanity is to achieve a safe and manageable future," he said in an email release. "Policy-makers must adopt a comprehensive strategy focused on deep and rapid emissions reduction and removal, whilst also developing resilience against increasing extreme weather events." With this year's UN climate summit, COP30, just a few months away in Belem, Brazil, "governments, financiers, and businesses must put this in focus," King added. "We do not have time to delay any further." Carney must approach the dual challenges of climate change and Trump's aggression "with clarity, to demonstrate that Canada means business," King told The Mix. "There is a real culture in Canada that is distinct from the culture of the United States," he said. So "protect your culture. Do what you can. But don't do it at any cost." Climate change has been accelerating over the last five years, along with the loss and damage from an uptick in extreme weather events, and "the result of the election in the United States producing Trump as the president means the onus is now on all other countries to make much better commitments." The United Kingdom has already reduced its emissions by 54% from 1990 levels, and has set a target of 81% by 2035. King said the Canadian prime minister "understands very clearly that in the UK, we have reduced our carbon dioxide footprint from 12 tonnes per person in 1995 to something like six tonnes, whereas you guys in Canada are well over 20 tonnes per person." So "Canada has an enormous amount of work to do to demonstrate that it understands why we're all suffering from these extreme weather events, and why the future of humanity is now severely at stake." The European Union has set its sights on a 90% emissions reduction by 2040. And King rejected concerns that that target will be undercut by reliance on questionable carbon credits, or by member states that don't deliver on their promises-largely because renewable energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in any part of the world. "That's the big driver for change," he said. But "we're seeing a terrible future unless we get action now from all progressive countries," and while "I have always admired Canada as a major progressive country, I can't say that on climate change," with its reliance on oil sands production that he cited as "probably the worst way of getting oil out of the ground." But judging by Carney's record with the Bank of England, where he took "a very strong line" against banks investing in fossil fuel projects destined to become stranded assets, "he understands the risks of climate change. He doesn't need a lecture on this issue. So you are very fortunate to have Mark Carney in any economy that is now based on oil, gas, or coal, there has to be a shift away from that, and Carney is frankly the right person to lead it." King said he saw no need to connect trade and climate policy. But Carney has been musing about replacing carbon pricing with a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) with other "like-minded" countries, and the Liberal Party platform in the recent federal election said a Carney government would "promote fair competition with our trading partners" through a CBAM.
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
The Simple Truth About These Miserable Heat Waves
In the coming days, some 200 million people across the United States will sweat through temperatures in the high 90s and triple digits, made worse by 'oppressive' humidity. It's the country's first major heat wave of the year, which may—like last year—turn out to be among the warmest years ever recorded. Last month was the second-hottest May ever recorded; 10 of the hottest years ever recorded on earth have occurred over the last decade. A study published on Thursday in Earth System Science Data finds that the amount of planet-heating carbon dioxide already emitted into the atmosphere by human activity will very likely, by 2028, have made the world 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was in preindustrial times. This increase might sound mild on its face, but respected scientists are in agreement about what this means: more brutal, dangerous heat waves like the one spreading across the U.S. right now. Maybe the most sobering aspect of rising temperatures is how predictable they are. Xuebin Zhang—a co-author of the study, professor at the University of Victoria, and head of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium—says that in his decades of research, very little has surprised him about how the planet has reacted to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. 'The world's climate is behaving exactly as we said it would all along, for many years. It is warming due to human influence. It gets faster if we don't act on it,' he told me. 'It's more than beyond a reasonable doubt. It is a fact.' So what differentiates a couple of hot days from a heat wave caused by climate change? Typically, heat waves are produced by something known as atmospheric blocks, when high pressure settles over a region for days or weeks at a time, causing air to descend and heat up. Since cloud cover is typically low during these periods, more solar radiation can heat up the surfaces below. While there are varying definitions of how long and hot a period of high temperatures has to be to qualify as a heat wave, the answer depends on where you are. Temperatures that are above average for June in New York, for instance, may not be abnormal in Tucson or Karachi. In order to determine whether such an event can be attributed to climate change, researchers run complex models based on historical observations: one showing the world as it is and the other 'an alternative world where there isn't any human influence on the climate,' said Nicholas Leach, a physicist at at Oxford University who researches weather and climate impacts on health. From there, scientists can determine how likely a specific extreme weather event would be in a world without climate change, i.e., with lower concentrations of human-caused greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Other studies, Leach says, more specifically replicate the exact atmospheric patterns and conditions that produced a particular heat wave in those two worlds, observing how the intensity and severity of the resulting heat wave would change in a world where human activity isn't causing temperatures to rise. It's generally easier to determine whether climate change has contributed to heat waves as compared to hurricanes, which can vary based on any number of factors in oceans and the atmosphere. 