Africa – Page 2 – Desdemona Despair

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 […]

Monthly global surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to 1850–1900 from January 1940 to March 2024, plotted as time series for each year. 2024 is shown with a thick yellow line, 2023 with a thick red line, and all other years with thin lines shaded according to the decade, from blue (1940s) to brick red (2020s). Data source: ERA5. Graphic: C3S / ECMWF

April 27, 2024

Earth’s warmest March is 10th straight record month, NOAA and NASA find

By Jonathan Erdman 12 April 2024 (Weather.com) – March was Earth’s warmest on record, according to data from three separate agencies, the latest month in a stretch of heat records since the planet’s hottest year in 2023. Another month, another record In a report released Friday, NOAA found March’s globally average temperature was 2.43 degrees Fahrenheit above […]

Map showing projected income changes in 2049 compared to an economy without climate change. Income changes are committed in the sense that they are caused by historical emissions. Photo: Kotz et al., 2024 / Nature

April 27, 2024

New study calculates climate change’s economic impact will hit $38 trillion per year by 2049 – World economy already committed to income reduction of 19 percent – World’s poorest countries will suffer 61 percent bigger income loss than the richest ones

By Seth Borenstein 17 April 2024 (AP) – Climate change will reduce future global income by about 19% in the next 25 years compared to a fictional world that’s not warming, with the poorest areas and those least responsible for heating the atmosphere taking the biggest monetary hit, a new study said. Climate change’s economic […]

Maps showing Central and South-East Africa cholera attack rate per 100,000 people (suspected and confirmed cases per month) between September and December 2023, as of 15 December 2023. Graphic: WHO

January 27, 2024

Cholera cases soar globally amid shortage of vaccines – “The unprecedented rate of cases and deaths is terrifying, and utterly overwhelming the health systems of these countries”

By Weronika Strzyżyńska 12 January 2024 (The Guardian) – Cholera cases soared last year, according to preliminary data from the World Health Organization, which recorded 4,000 cholera deaths and 667,000 cases globally. The numbers surpassed that of 2022, and the WHO has classified the global resurgence of cholera as a grade 3 emergency, its highest internal health […]

A map of the world plotted with some of the most significant climate events that occurred during November 2023. Graphic: NOAA/NCEI

December 29, 2023

NOAA reports 2023 hottest year on record, so far – “We will look back at 2023 and think of it as: remember that year that wasn’t so bad?”

By Lauren Sommer 28 December 2023 (NPR) – As 2023 draws to a close, it’s going out on top. “It’s looking virtually certain at this point that 2023 will be the hottest year on record,” says Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit that analyzes climate trends. Though temperature records from December have […]

Annual hot-hours under (A) 1.5, (B) 2, (C) 3, and (D) 4 °C of warming relative to preindustrial level, (E) population projection in 2050 following the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2, and (F) population subject to accumulated duration of 1 wk to 3 mo of uncompensable heat stress annually under 1–4 °C of global warming (the shaded area corresponds to the 10th to 90th percentiles of CMIP6 model spread). Rectangles in panel a delineate regions where heat exposure increases with global warming are particularly large and will be examined in detail in later sections. Graphic: Vecellio, et al., 2023 / PNAS

October 31, 2023

Climate-driven extreme heat may make parts of Earth too hot for humans – “If temperatures continue to rise, we will live in a world where crops are failing and millions or billions of people are trying to migrate because their native regions are uninhabitable”

By Aaron Wagner 9 October 2023 UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (PennState) – If global temperatures increase by 1 degree Celsius (C) or more than current levels, each year billions of people will be exposed to heat and humidity so extreme they will be unable to naturally cool themselves, according to interdisciplinary research from the Penn State […]

Flood damage in the city of Derna, where the death toll from floods in eastern Libya on 11 September 2023 was expected to soar dramatically. Photo: AFP / Getty Images

September 12, 2023

Up to 10,000 people feared dead after “catastrophic” floods sweep Libya – “The bodies are still lying on the ground in many parts. Hospitals are filled with bodies. And there are areas we have yet to reach.”

By Patrick Smith 12 September 2023 (NBC News) – As many as 10,000 people are feared dead after a storm slammed into Libya, unleashing a devastating surge of floodwaters across the country’s east. A disaster wrought by intense rainfall from Mediterranean storm Daniel intensified when two dams burst — with more than 2,000 people killed in […]

Percent prevalence of undernourishment, 2015-2022. Data: FAOSTAT Suite of Food Security Indicators, cited 12 July 2023. Graphic: Gallup

September 10, 2023

Hunger, food insecurity still higher than before pandemic – At the global level, there was no progress toward reducing food insecurity in 2022

30 August 2023 (Gallup) – Although hunger at the global level stopped rising in 2022, the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report shows that it is still increasing in many places around the world and that levels of both hunger and food insecurity remain higher today than they were before the pandemic. […]

Alain-Richard Donwahi in May 2017, in Abidjan. Mr. Donwahi is a former Ivory Coast defence minister who led the 2022 UN COP15 summit on desertification. Photo: Sia Kambou / AFP

August 20, 2023

Global heating likely to hit world food supply before 1.5°C, says UN expert – “Climate change is a pandemic that we need to fight quickly. See how fast the degradation of the climate is going – I think it’s going even faster than we predicted.”

By Fiona Harvey 12 August 2023 (The Guardian) – The world is likely to face major disruption to food supplies well before temperatures rise by the 1.5C target, the president of the UN’s desertification conference has warned, as the impacts of the climate crisis combine with water scarcity and poor farming practices to threaten global […]

This map shows global temperature anomalies for July 2023 according to the GISTEMP analysis by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Temperature anomalies reflect how July 2023 compared to the average July temperature from 1951-1980. Graphic: NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies

August 20, 2023

NASA announces July 2023 was hottest month on record – “The science is clear this isn’t normal”

By Sheri Walsh 14 August 2023 (UPI) – July 2023 was the hottest month on record in 143 years, as Americans felt “the effects of the climate crisis,” scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York announced Monday. According to NASA, July 2023 was on average 0.43 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than any […]