North America – Desdemona Despair

Effect of political contributions from oil and gas companies on U.S. legislators that vote against the environment. Coefficients and 95 percent CIs for tests of investment (Left) and influence (Right) hypotheses and their corresponding metaanalytic effects for the years 1992 to 2018. In 13 out of 14 analyses, lower LCV scores (i.e., more antienvironmental votes) in one election cycle predicted significantly increased contributions in the following election cycle. For example, the strongest result was observed for the 2016 election: For every additional 10 percent of congressional votes against the environment in 2014, a legislator would receive an additional $5,400 in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies in 2016 (b = −0.54, SE = 0.12; P < 0.001; 95 percent CI [−0.77, −0.31]). This is an especially strong relationship considering that many elected officials vote against environmental policies nearly 100 percent of the time, thereby compounding the cycle of antienvironmentalism and increasing rewards in the form of contributions. Graphic: Goldberg, et al., 2020 / PNAS

May 2, 2024

Big Oil spent decades sowing doubt about fossil fuel dangers, experts testify – “Big Oil had to evolve from denial to duplicity”

By Dharna Noor 1 May 2024 (The Guardian) – The fossil fuel industry spent decades sowing doubt about the dangers of burning oil and gas, experts and Democratic lawmakers testified on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The Senate budget committee held a hearing to review a report published on Tuesday with the House oversight and accountability […]

Map showing worldwide natural disasters in 2023. Worldwide, natural disasters in 2023 resulted in losses of around US$250 billion (previous year US$250 billion). Loss statistics were characterised by the large number of severe regional storms. Such high thunderstorm losses have never been recorded before in the USA or in Europe: assets worth around US$66 billion were destroyed in North America, of which US$50 billion was insured, while in Europe the figure was US$10 billion (€9.1 billion), of which US$8 billion (€7.3 billion) was insured. A large body of scientific research indicates that climate change favours severe weather with heavy hailstorms. Similarly, loss statistics from thunderstorms in North America and other regions are trending upward. Graphic: Munich Re

May 1, 2024

Munich Re: Record thunderstorm losses in 2023 – “The warming of the earth that has been accelerating for some years is intensifying the extreme weather in many regions, leading to increasing loss potentials”

9 January 2024 (Munich Re) – Worldwide, natural disasters in 2023 resulted in losses of around US$ 250bn (previous year US$ 250bn), with insured losses of US$ 95bn (previous year US$ 125bn). Overall losses tally with the five-year average, while insured losses were slightly below the average figure of US$ 105bn. Unlike in previous years, […]

Counts (S) of anadromous adults in eight populations of the Santa Monica Mountains BPG. Counts are adjusted by +1 so that zero counts show up on the log scale Graphic: Boughton, 2022 in SWFSC 2022

April 30, 2024

Steelhead trout, once thriving in Southern California, are declared endangered – “The negative trend toward extinction has not reversed”

By Ian James 23 April 2024 (Los Angeles Times) – Southern California’s rivers and creeks once teemed with large, silvery fish that arrived from the ocean and swam upstream to spawn. But today, these fish are seldom seen. Southern California steelhead trout have been pushed to the brink of extinction as their river habitats have […]

Effects of experimental open-top chamber (OTC) warming on ecosystem respiration (ER). Experimental warming increased ER across the tundra biome but the magnitude of the response varied across time and space. Effect of OTC warming on ER Hedges’ SMD calculated as (mean ER of the warmed plots − mean ER of the control plots)/pooled standard deviation across the 136 growing season datasets (that is, unique experiment × ER measurement year combinations). On the top of the graph, a blue diamond shows the mean estimate (est. = 0.57 and 95% CI [0.44–0.70], error bars) of the ER response across the 136 datasets, as well as the Q value testing for heterogeneity and P value from the meta-analysis. Black dots represent ER Hedges’ SMDs of individual datasets and 95% CIs (black error bars) in alphabetical and chronological order. Individual datasets are represented by the experiment ID in black (left) and ER measurement year (right) in a colour scale ranging from dark blue, light blue, orange to red which represents increasingly longer warming duration at the time of ER measurements. Experiments with more than 1 year of ER data are grouped. See Supplementary Tables 1, 2 and 4 for details on the datasets and SMD and CI values. The black dashed vertical line (SMD = 0) represents no change in ER with warming whereas the areas to the right and left of it represent increased (SMD > 0) versus decreased (SMD

April 28, 2024

Understanding climate warming impacts on carbon release from the tundra – “We anticipate an increase in respiration across the whole Arctic and alpine tundra”

By Sara-Lena Brännström 17 April 2024 (Umeå University) – A team of over 70 scientists from different countries used so called open-top chambers (OTCs) to experimentally simulate the effects of warming on 28 tundra sites around the world. OTCs basically serve as mini-greenhouses, blocking wind and trapping heat to create local warming. The warming experiments […]

Mike England, who owns England Farms and Cattle Company located 29 miles east of McAllen, walks across one of the fields on his farm near Mercedes, Texas on 18 April 2024. England had to destroy 500 acres worth of sugar cane he’d grown because of the ongoing drought in the Rio Grande Valley. Credit: Photo: Ben Lowy / The Texas Tribune

April 28, 2024

South Texas farmers are in peril as the Rio Grande Valley runs dry, again – “Without water, what are we using to grow our crops? What are we able to pay back those loans with?”

