Arctic – Page 5 – Desdemona Despair

Map showing trends of early-warning indicators of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapse. a, Linear trends of the corrected restoring rate λ estimated from the HadISST dataset assuming autocorrelated noise. b, Same as (a) but for the EN4 salinity dataset. c, Linear trends of the variance estimated from the HadISST dataset. d, Same as (c) but for the EN4 salinity dataset. e, Linear trends of the AC1 estimated from the HadISST dataset. f, Same as (e) but for the EN4 salinity dataset. Note the high positive values in the northern Atlantic and the subpolar gyre region in particular for λ and AC1, but also in the southern Atlantic ocean where a salinity pileup has recently been associated with an AMOC slowdown. Graphic: Boers, 2021 / Nature Climate Change

August 22, 2021

Gulf Stream could be veering toward irreversible decline, a new analysis warns – Atlantic current “approaching a critical threshold beyond which the circulation system could collapse”

By Ben Turner 6 August 2021 (LiveScience) – One of the most crucial ocean current systems for regulating the Northern Hemisphere’s climate could be on the verge of total collapse due to climate change, a new study has revealed. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream and is responsible for moderating […]

Time series of climate-related responses to anthropogenic drivers, 1990-2020. Out of the 31 tracked planetary vital signs, 18 were at new all-time record lows or highs in 2020. Data obtained before and after the publication of Ripple and colleagues (2020) are shown in gray and red respectively. For variables with relatively high variability, local regression trend lines are shown in black. The variables were measured at various frequencies (e.g., annual, monthly, weekly). The labels on the x-axis correspond to midpoints of years. Sources and additional details about each variable are provided in the supplemental material. Graphic: Ripple, et al., 2021 / BioScience

July 31, 2021

World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2021 – Humans face untold suffering from “the consequences of unrelenting business as usual”

28 July 2021 (BioScience) – In 2019, Ripple and colleagues (2020) warned of untold suffering and declared a climate emergency together with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries. They presented graphs of planetary vital signs indicating very troubling trends, along with little progress by humanity to address climate change. On the basis of […]

Firefighters work at the scene of forest fire near Andreyevsky village outside Tyumen, western Siberia, Russia, on 16 June 2021. Wildfires in Siberia are releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases, scientists say, contributing to global warming. Photo: Maksim Slutsky / AP Photo

July 25, 2021

Siberia hit by unprecedented wildfires – 1.5 million hectares burn after driest weather in 150 years – “Everything is on fire”

By Andrew Roth 20 July 2021 MOSCOW (The Guardian) – Every morning and evening for the last few days, shifts of young villagers have headed out into the taiga forest around Teryut with a seemingly impossible task: to quell the raging fires that have burned closer and closer for a month, shrouding this remote eastern […]

Satellite view of smoke from wildfires in the Yakutia region of Siberia, 18 July 2021. Photo: NASA / EOSDIS

July 18, 2021

Siberia permafrost ablaze with hundreds of wildfires in world’s coldest region – Half are burning unchecked due to firefighter shortage – “Siberia is dying now”

13 July 2021 (The Siberian Times) – Wildfires on permafrost are ravaging Yakutia – or the Sakha Republic, the largest and coldest entity of the Russian Federation. The scale is mesmerising. There are some separate 300 fires, now covering 12,140 square kilometres – but only around half of these are being tackled, because they pose […]

A wildfire rages beside the Kolyma highway, 30 June 2021. The highway is the major connection between the Republic of Sakha’s capital Yakutsk and the port town of Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk. The highway had to be shut because the fire got too close to the road and was much too fierce for safe driving. Photo: The Siberian Times

July 3, 2021

Siberia’s “Road of Bones” closed as early wildfires rage – “We can’t see the sun because of the smog, flakes of ash are raining from the sky. We are struggling to breathe, we really need help.”

