Category: Climate

The graph depicts global surface temperature through 2014, with the 10 warmest years highlighted in dark red. (Climate.gov) Earth’s average surface temperature was the warmest since record-keeping began in 1880, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. December also was the warmest month ever recorded, and was among five months that set records, the agencies reported Friday. The combined land and ocean surface temperature was 1.24 degrees above the 20th century average of 57 degrees, according to NOAA. December’s average global temperature was 1.39 degrees above that 20th century average. The four other months that set records were May, June, August and September, NOAA said. October tied for warmest, according to the agency’s report. The data add to a two-decade string of record warmth planetwide. Except for 1998, the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2002, according to NOAA. The increase in global average […]

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – Last year was Earth’s warmest on record, bolstering the argument that people are altering the planet’s climate by relentlessly burning fuels that belch greenhouse gases into the air, two major U.S. government agencies said on Friday. Separate studies by the U.S. space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that the 10 warmest years on record have taken place since 1997. The scientists said the record temperatures were spread around the globe, including most of Europe stretching into northern Africa, the western United States, far eastern Russia into western Alaska, parts of interior South America, parts of eastern and western coastal Australia and elsewhere. "While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases," said Gavin Schmidt, […]

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Carl Zimmer A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them. “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science . But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health. “We’re lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.” Scientific assessments […]

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Clmate change: A severe drought plagued a third of Queensland, Australia in 2013. Destabilizing the global environment could make Earth less hospitable for humans. (David Gray/Reuters) At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points in the natural world. The paper contends that we have already crossed four “planetary boundaries.” They include the extinction rate; deforestation; the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (used on land as fertilizer) into the ocean. “What the science has shown is that human activities — economic growth, technology, consumption – are destabilizing the global environment,” said Will Steffen, who holds appointments at the Australian National University and the […]

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We appear to be in rather peculiar and unsettling times. A year ago, conversations and fears were over the high oil price, which until September 2014, had been above $100 a barrel . Since a high of $115 in July 2014, it has plummeted, with West Texas Intermediate falling to $43 and North Sea Brent Crude marginally higher at $47 earlier in the week. Today, both have rallied to around $48, with an untypical mere 21 cents between them. Since Brent normally trades at least several dollars above WTI, any apparent synchrony of the two often reflects price-volatility, as indeed is the case now. It is fair to say that the crash in oil price was not anticipated by most people who keep an eye on the oil supply situation, and accordingly, its cause is a matter of intense speculation, with the future prognosis even more so. Among the […]

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According to the World Bank , human-induced or “ anthropogenic ” climate change may raise the earth’s temperature by two degrees in the next 20 or 30 years. Once four degrees is reached—which may arrive by the end of this century—the polar ice will be gone, sea levels will have risen dramatically and extreme climate disruption will be a fact. But climate scientists aren’t sure what will happen in the gap between these two scenarios. No-one knows where the point of no return is located, nor what the consequences will be of current climate changes for the human species and the planet. In effect, humanity is playing a game of Russian roulette. So what’s getting in the way of taking the necessary action? To find out some answers to this question, I hosted a discussion in November of 2014 between George Marshall , the co-founder of the Climate Outreach […]

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Around the world, carbon-based fuels are under attack.  Increasingly grim economic pressures, growing popular resistance, and the efforts of government regulators have all shocked the energy industry.  Oil prices are falling , colleges and universities are divesting from their carbon stocks, voters are instituting curbs on hydro-fracking, and delegates at the U.N. climate conference in Peru have agreed to impose substantial restrictions on global carbon emissions at a conference in Paris later in the year.  All this has been accompanied by what might be viewedas a moral assault on the very act of extracting carbon-based fuels from the earth,in which the major oil, gas, and coal companies find themselves portrayed as the enemies of humankind. Under such pressures, you might assume that Big Energy would react defensively, perhaps apologizing for its role in spurring climate change while assuming a leadership position in planning for the transition to a post-carbon […]

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