'We're warming up the atmosphere, and there's a very strong link between doing that and the hottest possible situations getting hotter,' Leach says. 'The link between climate change and thermodynamics has been understood for 100 years.' Researchers are still working on understanding what precisely climate change is doing to the atmospheric blocks that produce heat waves, particularly in the case of extraordinary events when temperatures soar far outside the range of historical observation—like the Pacific Northwest heat wave of 2021, which caused hundreds of excess deaths across the U.S. and Canada. One study found that heat waves that extreme would 'occur roughly every five to 10 years' in the same region if global temperature averages were to exceed two degrees Celsius above preindustrial times. As Nathan Gillett—another co-author of the climate indicators study and a researcher at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis—told me, the world is already experiencing heat waves that 'would have been much less likely or almost impossible without human-induced climate change.' Those heat waves will worsen as humans burn more fossil fuels and continue to raze forests, which is rapidly depleting the planet's ability to absorb carbon dioxide. The more of it that goes into the atmosphere, the hotter it gets. 'There's very high confidence,' Gillett said, 'that, with ongoing greenhouse gas emissions, the world will continue to warm and heat waves will continue to be hotter. That's going to happen everywhere.'
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Humanity could be just 3 years away from crossing a dire climate threshold, report warns
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Record greenhouse gas emissions could exhaust Earth's "carbon budget" in as little as three years, dooming the planet to breach the symbolic threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming. Global warming of 2 C (3.6 F) is considered an important threshold — warming beyond this greatly increases the likelihood of devastating and irreversible climate breakdown that include extreme heatwaves, droughts and the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries pledged to limit global temperature rises to ideally 1.5 C and safely below 2 C. Yet, according to a new assessment by more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists, this target is quickly moving out of reach — only 143 billion tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide remains before we have likely exceeded the Paris Agreement target, and humanity is already releasing over 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) each year. The researchers published their findings June 19 in the journal Earth System Science Data. "The window to stay within 1.5 C is rapidly closing," study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, said in a statement. "Global warming is already affecting the lives of billions of people around the world. Every small increase in warming matters, leading to more frequent, more intense weather extremes." Warnings that the Earth is careening beyond the 1.5 C limit, and the dire consequences that would follow from such a breach, are not new. In 2020, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated Earth's remaining climate budget to be around 550 billion tons (500 billion metric tons). Related: Earth's energy imbalance is rising much faster than scientists expected — and now researchers worry they might lose the means to figure out why Yet with emissions reaching record highs in the years since, and the next IPCC report not due until 2029, the scientists behind the new annual study wanted to fill the gap. The paper made its assessment by looking at 10 indicators of climate change, including net greenhouse gas emissions, Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, sea-level rises, global temperature extremes, and the remaining budget. The scientists' analysis makes for alarming reading, with warming occurring at a rate of about 0.49 F (0.27 C) each decade and the world standing at about 2.2 F (1.24 C) above preindustrial averages. This is causing extra heat to accumulate at more than double the rate seen in the 1970s and 1980s, and Earth is trapping heat 25% faster in this decade than it did in the last. Around 90% of this excess heat is being trapped in the oceans, disrupting marine ecosystems, melting ice and causing sea levels to rise at double the rate they were in the 1990s. RELATED STORIES —Climate wars are approaching — and they will redefine global conflict —Kids born today are going to grow up in a hellscape, grim climate study finds —Global carbon emissions reach new record high in 2024, with no end in sight, scientists say "Since 1900, the global mean sea level has risen by around 228 mm. This seemingly small number is having an outsized impact on low-lying coastal areas, making storm surges more damaging and causing more coastal erosion, posing a threat to humans and coastal ecosystems," co-author Aimée Slangen, a climatologist at the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, said in the statement. "The concerning part is that we know that sea-level rise in response to climate change is relatively slow, which means that we have already locked in further increases in the coming years and decades." The consequences of this warming are likely to hit humanity hard, with one recent study suggesting that yields of key crops such as maize and wheat in the U.S., China and Russia could drop by up to 40% before the end of the century. Another study has suggested an unprecedented global increase in drought severity is already underway, with 30% of Earth's land area experiencing moderate to extreme drought in 2022. Nonetheless, the report also stressed that global greenhouse gas emissions will likely peak this decade before decreasing. But for this to happen, we must continue to rapidly adopt wind, solar and other clean energy sources, while drastically reducing carbon emissions, the authors noted. "Emissions over the next decade will determine how soon and how fast 1.5°C of warming is reached," Rogelj said. "They need to be swiftly reduced to meet the climate goals of the Paris Agreement."
