South America – Desdemona Despair

The carcass of an elephant seal is seen next to plastic garbage on a beach, in Pico Sayago, in the Patagonian province of Chubut, Argentina, 26 September 2024. Photo: Agustin Marcarian / REUTERS

October 5, 2024

Fishing waste chokes marine wildlife, threatens human health in Argentina’s Patagonia – Mountains of plastic waste from the fishing industry cover the coast along the Valdes Peninsula

By Miguel Lo Bianco 4 October 2024 VALDES PENINSULA, Argentina (Reuters) – Mountains of plastic waste from the fishing industry have covered the coast along the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina’s Patagonia, threatening the lives of sea lions, fish, penguins and whales and also endangering human health. The coasts of the peninsula on Argentina’s Atlantic coast, […]

Dengue cases in Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras, 2023-2024 and 5-year average. In the Region of the Americas, the number of dengue cases recorded during the first half of 2024 exceeded the maximum number of cases historically reported in a year, as compared to all previously recorded years. As of epidemiological week (EW) 23 of 2024, 43 countries and territories in the Region of the Americas have reported 9,386,082 cases of dengue; this number is twice as high as the number of cases recorded throughout 2023, 4,617,108 cases. Data: Adapted from the Pan American Health Organization / PLISA Health Information Platform for the Americas, Dengue Indicators Portal, Washington, D.C. PAHO; 2024 cited 13 June 2024. Graphic: PAHO / WHO

July 7, 2024

Dengue fever: CDC issues alert amid U.S. and global spike in cases – In 2024, cases of dengue fever in the Americas have reached record-breaking levels, with more than 9.7 million reported cases, twice the number for the entire year in 2023

By Finn Cohen 27 June 2024 (Healthline) – As cases of dengue fever rise worldwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an advisory for physicians, public health authorities, and the public in the United States to be alert to the trend. So far in 2024, cases of dengue fever in countries in the Americas have reached record-breaking […]

Map showing additional days with temperatures above the 90th percentile in the current climate over 15 May 2023 to 15 May 2024, added by the burning of fossil fuels. Produced 21 May 2024. Graphic: Climate Central

June 1, 2024

Global warming added a month’s worth of extra-hot days between 2023 and 2024 – “That’s a lot of toll that we’ve imposed on people. It’s a lot of toll that we’ve imposed on nature.”

By Raymond Zhong 28 May 2024 (The New York Times) – Over the past year of record-shattering warmth, the average person on Earth experienced 26 more days of abnormally high temperatures than they otherwise would have, were it not for human-induced climate change, scientists said Tuesday [Climate change and the escalation of global extreme heat […]

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 […]

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 […]

Geographical pattern of the primary drivers of deteriorating status among amphibians. a,b, The primary drivers of deteriorating status among amphibians during 1980–2004 (482 species; a) and 2004–2022 (306 species; b). Cell colour was determined by the primary driver impacting the most species. Where two primary drivers equally contribute to a cell, an intermediate colour is shown. The stars indicate where the primary driver is undetermined or there are numerous primary drivers. The cell area is 7,775 km2. Graphic: Luedtke, et al., 2023 / Nature

October 29, 2023

Climate change emerges as major driver of amphibian declines, new research finds – “It’s a gut punch and an awakening”

By JoAnn Adkins 4 October 2023 (FIU) – Amphibians are in trouble and in desperate need of conservation action, according to a new global assessment of the world’s amphibian population. Salamanders are experiencing the greatest decline in numbers, but frogs, toads, newts, and salamanders throughout the Neotropics — extending from South Florida and Caribbean islands […]

Wind farms in Boqueirão da Onça, or Jaguars’ Ravine, in the Caatinga in northeastern Brazil. Conservationists say companies shouldn’t install turbines in long rows, which forces animals to make unnecessarily long detours. Photo: Dado Galdieri / The Wall Street Journal

September 30, 2023

Brazil’s big cats under threat from wind farms – “Wind power is a fantastic proposal, and the northeast certainly has plenty of wind … but wind parks must also take into account what is happening here on the ground”

By Luciana Magalhaes and Samantha Pearson 17 September 2023 JUAZEIRO, Brazil – Weighing more than 100 pounds, big cats have long reigned over this hot and semi-arid region of Brazil, developing tougher paws for the scorched earth and reaching speeds of 50 miles an hour to bring down wild boar and deer. But nothing could […]