I am utterly devastated by the Los Angeles wildfires, shaking with rage and grief. The Altadena community near Pasadena, where the Eaton fire has damaged or destroyed at least 5,000 structures, was my home for 14 years.
I moved my family away two years ago because, as Californiaâs climate kept growing drier, hotter and more fiery, I feared that our neighborhood would burn. But even I didnât think fires of this scale and severity would raze it and other large areas of the city this soon. And yet images of Altadena this week show a hellscape, like a landscape out of Octavia Butlerâs uncannily prescient climate novel âParable of the Sower.â
One lesson climate change teaches us again and again is that bad things can happen ahead of schedule. Model predictions for climate impacts have tended to be optimistically biased. But now, unfortunately, the heating is accelerating, outpacing scientistsâ expectations. (...)
The guy has a point in terms of media hype and the swings in public doom-mongering (ice age vs. global warming, etc.). Nevertheless, I don't trust his implied premise, which is don't trust any of the warnings. Skepticism is certainly called for, but inaction is just as stupid as jumping blindly on the bandwagon. Remember when air pollution was a thing? Legislation changed that.
Very much for the better IMHO.
Humans have an incontrovertible impact on the environment. We need to discuss what kind of world we want to live in and adjust our behaviour to suit.
Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s. The integrated enterprise embodied in the Nobel Prizewinning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change existed then as separate threads of research pursued by isolated groups of scientists. Atmospheric chemists and modelers grappled with the measurement of changes in carbon dioxide and atmospheric gases, and the changes in climate that might result. Meanwhile, geologists and paleoclimate researchers tried to understand when Earth slipped into and out of ice ages, and why. An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting âglobal coolingâ and an âimminentâ ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests.
The guy has a point in terms of media hype and the swings in public doom-mongering (ice age vs. global warming, etc.). Nevertheless, I don't trust his implied premise, which is don't trust any of the warnings. Skepticism is certainly called for, but inaction is just as stupid as jumping blindly on the bandwagon. Remember when air pollution was a thing? Legislation changed that.
Very much for the better IMHO.
Humans have an incontrovertible impact on the environment. We need to discuss what kind of world we want to live in and adjust our behaviour to suit.
there's certainly been some over-reaction on both sides of this issue
here's a really direct twelve minute presentation by a relative nobody
The guy has a point in terms of media hype and the swings in public doom-mongering (ice age vs. global warming, etc.). Nevertheless, I don't trust his implied premise, which is don't trust any of the warnings. Skepticism is certainly called for, but inaction is just as stupid as jumping blindly on the bandwagon. Remember when air pollution was a thing? Legislation changed that.
Very much for the better IMHO.
Humans have an incontrovertible impact on the environment. We need to discuss what kind of world we want to live in and adjust our behaviour to suit.
(...) But there are biggerâfar biggerâfactors at play in the disaster, factors that have less to do with local politics and institutional preparedness and more to do with the existential matter of a planet grown sickly from climate change. A crisis that is feeding more and bigger storms and causing more and greater destructionâdestruction that lawmakers and other leaders, here and around the world, still seem unable to muster the will to address. Here is the reality: The very metabolism of the Earth has been thrown off by an atmosphere choking on greenhouse gasses, and it will take more than political bickering to set things right. Another reality: Fixing the problem first requires understandingâand, even more fundamentally, acceptingâthe science. Only then can we implement policies and put in place protocols that help us both reduce the likelihood of more such crises and minimize the death and destruction when they ultimately do occur.
Itâs long been established that climate change turbocharges wildfires, with droughts, persistent heat, dried vegetation, and lightning storms all worsening in a warming world and all contributing to out-of-control blazes. Thatâs just one reason a new report from the European Space Agencyâs Copernicus Climate Change Serviceâa report that landed on Jan. 10, while L.A. still burnedâarrived as such bad news. According to the release, 2024 was the first year global mean temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.6°C (2.88°F). That blows past the benchmark established by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which sought to limit future warming to well below 2°C in the 21st century, with a preferred target no higher than 1.5°C. Doing so would help limit the impact of a hotter planet. (...)
Scientists sounded the alarm long before last year ended that 2024 would become the hottest year on record and almost certainly the first to surpass the 1.5C limit to global warming, set out as a goal in the Paris Agreement. Now both of those milestones are expected to be confirmed on Thursday and Friday in official statistical releases from scientific agencies, including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the UK Met Office.
