global warming – Page 40 – Desdemona Despair

New Climate and Environment Minister Romina Pourmokhtari (center), is pictured during a group photo in front of the Parliament in Stockholm, on 18 October 2022. Photo: Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP

October 24, 2022

Sweden’s climate policy is in turmoil – Far-right government puts Environment Ministry under Ministry of Energy and Industry – “Historic decision that will have devastating consequences for climate issues”

By Anne-Françoise Hivert 22 October 2022 MALMÖ, Sweden (Le Monde) – It is quite a symbol: For the first time since 1987, Sweden has no proper Environment Ministry. Romina Pourmokhtari, 26, the youngest member of the government presented by the conservative Ulf Kristersson on Tuesday, October 18, has been appointed minister for climate and the […]

Aerial view of flooding in South Sudan following fourth year of historic rainfall, 18 October 2022. Photo: UNHCR

October 23, 2022

Devastation in South Sudan following fourth consecutive year of historic floods – Two-thirds of country experiencing flooding – More than 900,000 people directly impacted

21 October 2022 (UNHCR) – UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is urging international support for humanitarian efforts in South Sudan in the face of record-breaking rains and floods for a fourth consecutive year, and the threat of worse to come as the climate crisis accelerates. Two-thirds of the country is currently experiencing flooding. Over 900,000 […]

Aerial view of people arriving at a displacement camp in southern Somalia in late September 2022. Photo: Jerome Delay / AP Photo

October 23, 2022

Prolonged drought brings famine, death, and fear to Somalia – “We’d grieve, stop for a while, pray. We’d bury them beside the road.”

By Cara Anna 5 October 2022 DOLLOW, Somalia (AP) – A man in a donkey cart comes wheeling through the dust, carrying two small, silent boys. The sky is overcast. It could rain. It won’t. It hasn’t for a very long time. Mohamed Ahmed Diriye is 60 years old, and he’s completing the grimmest journey […]

A view of a fallow field and a dry irrigation canal in Palo Verde, California, U.S., 19 September 2022. Photo: Aude Guerrucci / REUTERS

October 23, 2022

California drought withers tomatoes, pushing grocery prices higher – “There’s just not enough water to grow everything that we normally grow”

By Nathan Frandino, Christopher Walljasper, and Aude Guerrucci 10 October 2022 FIREBAUGH, California (Reuters) – A lack of rain and snow in central California and restricted water supplies from the Colorado River in the southernmost part of the state have withered summer crops like tomatoes and onions and threatened leafy greens grown in the winter. […]

People walk on a street affected by the passing of Hurricane Fiona in Penuelas, Puerto Rico, 19 September 2022. Ricardo Arduengo / REUTERS

October 22, 2022

Five years after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s power grid is still costly and unreliable – Puerto Rico struggles to recover after Hurricane Fiona razed crops

By Fred Imbert 22 October 2022 (CNBC) – When Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico in September, Felipe Pérez was ready. Pérez, the owner of local sandwich shop chain El Meson, equipped his stand-alone locations with power generators and water tanks in the event of a prolonged outage like the one after Hurricane Maria, the devastating […]

Predicted (left) and observed (right) sea levels caused by melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). A statistically significant correlation between the two fields (P < 0.001) provides an unambiguous observational detection of the near-field sea level fingerprint of recent GrIS melting in our warming world. Graphic: Coulson, et al., 2022 / Science

October 22, 2022

Discovery of “fingerprint” confirms alarming predictions of Greenland ice sheet melt – “How fast the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will respond to warming is a really big unknown, and frankly a very scary unknown”

By Sarah Sloat 29 September 2022 (NBC News) – Scientists now have unambiguous proof that a phenomenon critical to predicting the impact of climate change exists. Researchers announced Thursday that they had detected the sea level “fingerprint” of the Greenland ice sheet melt, pinpointing the unique pattern of sea level change linked to the melting ice. It’s the […]

