Latest news with #HumanNature
Straits Times
6 days ago
- Science
- Straits Times
The world is warming up - and it's happening faster
A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. PHOTO: EPA-EFE NEW YORK - Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking 'heat dome'. Alaska saw its first-ever heat advisory this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the hottest calendar year in recorded history. The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, and has been growing since. This doesn't surprise scientists who have been crunching the numbers. For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of warming in the atmosphere would speed up. But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people's daily lives. 'Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, like extreme downpours and severe droughts and wildfires,' said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. While this aligns with scientific predictions of how climate change can intensify such events, the increase in severity may feel sudden to people who experience them. 'Back when we had lesser levels of warming, that relationship was a little bit less dramatic,' Dr Swain said. 'There is growing evidence that the most extreme extremes probably will increase faster and to a greater extent than we used to think was the case,' he added. Take rainfall, for example. Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7 per cent with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate, Dr Swain said. 'There is no weather that's happening outside of climate,' said Dr Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and author of the book 'Human Nature'. 'This is stuff that's manifesting in the real world,' she said, citing catastrophes such as Hurricane Helene that hit Florida in 2024. According to Dr Swain, scientists have yet to come to a universal understanding of these events, in part because the infrequent nature of outliers makes them difficult to study. And as warming has intensified, so have the impacts on vulnerable regions of the planet such as the Arctic and Antarctic, making previously rare or hidden consequences more apparent. Scientists are fine-tuning their models to understand the behaviour of the vast ice sheets in such places to match the rapid changes they're observing. In March 2025, a NASA analysis found that sea levels had risen faster than expected in 2024, in part because of a combination of melting glaciers and heat penetrating deeper into oceans, causing them to expand thermodynamically. Sea surface temperatures are rising faster than previously predicted, too, according to a study published in April by researchers at the National Center for Earth Observation in Britain. Cecilia Bitz, a professor of climate science at the University of Washington, said that modeling the Earth is complex, and that there are an innumerable amount of small factors that could be taken into account. But even with these uncertainties, scientists have ways of building their models to identify trends that are largely accurate. 'Nothing is defying our big picture about the physics of the climate system,' Prof Bitz said. Overall atmospheric warming has consistently followed modeling predictions for decades. But recently, the fundamental imbalance responsible for this heat has been tilting – catching even scientists off guard. Global warming is a symptom of Earth's energy imbalance, which is a measure of the difference between the total amount of heat reaching Earth from the sun, and the amount radiating back into space. In May 2025, a paper analysing data from a NASA satellite found that this imbalance had grown faster than expected, more than doubling in the past two decades and becoming nearly twice as large as it was previously predicted to be. Dr Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said climate scientists were still working to understand these findings. There are various theories, such as fewer emissions of aerosols, a type of air pollution that is harmful to human health and that increases the reflectivity of clouds, which bounce the sun's heat back into space. Historically, aerosol emissions have masked the warming effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Over the past half-century or so, as nations reduced certain kinds of air pollution, aerosol emissions fell significantly. According to Dr Hausfather, this change is the primary reason atmospheric warming has accelerated in recent decades. But the most worrying possibility behind Earth's energy imbalance, he said, is how the general nature of clouds may be changing in response to climbing temperatures. It's a feedback loop that could potentially exacerbate warming and is 'one of the single biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate,' he said. As the world continues to emit planet-warming greenhouse gasses, and temperatures climb past what the human world was built to handle, Dr Marvel said, more people will experience climate change in damaging and frightening ways. 'It's always worse than expected when it happens to you,' Dr Marvel said. 'It is one thing to see something in a climate model, and it's a totally different thing to actually experience it in your own life.' NYTIMES Find out more about climate change and how it could affect you on the ST microsite here.
USA Today
6 days ago
- Science
- USA Today
Record heat, a climate reckoning: How will humans respond?