Whatâs puzzled scientists is the clear acceleration in rising temperatures, even as the evidence of the fast-warming atmosphere became impossible to miss.
The hottest day ever recorded happened on July 21, 2024 â a record that held until July 22. The planetary heatspike was made 2.5 times more likely by greenhouse gases, according to researchers. Typhoon Gaemi in Asia and Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US, similarly juiced by climate change, killed hundreds of people and caused colossal damage. There was flooding across Africaâs Sahel and in southeastern Spain; drought in southern Italy and the Amazon River basin; wildfires in central Chile; and landslides in northern India.
Hottest-year status, awaiting confirmation, would put 2024 in rarefied company. The warmest year up to now, by a substantial margin? 2023. (...)
I guess I always assumed they did something like this everywhere. But I guess it's easier to look at history and try to plot the next few years without the political layer of climate change. At least here if your maps and predictions try to take climate change into account, there will be a lot of howling.
They already do... but your insurance company is keeping that very quiet.
My area is showing a slight decrease in predicted fire risk that I think is due to shifting weather patterns increasing summer rain. Still a high risk area with all the areas of bushland within the city and especially on the urban fringe. Nothing like the > 50% increase seen between Sydney and Brisbane.
I guess I always assumed they did something like this everywhere. But I guess it's easier to look at history and try to plot the next few years without the political layer of climate change. At least here if your maps and predictions try to take climate change into account, there will be a lot of howling.
My area is showing a slight decrease in predicted fire risk that I think is due to shifting weather patterns increasing summer rain. Still a high risk area with all the areas of bushland within the city and especially on the urban fringe. Nothing like the > 50% increase seen between Sydney and Brisbane.
Major oil companies, including Shell and precursors to energy giants Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, were alerted about the planet-warming effects of fossil fuels as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents show.
The warning, from the head of an industry-created group known as the Air Pollution Foundation, was revealed by Climate Investigations Center and published Tuesday by the climate website DeSmog. It represents what may be the earliest instance of big oil being informed of the potentially dire consequences of its products.
âEvery time thereâs a push for climate action, (we see) fossil fuel companies downplay and deny the harms of burning fossil fuels,â said Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center who uncovered the historic memos. âNow we have evidence they were doing this way back in the 50s during these really early attempts to crack down on sources of pollution.â
The Air Pollution Foundation was founded in 1953 by oil interests in response to public outcry over smog that was blanketing Los Angeles county.
Researchers had identified hydrocarbon pollution from fossil fuel sources such as cars and refineries as a primary culprit and Los Angeles officials had begun to proposal pollution controls.
The Air Pollution Foundation, which was primarily funded by the lobbying organization Western States Petroleum Association, publicly claimed to want to help solve the smog crisis, but was set up in large part to counter efforts at regulation, the new memos indicate.
Itâs a commonlyused tactic today, said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in climate disinformation at the University of Miami. (...)
In 2004, a trio of researchers published a study that accomplished something never seen before. They calculated the specific contribution that human-caused climate change made to an individual extreme weather event.
The extreme event in question was the European heatwave in the summer of 2003. Week upon week of extreme heat had a devastating impact, killing more than 70,000 people across the continent.
The scientists worked out that human influence had at least doubled the risk of such an extreme heatwave occurring. The findings madeheadlines around the world.
The study kick-started the scientific field of âextreme event attributionâ.
To keep track of this rapidly growing field of research, Carbon Brief has mapped every published study on how climate change has influenced extreme weather.
This latest iteration of the interactive map (below) includes more than 600 studies, covering almost 750 extreme weather events and trends. (...)
Abstract: Climate impacts on economic productivity indicate that climate change may threaten price stability. Here we apply fixed-effects regressions to over 27,000 observations of monthly consumer price indices worldwide to quantify the impacts of climate conditions on inflation. Higher temperatures increase food and headline inflation persistently over 12 months in both higher- and lower-income countries. Effects vary across seasons and regions depending on climatic norms, with further impacts from daily temperature variability and extreme precipitation. Evaluating these results under temperature increases projected for 2035 implies upwards pressures on food and headline inflation of 0.92-3.23 and 0.32-1.18 percentage-points per-year respectively on average globally (uncertainty range across emission scenarios, climate models and empirical specifications). Pressures are largest at low latitudes and show strong seasonality at high latitudes, peaking in summer. Finally, the 2022 extreme summer heat increased food inflation in Europe by 0.43-0.93 percentage-points which warming projected for 2035 would amplify by 30-50%.