Hubei’s Guanyin Pavilion during the July 2017 flood and the August 2022 drought. Photo: Getty Images

October 21, 2022

Climate change has come for the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter – “There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China”

By Muizz Akhtar 29 September 2022 (Vox) – China just finished one of its most disastrous summers on record, with record-breaking heat, drought, and wildfires leading to water shortages even into the fall. More than 900 million people — or about 64 percent of China’s population — faced brutal heat waves alone, highlighting how much further the nation has to […]

(a) Ocean thermal forcing (shaded areas) at the ocean bottom or 1000 m (whichever is shallower) and annual submarine melt rate (filled squares) at Greenland’s marine-terminating glaciers. The black dotted line shows the 1,000 m isobath and delineates the extent of the continental shelf. The black dashed regions on the ice sheet delineate the hydrological catchments for three large example glaciers: Jakobshavn Isbrae (JI), Helheim (HH) and Kangerdlugssuaq (KG). The five ice sheet regions considered throughout the paper—south (SO), central-west (CW), northwest (NW), northeast (NE) and north (NO)—are delineated by the black ticks. Other labels are the Irminger Sea (Irm), Davis Strait (Dav) and Denmark Strait (Den). Bathymetry is from ref. 42 and ref. 43. (b) Subglacial discharge (x axis, note logarithmic scale) and ocean thermal forcing (y axis) for each marine-terminating glacier. The background shading shows the resulting submarine melt rate. Glaciers are coloured by their regional grouping. The larger squares and error bars show the median and interquartile range for each region, respectively. (c) Submarine melt rate versus grounding line depth by region with fitted linear trends (all significant at the 5% level) as dashed lines. All the results shown in these plots are annually averaged over 1979–2018. Graphic: Slater and Straneo, 2022 / Nature Geoscience

October 21, 2022

Warmer air and warmer water are combining to melt Greenland ice sheet – “This unfortunately adds to the overwhelming body of evidence showing the sensitivity of the Greenland ice sheet to climate change”

By Rachel Koning Beals 17 October 2022 (MarketWatch) – The Greenland ice sheet — one of the two most important glaciers of its kind on Earth — may be even more sensitive to the warming climate than scientists previously thought. The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shed fresh light on the forces driving ice […]

People walk through floodwaters after heavy rainfall in Hadeja, Nigeria, 19 September 2022. Officials in Nigeria say the death toll from this year's flooding has now risen to 603. Authorities have called the floods the country's worst in more than a decade, blaming the disaster on unusually heavy rainfall and the release of excess water from the Lagdo dam in neighboring Cameroon. Photo: AP Photo

October 21, 2022

Millions of people at risk in Nigeria after worst floods in a decade – More than 1.3 million displaced – Cholera outbreak sickens 6,000 – 100,000 hectares of farmland underwater – Rains to continue through November – “This is a catastrophe indeed. All of these wrong things are happening at the same time.”

21 October 2022 (UN News) – More than 2.8 million people have been impacted by Nigeria’s worst floods in a decade, with 1.3 million displaced and hundreds of lives lost, said the UN chief on Friday, expressing his sadness at the devastation. Infrastructure and farmland have also been damaged, said the statement issued on behalf […]

Annual temperatures for Alaska, 1900-2018. Alaska’s ten coldest years on record (blue dots) all occurred before 1980. Meanwhile, nine of its ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1980. Data: NASA GISS and UAF / Brian Brettschneider. Graphic: Rick Thoman / Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy

October 21, 2022

Warming waters causing mass die-off of Alaska snow crabs – Total numbers down 84 percent since 2018 – “The cold-water habitat they need was virtually absent, which suggests that temperature is really the key culprit in this population decline”

20 October 2022 (CBS News) – Climate change is a prime suspect in a mass die-off of Alaska’s snow crabs, experts say, after the state took the unprecedented step of canceling their harvest this season to save the species. According to an annual survey of the Bering Sea floor carried out by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, […]