By Berenice Garcia 18 April 2024 MERCEDES, TEXAS (The Texas Tribune) – Across the street from a red barn, a 40-acre field once covered by a sea of green sugar cane leaves now sits dry and thirsty. Irrigation water is dangerously elusive for the fields of the Rio Grande Valley. Mike England, who owns England […]

Twenty-first century groundwater-level trends in globally distributed monitoring wells. Each point represents one monitoring well, coloured to represent the Theil–Sen trend of annual median groundwater levels during the twenty-first century. Blue and red points indicate shallowing and deepening, respectively, of groundwater levels over time, with darker colours indicating faster rates. a, Spatial distributions of groundwater-level trends in globally distributed monitoring wells. b–o, Regional maps illustrating the substantial spatial variability in groundwater-level trends. Supplementary Notes 16 and 17 show monitoring wells and their groundwater-level trends at subcontinental scales (Supplementary Note 16) and in 207 individual aquifer systems. Graphic: Jasechko, et al., 2024 / Nature

April 28, 2024

Groundwater resources are drying up across the globe – “Climate variability and change can impact water supplies underground as well as above-ground”

By Matthew Rozsa 24 January 2024 (Salon) – Humans rely on groundwater for many things, but especially our food. Roughly 30 percent of all the planet’s available freshwater comes from groundwater, or water that is found underground in the spaces between rocks, soil and sand. It is primarily used for agriculture and billions of humans are dependent […]

Spatial distribution of the total number of exposed days in 995 California ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA) from 2006 to 2019 under the main analysis definition for climate hazards (85th percentile for extreme heat and 15 μg/m3 for wildfire PM2.5). (A) Compound exposure, (B) extreme heat alone, and (C) wildfire smoke alone. Gray color represents excluded ZCTA that has a population of ≤1000 or lacks any exposed day (extreme heat alone, wildfire smoke alone, or both). Graphic: Chen, et al., 2024 / Science Advances

April 28, 2024

Extreme heat, wildfire smoke harm low-income and nonwhite communities the most – “It’s really important to highlight this social injustice aspect of climate change”

By Dorany Pineda 2 February 2024 LOS ANGELES (AP) – Extreme heat and wildfire smoke are independently harmful to the human body, but together their impact on cardiovascular and respiratory systems is more dangerous and affects some communities more than others. A study published Friday in the journal Science Advances said climate change is increasing the frequency […]

Annual global mean surface temperature anomalies relative to 1850–1900. Global mean near-surface temperature in 2023 was 1.45 ± 0.12 °C above the 1850–1900 average. The analysis is based on a synthesis of six global temperature datasets. 2023 was the warmest year in the 174-year instrumental record in each of the six datasets. The past nine years – from 2015 to 2023 – were the nine warmest years on record. The two previous warmest years were 2016, with an anomaly of 1.29 ± 0.12 °C, and 2020, with an anomaly of 1.27 ± 0.13 °C. Globally, every month from June to December was record warm for the respective month. September 2023 was particularly noteworthy, surpassing the previous global record for September by a wide margin (0.46 °C–0.54 °C) in all datasets. The second-highest margin by which a September record was broken in the past 60 years (the period covered by all datasets) was substantially smaller, at 0.03 °C–0.17 °C in 1983. July is typically the warmest month of the year globally, and thus July 2023 became the warmest month on record. The long-term increase in global temperature is due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The shift from La Niña, which lasted from mid-2020 to early 2023, to fully developed El Niño conditions by September 2023 likely explains some of the rise in temperature from 2022 to 2023. However, some areas of unusual warming, such as the North-East Atlantic do not correspond to typical patterns of warming or cooling associated with El Niño. Other factors, which are still being investigated, may also have contributed to the exceptional warming from 2022 to 2023, which is unlikely to be due to internal variability alone. Graphic: WMO

April 28, 2024

WMO: Climate change indicators reached record levels in 2023 – “Sirens are blaring across all major indicators. Some records aren’t just chart-topping, they’re chart-busting. And changes are speeding-up.”

19 March 2024 (WMO) – A new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) shows that records were once again broken, and in some cases smashed, for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat. Heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, and rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones […]

Electric vehicles charging in Victorville, California, 11 March 2024. In California, electric vehicles could soon account for 10 percent of peak power demand. Photo: Lauren Justice / The New York Times

April 28, 2024

A new surge in power use is threatening U.S. climate goals – “I can’t recall the last time I was so alarmed about the country’s energy trajectory”

By Brad Plumer 17 March 2024 (The New York Times) – Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge. Over the past year, electric utilities have nearly doubled their forecasts of how much additional power they’ll need by 2028 as they confront […]

(a) Maps of the Pacific Northwest U.S. showing the median annual flight hours between November 1st and January 31st for Historical, and near-future, mid-future, and distant-future time frames for two RCPs, (b) elevations with Cascade and Rocky Mountain ranges marked, (c) Map of the continental United States with highlighted study area (grey). The historical panel of ‘a’ marks two locations in Washington State, Omak, and Richland, which are referenced in the text. Note that the elevation data is not used in any analysis and is provided solely for visual context. Graphic: Rajagopalan, et al., 2024 / Nature Scientific Reports

April 28, 2024

Western honeybee colonies at risk of collapse, WSU study finds – “They’re really the glue in our ecosystems. And you never notice the glue — until it stops working.”

By Conrad Swanson 1 April 2024 (The Seattle Times) – One of nature’s most important keystone species is working itself to death. Colonies of honeybees — crucial pollinators for a wide variety of plants and cash crops — are at risk of collapse because of climate change, a recent study by scientists at Washington State University and […]