Mexico – Desdemona Despair

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Map showing notable economic loss events due to natural and climate disasters in 2023. Global economic losses in 2023 were higher than the 21st century average. Economic losses from global natural disasters in 2023 are estimated at $380 billion, above long-term and short-term averages, after adjusting historical losses to today’s values using the U.S. Consumer Price Index. All continents recorded remarkable natural disaster events in 2023 and multiple countries faced the most significant disasters in their modern histories. The global map shows event and peril patterns that contributed to the overall economic losses in 2023. The largest loss driver was earthquake, yet this was largely caused by a handful of events, notably the earthquake sequence in Turkey and Syria. Severe convective storms came second, with the largest individual losses concentrated in the United States and Europe. Graphic: Aon

February 19, 2024

Aon: Number of billion-dollar disasters in 2023 highest on record – Severe convective storms were the most damaging peril for insurers

LONDON, 23 January 2024 (Aon) – Aon plc, a leading global professional services firm, today published its 2024 Climate and Catastrophe Insight report, which identifies global natural disaster and climate trends to help make better decisions to manage volatility and enhance global resilience. The report reveals that the 398 global natural disaster events caused a $380 billion (2022: $355 billion) […]

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 […]

A church is surrounded by water in a flooded neighborhood in Kherson, Ukraine, following the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka / Associated Press

December 28, 2023

Water increasingly at the center of conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East – “It’s very disturbing that in particular attacks on civilian water infrastructure seem to be on the rise”

By Ian James 28 December 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – Six months ago, an explosion ripped apart Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, unleashing floods that killed 58 people, devastated the landscape along the Dnipro River and cut off water to productive farmland. The destruction of the dam — which Ukrainian officials and the European Parliament blame on Russia, […]

Storm track of Hurricane Idalia before it made landfall in Florida. The warm sea surface temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico fueled the storm, allowing it to strengthen to a Category 4 hurricane from a Category 1 just hours before making landfall on 30 August 2023. Graphic: The New York Times

December 25, 2023

2023 hurricane season marked by storms that “really rapidly intensified”

By William B. Davis and Judson Jones 2 December 2023 (The New York Times) – The 2023 hurricane seasons in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific came to an end this week, with both basins experiencing an above average number of storms, fueled by extremely warm ocean temperatures. The two basins had a combined 37 storms, […]

A new “bubble”, the glass pipe used for smoking meth. Photo: Hilary Swift / The New York Times

November 13, 2023

“Super meth” and other drugs push U.S. crisis beyond opioids – “It’s no longer an opioid epidemic. This is an addiction crisis.”

By Jan Hoffman 13 November 2023 (The New York Times) – Dr. Nic Helmstetter crab-walked down a steep, rain-slicked trail into a grove of maple and cottonwood trees to his destination: a dozen tents in a clearing by the Kalamazoo River, surrounded by the detritus of lives perpetually on the move. Discarded red plastic cups. […]

Global mean surface temperature anomaly, 1970-2023. The average global temperature in 2023 was 1.32°C above that during the pre-industrial baseline period of 1850 to 1900, surpassing the previous record of 1.29°C that was set from October 2015 to September 2016. Data: Climate Central. Graphic: Nature

November 10, 2023

Earth had its hottest year on record in 2023 – “This is the hottest temperature that our planet has experienced in something like 125,000 years”

By Carissa Wong 10 November 2023 (Nature) – The past 12 months were the hottest on record. Some 7.3 billion people worldwide were exposed, for at least 10 days, to temperatures that were heavily influenced by global warming, with one-quarter of people facing dangerous levels of extreme heat over the past 12 months, according to a report […]