By Svetlana Skarbo 30 June 2021 (The Siberian Times) – More than 2,000 people are deployed in extinguishing wildfires raging around Russia’s coldest inhabited territory, Yakutia, now in the third year of an extremely intense season of wildfires. The first of them ignited as early as the beginning of May right outside the world-famous Pole […]

Risk levels for climate-sensitive health outcomes based on different greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation scenarios. Graphic: IPCC WG 2 Sixth Assessment Report / AFP

June 23, 2021

Hunger, drought, disease: UN climate report reveals dire health threats – “The basis for our health is sustained by three pillars: the food we eat, access to water, and shelter. These pillars are totally vulnerable and about to collapse.”

By Patrick Galey 23 June 2021 (AFP) – Hunger, drought and disease will afflict tens of millions more people within decades, according to a draft UN assessment that lays bare the dire human health consequences of a warming planet. After a pandemic year that saw the world turned on its head, a forthcoming report by […]

Millennium-scale evolution of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), 400 - 2020. SST-based AMOC reconstructions (light and dark blue) compared to various proxy reconstructions, including land and sea surface temperature reconstructions, sortable silt data, δ18O in benthic foraminifera, δ15N of deep-sea gorgonian corals, and relative abundance of Turborotalita quinqueloba. Since at least 400 AD relatively stable, the AMOC began to decline during the 19th Century which is evident in all proxy records. Around 1950 a phase of particularly rapid decline started that is found in several, largely independent proxies. A short-lived recovery is evident in the 1990s before a return to decline from the mid-2000s. Together these data consistently show that the modern AMOC slowdown is unprecedented in over a thousand years. Graphic: Levke Caesar

March 21, 2021

Gulf Stream System at its weakest in more than a millennium – “This could bring us dangerously close to the tipping point at which the flow becomes unstable”

25 February 2021 (PIK) – Never before in over 1000 years the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as Gulf Stream System, has been as weak as in the last decades. This is the result of a new study by scientists from Ireland, Britain, and Germany. The researchers compiled so-called proxy data – taken […]

Observed sea-level rise in Rockport, Texas, 1969-2020 and projected to 2050. Rockport has the second-highest annual rise rate (7.1 mm/year in 2020), and the highest projected sea-level rise for 2050 at 0.82 meters (2.69 ft) above mean sea level in 1992. Graphic: VIMS

February 28, 2021

U.S. sea-level report cards: 2020 again trends toward acceleration – Water levels at 26 of 32 stations rose at higher rate than in 2019

By David Malmquist 24 January 2021 (VIMS) – Sea level “report cards” issued annually by researchers at William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science add further evidence of an accelerating rate of sea-level rise during 2020 at nearly all tidal stations along the U.S. coastline. The team’s web-based report cards project sea level to […]

Infographic showing costs of natural disasters in 2020. Global losses from natural disasters in 2020 came to US$210 billion. The hurricane season in the North Atlantic was hyperactive, with a record-setting 30 storms, 13 of which reached hurricane status. Graphic: Munich Re

January 10, 2021

Global natural disaster figures for 2020 – “The hurricane season in the North Atlantic was hyperactive”

7 January 2021 (Munich Re) – Global losses from natural disasters in 2020 came to US$ 210bn, of which some US$ 82bn was insured. Both overall losses and insured losses were significantly higher than in the previous year (2019: US$ 166bn and US$ 57bn respectively). The US share of losses was rather high: Natural disasters in the […]

Average annual global temperature (deg C) relative to 1850-1900. 2020 tied with 2016 as the hottest year on record. Data: ERA5 / Copernicus Climate Change Service. Graphic: The Guardian

January 9, 2021

2020 tied 2016 for hottest year ever recorded – “The extraordinary climate events of 2020 show us we have no time to lose”

By Damian Carrington 8 January 2021 (The Guardian) – The climate crisis continued unabated in 2020, with the joint highest global temperatures on record, alarming heat and record wildfires in the Arctic, and a record 29 tropical storms in the Atlantic. Despite a 7% fall in fossil fuel burning due to coronavirus lockdowns, heat-trapping carbon dioxide continued to build […]