Climate Crisis Made Australia’s Historic Wildfires at Least 30% More Likely, Study Finds
05 March
Climate
A fire burns in New South Wales, Australia in November of 2019. Dean Sewell / The Sydney Morning Herald via Getty Images
The climate crisis played a significant role in Australia's devastating wildfire season, a group of researchers has confirmed.
<p>Their findings, <a href="https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/bushfires-in-australia-2019-2020/" target="_blank">made public ahead of peer review Wednesday</a>, concluded that the climate crisis made the fires that killed at least 34 people and destroyed nearly 6,000 buildings at least 30% more likely, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/climate/australia-wildfires-climate-change.html" target="_blank">The New York Times reported</a>. And if global temperatures rise to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the conditions that sparked the flames would be at least four times more likely to recur.</p>
<p>"Last year the fire prevention system in Australia, which is extremely well prepared for bushfires, was straining. It was at the limits of what it could handle, with volunteers working for weeks on end," study coauthor Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute told <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51742646" target="_blank">BBC News</a>. "As the world warms, these events will become more likely and more common. And it's not something that we are ready for."</p>
<p>The study was carried out by World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists who have developed a method for rapidly determining the climate footprint of specific <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/extreme-weather" target="_self">extreme weather</a> events, as<a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-climate-change-did-influence-australias-unprecedented-bushfires/" target="_blank"> Scientific American explained</a>. This was the most complicated such study the group has carried out, van Oldenborgh told The New York Times, because so many factors influence wildfires, from temperature and <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/drought" target="_self">drought</a> to wind and humidity.</p><p>The researchers looked at something called the Fire Weather Index, a measurement that combines all of these factors, and analyzed the likelihood of 2019 and 2020's high fire index when compared to the likelihood of such a high index occurring in the cooler climate of 1900.</p>
<p>Climate models showed that the chance of this past year's extreme fire weather had increased by 30% due to climate change, while observational studies showed that such weather was four times more likely to occur now than at the beginning of the 20th century.</p><p>The researchers also looked separately at heat and drought. They found no clear connection between climate change and drought risk, but they did for heat, Scientific American explained. The historical record showed that extreme heat waves were 10 times more likely now, while climate models showed that their probability had doubled.</p><p>The discrepancy between what the models predict and how high temperatures are actually getting is one weakness in the study, the researchers acknowledged. They said the actual contribution of climate change to the fires is likely to be much higher, but the 30% figure was the figure they could prove for sure.</p>
<div id="0b171" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2GBJJS1583417112"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1235259193441079297" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">Our WWA attribution study of Australian bushfire risk is out. TL;DNR: due to model deficiencies we can only compute… https://t.co/tQwLGXET5h</div> — Geert Jan van Oldenborgh (@Geert Jan van Oldenborgh)<a href="https://twitter.com/gjvoldenborgh/statuses/1235259193441079297">1583343716.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>"I hope that people will see this as the study that did show there is a link between climate change and the bushfires," van Oldenborgh told Scientific American.</p><p>The study comes <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/australia-wildfires-climate-models-2645279035.html?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2" target="_self">about a week after another study</a> emphasized the failure of climate models, showing that the intensity and duration of the Australian fires themselves greatly exceeded what climate models had predicted.</p><p>Climate scientist Michael Mann, who was not involved in Wednesday's study, <a href="https://michaelmann.net/content/comments-new-world-weather-attribution-analysis-australian-bushfires" target="_blank">also emphasized</a> the discrepancy between climate models and reality.</p><p>"Current generation climate models are simply not up to the task of extreme event attribution in many cases," he wrote in his response. "They are not capturing key atmospheric mechanisms behind many extreme summer weather episodes that are almost certainly being influenced by climate change."</p><p>He argued that studies like the World Weather Attribution report needed to be upfront about these limitations.</p><p>"Otherwise, they are potentially misleading the public and policymakers by understating the role that climate change is playing in these unprecedented weather extremes," he wrote.</p>
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Air conditioners, like these in a residential and restaurant area of Singapore city, could put a massive strain on electricity grids during more intense heatwaves. Taro Hama @ e-kamakura / Moment / Getty Images
By Tim Radford
Scientists in the U.S. have added a new dimension to the growing hazard of extreme heat. As global average temperatures rise, so do the frequency, duration and intensity of heatwaves.