On a special episode (first released on June 25, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: As the earth continues to warm, how will mankind respond? Is it in our nature to act? Author and climate scientist Kate Marvel joins USA TODAY's The Excerpt to discuss her new book 'Human Nature,' which explores how emotions may be key to our survival. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to podcasts@ Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here Dana Taylor: Hello, I'm Dana Taylor, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. Climate change, global warming, we've all heard this steady drumbeat of doom. But a recent five-year forecast by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office puts it starkly. The world will likely soon break another annual temperature record, and according to The Associated Press, the heat will be deadly. What would happen if we embrace the idea that the future still rests firmly in our hands? Is it in our nature to learn, adapt, and change? And equally important, is there still time? Author and climate scientist Kate Marvel dives into those questions in her new book, Human Nature, on bookshelves now. Thanks for joining me, Kate. Kate Marvel: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Dana Taylor: In your work, you manipulate climate models to gauge the impacts of climate change. In the simplest terms, can you briefly walk us through the creation of one of these models and how you've used them to glean data? Kate Marvel: So a climate model is basically a toy planet on a computer that we can do experiments on that would be impossible or unethical to do in the real world. We can't gauge human influence on the climate by asking everybody to go live on another planet for a couple of hundred years, but we can do that in the safe digital confines of a climate model. Now, what a climate model is is basically the encapsulation of everything we know about the physics and chemistry of how the world works, written down in equations and then translated to code. Dana Taylor: The most startling moments I experienced while reading your book are when you were expressing your anger regarding gaslighting by climate change deniers. Was there a specific tipping point for you here? And how did you grapple with how you would express anger in your writing? Kate Marvel: Yeah. I mean, I struggled a lot with expressing anger. I actually struggled a lot with expressing any emotions. Because scientists, we're supposed to be neutral, we're supposed to be objective, we're supposed to have no feelings whatsoever. And I was worried that if I expressed anger or if I expressed fear or grief or even hope, I would be taken less seriously as a scientist or maybe my science would be seen as a little bit less credible. But then I realized that we don't make ourselves more credible when we lie about not having feelings. I am a scientist, but I'm also a human being and I'm a human being who lives on this planet. And that means I feel things when I study the planet that I live on and that everybody I love lives on. So yeah, rage. I do feel incredible anger when I think about the history of climate science. None of this stuff is new. We've known about the greenhouse effect for more than 100 years and the history of climate science, scientists finding things out, is intertwined with the history of people pushing back on this and lying about it. So you can't really look at the history of climate science without looking at the counterbalancing history of climate denial. And I'm really mad about that. Dana Taylor: In your book you wrote that, "Weather is what we humans experience over our short lives and that climate is a matter for the Gods." What did you mean by that? And are you worried that some readers will walk away thinking there really isn't much that humans can do at this point? Kate Marvel: I wrote that because I wanted to include it in the context of, I talk about climate models in the context of Greek mythology, especially the myth of Cassandra, who famously was cursed to be able to see the future, but nobody would believe her. And so oftentimes climate scientists are called Cassandra's because we're making these projections about dire futures, but it seems like nobody's listening to us. So that was the context of things that I was playing with a little bit where I really wanted to bring that in. I think my colleague Dr. Marshall Shepherd at the University of Georgia puts it excellently that weather is your mood and climate is your personality. So climate is essentially the background conditions under which all weather can occur. It's not supposed to change this fast, but human beings, because we have changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere, are indeed changing the climate. But when I look at it, I think, wow, wouldn't it be scarier if we didn't understand what was causing climate change? Wouldn't it be scarier if this were some meteor heading toward us that we didn't know how to stop? But the fact that we understand exactly what is causing climate change, it's humans doing things that emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, that means we know exactly how to stop it. So I think it's really important for scientists to stress that there are things that we can do. We are not doomed to inevitable, catastrophic climate change. We can still avoid the worst impacts. Dana Taylor: I want to stick with that in talking about the weather. You also said that all weather is formed in a