IOL News
20-06-2025
- Science
- IOL News
Warning signs on climate flashing bright red: top scientists
The planet's energy imbalance has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and scientists do not know how long oceans will continue to massively soak up this excess heat. Image: Alan Kearney / Connect Images via AFP From carbon pollution to sea-level rise to global heating, the pace and level of key climate change indicators are all in uncharted territory, more than 60 top scientists warned Thursday. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation hit a new high in 2024 and averaged, over the last decade, a record 53.6 billion tonnes per year -- that is 100,000 tonnes per minute -- of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases, they reported in a peer-reviewed update. Earth's surface temperature last year breached 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels for the first time, and the additional CO2 humanity can emit with a two-thirds chance of staying under that threshold long-term -- our 1.5C "carbon budget" -- will be exhausted in two years, they calculated. Investment in clean energy outpaced investment in oil, gas and coal last year two-to-one, but fossil fuels account for more than 80 percent of global energy consumption, and growth in renewables still lags behind new demand. Included in the 2015 Paris climate treaty as an aspirational goal, the 1.5C limit has since been validated by science as necessary for avoiding a catastrophically climate-addled world. The hard cap on warming to which nearly 200 nations agreed was "well below" two degrees, commonly interpreted to mean 1.7C to 1.8C. With the 1.5C level now expected to be breached in the coming years, "we are already in crunch time for these higher levels of warming," co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, told journalists in a briefing. "The next three or four decades is pretty much the timeline over which we expect a peak in warming to happen." 'The wrong direction' No less alarming than record heat and carbon emissions is the gathering pace at which these and other climate indicators are shifting, according to the study, published in Earth System Science Data. Human-induced warming increased over the last decade at a rate "unprecedented in the instrumental record", and well above the 2010-2019 average registered in the UN's most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, in 2021. The new findings -- led by the same scientists using essentially the same methods -- are intended as an authoritative albeit unofficial update of the benchmark IPCC reports underpinning global climate diplomacy. They should be taken as a reality check by policymakers, the authors suggested. "If you look at this year's update, things are all moving in the wrong direction," said lead author Piers Forster, head of the University of Leed's Priestley Centre for Climate Futures. The rate at which sea levels have shot up in recent years is also alarming, the scientists said. After creeping up, on average, well under two millimetres per year from 1901 to 2018, global oceans have risen 4.3 mm annually since 2019. What happens next? An increase in the ocean watermark of 23 centimetres (nine inches) over the last 125 years has been enough to imperil many small island states and hugely amplify the destructive power of storm surges worldwide. An additional 20 centimetres of sea level rise by 2050 would cause $1 trillion in flood damage annually in the world's 136 largest coastal cities, earlier research has shown. Another indicator underlying all the changes in the climate system is Earth's so-called energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere and the smaller amount leaving it. So far, 91 percent of human-caused warming has been absorbed by oceans, sparing life on land. But the planet's energy imbalance has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and scientists do not know how long oceans will continue to massively soak up this excess heat. Dire future climate impacts worse than what the world has already experienced are already baked in over the next decade or two. But beyond that, the future is in our hands, the scientists made clear. "We will rapidly reach a level of global warming of 1.5C, but what happens next depends on the choices which will be made," said co-author and former IPCC co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte. The Paris Agreement's 1.5C target allows for the possibility of ratcheting down global temperatures below that threshold before century's end. Ahead of a critical year-end climate summit in Brazil, international cooperation has been weakened by the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. "Governments, financiers, and businesses must put this (report) in focus in the run-up to COP30 in Brazil," said David King, former UK Chief Scientific Advisor and Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. "If today's data tells us anything, it's that we do not have time to delay any further."