<p>And that's not the only factor to worry about. By mid-century, the area straddled by those <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-10/nh-hwc100719.php" target="_blank">bands of extreme heat could increase by 50%</a> – if nations attempt seriously to contain <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-change" target="_self">climate change</a>.</p><p>But if humans carry on burning <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/fossil-fuels" target="_self">fossil fuels</a> in ever-greater quantities and felling more and more reaches of tropical <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/forests" target="_self">forests</a>, the most dangerous and <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/extreme-weather">extreme</a> heatwaves in the future could cover areas 80% bigger than at present.</p><p>"As the physical size of these regions increases, more people will be exposed to heat stress," warns Bradfield Lyon, associate research professor in the <a href="https://umaine.edu/earthclimate/people/bradfield-lyon/" target="_blank">Climate Change Institute and School of Earth and Climate at the University of Maine</a>.</p><p>Lyon, lead author of a <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab4b41" target="_blank">new study in <em>Environmental Research Letters</em></a>, says: "Larger heatwaves would also increase electrical loads and peak energy demand on the electricity grid as more people and businesses turn on air conditioning as a response."<br></p><p>Climate scientists have warned repeatedly that <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/more-heatwaves-by-2020-are-now-certain/" target="_blank">higher average temperatures must mean ever hotter extremes</a>.</p><p>By the century's end, under some <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/22490-2/" target="_blank">climate projections</a>, three out of four people on the planet could be exposed to <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/hotter-planet-faces-more-killer-heat/" target="_blank">potentially dangerous heatwaves</a>.</p>
<h2>Double Punch</h2><p>In some regions, the double punch of <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/growing-risk-of-extreme-heat-and-humidity/" target="_blank">high heat and very high humidity</a> could make conditions intolerable, and scientists in the U.S. recently counted <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/23392-2/" target="_blank">27 ways in which high temperatures could claim lives</a>.</p><p>In principle, extremes of heat are already a <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/extremes-of-heat-will-hit-health-and-wealth/" target="_blank">threat not just to public health, but also to national economies</a>. Researchers in Australia have already <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/australia-pays-cost-of-climate-driven-heat-waves/" target="_blank">started to count the cost</a>.</p><p>Until now, the interest has focused on the highest temperatures by day and by night, the number of days of sustained heat, and the frequency with which extremes might return.</p><p>But the new dimension – the increased area oppressed by extreme heat – presents unexpected challenges for city authorities and energy utilities.</p><p>"If you have a large contiguous heatwave over a highly populated area, it would be harder for that area to meet peak electric demand than it would be for several areas with smaller heatwaves that, when combined, are the same size," said one of the report's other authors, <a href="https://iri.columbia.edu/contact/staff-directory/anthony-barnston/" target="_blank">Anthony Barnston</a>, chief forecaster at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Why Night Can Be the Most Dangerous Time During <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/HeatWaves?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#HeatWaves</a> <a href="https://t.co/5uzUqiteC2">https://t.co/5uzUqiteC2</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/climatecouncil?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@climatecouncil</a></p>— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) <a href="https://twitter.com/EcoWatch/status/1158482900049940482?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 5, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from our media associate </em><em><a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/heatwaves/" target="_blank">Climate News Network</a>.</em><br/></p>
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Climate Change Driving Surge in ‘Day-Night Hot Extremes’ in Northern Hemisphere
12 February
Climate
Oil rigs seen at sunset off the southern California coast. Neil Nissing / The Image Bank / Getty Images
By Daisy Dunne
Deadly "day-night hot extremes" are increasing across the northern hemisphere due to climate change, a new study finds.