changing climate. Can you help us understand the weather through the eyes of a climate scientist? Kate Marvel: There is no weather now that's not happening against the backdrop, like you pointed out, of this changed climate. So I cannot tell you what the weather is going to be like in New York City where I live 10 years from now on June 1st. But what I can tell you is that it's likely to be warm. I can tell you some of the basic contours of what it's likely to be because I know that New York City is on the East Coast of a large landmass. I know what the prevailing winds look like. I know the factors that shape the climate of New York City. Dana Taylor: Clearly humans, Homo sapiens, have adapted to life on this planet for roughly 300,000 years. Is it correct to say that based on your climate models, mankind will not be able to adapt quickly enough? Kate Marvel: I don't know because people are very, very, very difficult to put in a climate model. I am a physicist, I know exactly what water droplets and air molecules are going to do because those things obey the laws of physics. You push them, they always move in exactly the same way. Human beings are much more difficult to predict. So what human beings are going to do in response to the changing climate, are we going to take sensible science-based decisions and mitigate the change climate and adapt to the changes that have already occurred? That's a possibility. But are we going to panic and blame each other and have scapegoats? That's also a possibility. So I have learned as a physicist to actually be very, very humble about what I don't know. And the thing that I really don't know is what human beings are going to do. Dana Taylor: Well, the warning in your book that climate change is unlikely to dole out one disaster at a time is something that really struck me. I want you to help us understand what you call the misery index. Have humans survived worse than what we're experiencing now or worse than what your models predict we will experience in the near future? Kate Marvel: So one of the scariest things about climate change is that obviously it increases the risk of heat waves. But at the same time, it changes the humidity of the atmosphere. And I think we've all experienced it, that dry heat is very different from humid heat. A lot of people say, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." And there is actually a threshold, what we call the wet bulb temperature, which is basically a measure of the combined heat and humidity. There's a point where that exceeds a value so that the human body cannot cool itself off by its natural response, which is sweating. And when the wet bulb temperature, that index, exceeds this particular critical threshold, if you go outside, even if you're young, even if you're healthy, even if you're not moving around very much, you will die. Now, that's not happening with any regularity right now, but we have seen in a couple isolated cases that threshold being exceeded. And for me, that's something that's very frightening because that is a little glimpse of possibly a world, particularly in the tropics, particularly in the Global South, where human beings are essentially no longer welcome. Dana Taylor: What would a reverse Ice Age look like? And are we at risk? Kate Marvel: Let's think about what the Ice Age was. Ice Ages are caused by little tiny wobbles in the Earth's orbit as it goes around the sun. The last Ice Age was around 21,000 years ago, scientists call it the last glacial maximum. And during the last glacial maximum, the temperature was between five and six degrees Celsius colder than it was now. And just to put that in perspective, what we could be looking at under an absolute worst case scenario is warming of about five to six degrees Celsius by the end of the century. So when you think about it, when you think about the difference between now and the last Ice Age, the planet looks very, very, very different back then. Human beings are surviving, there are species that are surviving, but it is a completely foreign planet to us. And when you look forward into the future, if it does warm by five degrees, six degrees Celsius, that is a planet that is also completely alien to us, completely foreign to us. And that could be the planet that we're sending our children to go live on. Dana Taylor: You wrote that you grew up wanting to make bad movies. Do you feel like a scientist in a bad movie? And what can that scientist do to save the day? Kate Marvel: I often feel like a scientist in a bad movie. And what makes a movie a disaster movie is usually when the scientist gets ignored. So I think it is very important that we not be ignored. The problem that I have with bad movies and good movies too, is that they tell the story of a single person. Movies usually have a hero. And that is not what's going to happen with climate change. There is no single hero. There's no one person who's going to come along and save all of us. We are all going to have to work together. We are all going to have to do this ourselves. And for me, that's almost comforting. It means that I don't have to be the star, I don't have to carry this picture on my shoulders because I am not capable of doing that. But it's knowing that I am in this with essentially all of humanity. And as a result, there are so many heroes of this story. There's so many people working on various aspects of this enormous problem to do something that humanity has never done before. And for me, that's what happens in a good