It’s already official: You’re living through the hottest year on record
According to the European Union’s climate agency, 2024 is also the first year to breach a key climate threshold.
Nine months ago, the oceans became bathwater. As historically hot sea temperatures forced corals to expel the microorganisms that keep them alive, the world endured its fourth mass coral bleaching event, affecting more than half of all coral reefs in dozens of countries. As the temperatures continued to climb, many died.
It was an early taste of what would become a year marked by the consequences of record-breaking heat. And now it’s official: Last week, when much of the world’s attention was turned to the U.S. presidential election, scientists from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service crowned 2024 as the hottest year on record — and the first year to surpass the 1.5 degrees Celsius benchmark. And that’s with two months left to go in the year.
Where has all the rain gone? Bone-dry October strikes much of US
A bone-dry October is pushing nearly half of the United States into a flash drought, leading to fires in the Midwest and hindering shipping on the Mississippi River.
More than 100 different long-term weather stations in 26 states, including Alaska, are having their driest October on record, through Sunday, according to records by the Southern Regional Climate Center and Midwest Regional Climate Center. Cities that have had no measurable rain for October include New York, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Sioux City, Iowa, along with normal dry spots such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix, National Weather Service records show.
The Y-K Delta’s permafrost could be entirely gone within decades
All over Alaska, perennially frozen ground, or permafrost, is melting. During a panel discussion at the Arctic Encounter Symposium in April, an ecologist said the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta is set to lose nearly all of its permafrost in the next two decades. And a warming climate is to blame.
“It’s bad news,” said Sue Natali, a Senior Scientist and leader of the Permafrost Pathways Initiative at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. The goal of the initiative is to help develop strategies to manage and adapt to the enormous impact permafrost thaw is having on Y-K Delta communities. “It’s worse if you don’t know, it’s worse if you don’t plan and it’s worse if you’re not part of the planning process,” she said.
Could a big hurricane whack New England? ‘More of a question of when than if.’
When Hurricane Helene blasted through western North Carolina in late September, devastating a region normally immune to severe damage from hurricanes, it woke up a wide swath of the country to a hard fact: We’re not as safe as we think.
That’s true in New England, too.
The nature of hurricanes has shifted as the planet warms due to climate change, with bigger, wetter, and stronger storms — something we’ve now seen happen twice in rapid succession, with Hurricane Milton following Helene.
Read more on The Boston Globe.
Nowhere in America is safe from climate-fueled storms and fires
Forecasters had warned for days that Hurricane Helene was likely to cause widespread devastation. But when the powerful storm struck Florida and barreled through the eastern US last week, killing more than 180 people and taking whole communities offline, it still managed to come as a shock.
Florida’s Big Bend, where Helene made landfall, previously went decades without a hurricane strike. In the past year or so, it has now seen three. The western half of North Carolina, once held up as a haven from the worst impacts of climate change, has been paralyzed by floods.
Destructive hurricanes like Helene highlight that catastrophic impacts from storms can extend far inland
Inland communities will increasingly need to prepare for impacts from storms.
Destructive hurricanes like Helene are a stark reminder that significant and devastating impacts from many major storms are not relegated to coastal cities and communities — inland regions often face catastrophic impacts too, experts are warning.
The Category 4 hurricane made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend region Thursday night before tracking north, leaving a wake of destruction over 400 miles in the days the followed.
Is methane release from the Arctic unstoppable?
Global warming has already caused the Arctic to release more climate-warming methane—but exactly how much will depend closely on the actions we take to halt climate change.
Under the Arctic ice lies an extremely carbon-rich environment. Over thousands of years, plants in the Arctic have absorbed carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air to grow, before being buried under snow and ice during the winter, becoming part of the soil. If this perennially frozen ground thaws—as it is now, as a result of climate change—ancient plants are uncovered, alongside plant-eating microbes that break them down.
This releases two main climate-warming greenhouse gases: CO2, and even more potent methane.
Continue reading on Climate Portal.
Thousands of fires are burning in the drought-wracked Amazon
Much of Brazil is burning as tens of thousands of fires rage around the country, half of them in the Amazon rainforest. Exacerbated by a severe drought, the fires threaten one of the world’s most crucial ecosystems and are consuming the Amazon’s vast stores of carbon, sending more of the damaging greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
2.4 million hectares (about 6 million acres) of forests, fields and pastures in the Amazon burned between June and August. There were more than 95,000 hot spots in the Amazon biome this year to Sept. 18, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, known as Inpe.