<p>And the number of people exposed to such events, also known as "compound hot extremes," is likely to increase "several-fold" as temperatures continue to climb in the coming decades, the study authors tell Carbon Brief.</p>
<p class=""><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-driving-surge-in-day-night-hot-extremes-in-northern-hemisphere" target="_blank">Carbon Brief</a>.</em></p>
<p>If global temperatures reach 2 C — the upper limit set by countries in the <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/interactive-the-paris-agreement-on-climate-change" target="_blank">Paris agreement</a> — the frequency of compound hot extremes could more than double across the northern hemisphere, when compared to 2012, the research finds.</p><p>However, if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed, compound hot extremes could become eight times more frequent by the end of the century.<br></p><p>The study sets out "clear evidence" that human-caused climate change is leaving its mark on extreme heat events, another scientist tells Carbon Brief.</p>
Day and Night
<p>The new study, published in <a href="https://nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14233-8" target="_blank">Nature Communications</a>, looks specifically at "compound hot extremes" — a 24-hour period in summer where hot daytime temperatures are followed by similar nightime temperatures. (Temperatures are considered "hot" if they are in the top 10% of temperatures experienced by a region from 1960-2012.)</p><p>These kinds of events pose a particularly high danger to human health, explain study authors <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/people/yang-chen/" target="_blank">Dr Yang Chen</a>, a climate extremes scientist from the <a href="http://www.cma.gov.cn/en2014/aboutcma/organizational/InstitutionsunderCMA/201409/t20140915_261139.html" target="_blank">Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences</a>, and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jun_Wang272" target="_blank">Dr Jun Wang</a>, a climate and meteorological scientist from the <a href="http://english.iap.cas.cn/" target="_blank">Institute of Atmospheric Physics</a> in China. In a joint interview, they tell Carbon Brief:</p><blockquote>Simply put, compound hot extremes deprive humans of the valuable chance of relief, which could have been provided by the 'cooling-off' effects of a nighttime low.<br></blockquote><p>Such conditions occurred during the <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/study-links-heatwave-deaths-london-paris-climate-change" target="_blank">2003 summer heatwave</a> in Europe, which saw <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631069107003770" target="_blank">70,000 deaths</a> across 16 countries, the authors say. Another example is the <a href="https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/July-2015/1995-Chicago-heat-wave/" target="_blank">1995 Chicago heatwave</a>, which led to more than 700 heat-related deaths in just five days.<br></p><p>The study is the first to present "a complete storyline on compound hot extremes" — investigating how they have changed, the role of climate change in this and how they might increase in the future, the authors say.<br></p><p>The results show that compound hot extremes "are significantly increasing and will continue to increase in frequency and intensity" across the northern hemisphere, say Chen and Wang:</p><blockquote>These increases in heat hazards will translate into several-fold increases in population exposure to them. The rise of anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gas emissions is to blame for these increases.<br></blockquote>Burning Up
<p>For the first part of their study, the authors analysed the "fingerprint" of human-caused climate change on compound hot extremes to date. To do this, they conducted an "<a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/category/science/extreme-weather/attribution" target="_blank">attribution</a>" analysis.<br></p><p>This involves using <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-do-climate-models-work" target="_blank">climate models</a> to produce two sets of simulations: one including <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-scientists-think-100-of-global-warming-is-due-to-humans" target="_blank">all the factors that affect the climate</a>, including human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, volcanic eruptions and solar variability, and one including all of these factors except for greenhouse gas emissions.</p><p>The researchers then compared the frequency and intensity of compound hot extremes in both of these scenarios.</p><p>They found that only the scenario including human-caused greenhouse gas emissions could closely reproduce the pattern of compound hot extremes observed from 1960 to 2012. In their research paper, the authors write:</p><blockquote>We find that the summer-mean warming over 1960-2012 largely dictates the past increases in frequency and intensity of compound hot extremes during that period in both observations and simulations.<br></blockquote><p>The maps below show observed changes in summertime compound hot extreme frequency (left) and intensity (right) across the northern hemisphere from 1960-2012.</p><p>The left-hand map shows changes in the number of compound hot extreme days per decade (yellow to red for increases; light to dark blue for decreases), while the right-hand map shows changes in the average temperature of compound hot extremes per decade (same color scale).</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjY3ODQ5MC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MzcyNzMxNn0.3Qy08rehvqYym0vPHFEYOOlXygOkrz_ALOQUiWKL8y8/img.png?width=980" id="57a44" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="48ac462dca461f1cc5a9ff87f7c67427" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Contributions from changing temperature mean and variability. Wang et al. (2020)