story, is people do something that they didn't think they could do. Dana Taylor: Finally, you lean into human emotions like fear, guilt, and wonder. What do you hope readers might better understand about human civilization and climate change after reading your book? Kate Marvel: I hope they see themselves somewhere in the book. I hope they understand that climate change is important, not because it's affecting a planet necessarily, but because it's affecting our planet. I get really annoyed when I see these headlines that say, "Scientists concerned about climate change, or "Scientists worried about melting glaciers." Because I think, honestly, where do the rest of you live? What planet is everybody else on? And I want to make it very clear that scientists care about this because we're human beings and all human beings should care about this. This is not a scientific problem, it's not something that only scientists should be worried about, and it's certainly not something that all scientists can solve. And so I think that if we want to address the magnitude of this problem, one of the best ways to get started is to talk about it, to talk about it to ourselves, to talk about it with each other. And what I really hope is that people read this book and come away thinking, hey, I see myself in this picture. That to me will make it a success. Dana Taylor: Human Nature is available on bookshelves now. Thanks so much for being on The Excerpt, Kate. Kate Marvel: Oh, thank you so much. It was lovely. Dana Taylor: Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@ Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
Washington Post
21-06-2025
- Climate
- Washington Post
How to cope with grief and find wonder as Earth's climate changes
Over the next two weeks, extreme levels of humidity are forecast to hit about 40 states. Across the country, around 170 million people will experience temperatures above 90 degrees. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post) Kate Marvel watches the world end all the time. She's a physicist who works with climate models, so it's her job to run experiments in computer simulations, watching sea levels rise and temperatures climb. But climate change isn't happening just in models. It's happening here, and now – and Marvel has some feelings about it. In her new book Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, Marvel explores the many emotions she has been feeling surrounding climate change – grief, fear and anger, of course, but also hope, wonder and love. In today's Post Reports, she explains how we can all feel a little more empowered and motivated to change the world. Today's show was edited by Ariel Plotnick and mixed by Sean Carter. Subscribe to The Washington Post here.
Washington Post
21-06-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
How to feel about climate change? A scientist reflects on anger, hope and love.
Kate Marvel is a climate scientist. She spends her days working with climate models, watching temperatures climb, glaciers melt and seas rise — and she has some feelings about it. Marvel's new book is called 'Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet,' and it's organized around emotions. There is anger, grief and fear, of course — but there is also wonder, surprise, hope and love.
Perth Now
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Patricia Arquette 'didn't want to be limited' by her beauty
Patricia Arquette "didn't want to be limited" by her beauty during her acting career. The Hollywood actress, 57, has admitted she worried about being cast for her good looks because she felt "a really intense conflict"about being valued for her appearance and being attractive has a "short shelf-life". She told New York Post column PageSix: "I really was conscious about trying to get out of that ingenue situation as quickly as possible. "Beauty felt really dangerous to me and a bit scary. It also felt one-note, and felt like [it had] a short shelf life." Arquette went on to explain she took a role in 2001 movie Human Nature playing a character with hypertrichosis - a condition that causes excessive hair growth - because she didn't want to be typecast in traditional leading lady roles. She added: "I didn't want to be limited by my own beauty. I didn't even feel beautiful myself, but the world was treating me like that, so I always had a really intense conflict with that." Patricia previously admitted she had to deal with "creepy" behaviour when she was younger but tried not to "take it personally". She told The Guardian newspaper: "Honestly, the grossest things that have happened to me did not happen in this business. I grew up at a time when the whole world was pretty blatantly creepy. "[I had to cope with] racy jokes and people commenting on your body, or even brushing past you or touching you in a certain way. I would have gone crazy if I took it all personally. I feel like my whole life was a bit of a booby trap of all of that stuff." The Boyhood star insisted that she is doing fine these days, even though she reflected that her awareness of her own "beauty" in those days was a risky thing for her. She said: "My younger life. Now, no. When you're old, you're OK. [I considered myself beautiful] and how dangerous it was that others were aware]. My beauty in the world was dangerous for me, and scary. "Looking certain ways really impacts how my characters are treated in their lives, and how they perceive the world … This is part of how I tell the story of different human beings."