<p>The map shows that increases in the frequency and intensity of compound hot extremes are widespread across the northern hemisphere, with parts of continental Europe and China particularly affected.</p><p>(Gaps in the data prevented the researchers from analysing changes in the most southern parts of the northern hemisphere, the authors say in their research paper.)</p><p>While the global pattern of increases is best explained by human-caused global warming, it is possible that some regional differences may be explained by other factors, the authors say.</p><p>For example, the drying of soils could help to explain local variation of heat extremes, the authors say in their research paper.</p><p>This is because dry soils accumulate heat during the day and release it at night, Wang and Chen say, making night hot extremes and, therefore, compound hot extremes, more likely.</p>Furnace Forecast
<p>The authors also used climate models to project possible future changes to compound hot extremes until 2100. They investigated two scenarios: one "<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0148-z" target="_blank">intermediate mitigation</a>" pathway with moderately high greenhouse gas emissions ("<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0151-4" target="_blank">RCP4.5</a>") and one with very high greenhouse gas emissions ("<a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-the-high-emissions-rcp8-5-global-warming-scenario" target="_blank">RCP8.5</a>").</p><p>Within each emissions scenario, they also looked at the changes to compound hot extremes expected if the world reaches 1.5 C and 2 C of global warming, which are the temperature limits set by the <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/interactive-the-paris-agreement-on-climate-change" target="_blank">Paris agreement</a>.</p><p>The charts below show the average expected change in the number of summertime compound hot extreme days (purple line), as well as independent hot days (blue line) and independent hot nights (turquoise line) across the northern hemisphere under RCP4.5 (top) and RCP8.5 (bottom) until 2100. (Compound extremes are where a hot day is followed by a hot night, whereas an "independent hot day" is when a hot day is not followed by a hot night.)</p><p>On the charts, red circles point out when the temperature limits of 1.5 C and 2 C will be breached in each scenario. The bottom chart also highlights when 4C could be breached. The various data points represent results from different climate models.</p><p>(It is worth noting that events are considered to be compound or independent. So, a 24-hour period where a hot day is followed by a hot night would be considered a compound extreme, but not an independent hot day or hot night.)</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjY3ODQ5My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwODcyNzk3Mn0.C2pCow5E2GKET9tRcrpw_BszacBruAs5y9kDGFg4AD4/img.png?width=980" id="31a0d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="5a2361782343ec141a8d14863900d80f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Constrained projections of summertime hot extremes. Wang et al. (2020)
<p>The results show that the average number of compound hot extreme days across the northern hemisphere in summer would more than double if temperatures reach 2 C, when compared to 2012.</p><p>Keeping temperatures at 1.5 C could see five fewer compound hot extreme days across the northern hemisphere, on average, when compared to 2 C, the research adds.</p><p>If greenhouse gas emissions are extremely high (RCP8.5), the number of summertime compound hot extremes could increase eight-fold by 2100, when compared to 2012, the results show.</p><p>The charts also show that compound hot events are expected to increase at a much more rapid rate than independent hot day or hot night events.</p><p>This is chiefly because <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/11/climate/summer-nights-warming-faster-than-days-dangerous.html" target="_blank">climate change is known</a> to have a larger effect on nightime temperatures than daytime temperatures, the authors say.</p><p>Therefore, as the chances of hot nights become higher, the chances of compound hot events also increase — and, so, the chances of a hot day or night occurring independently decreases, explain Chen and Wang.</p>‘Clear Evidence’
<p>The findings reinforce "the urgency in reducing emission of greenhouse gases" for policymakers, say Chen and Wang:</p><blockquote>We should keep the point in mind that as the globe warms, future summers are increasingly dominated by compound hot extremes and become more uncomfortable. Namely, a hot day accompanied by a hot night without a relief window for humans might become a 'new norm'. As a result, vigilance against excess heat should be kept through day and night.<br></blockquote><p>The study is "impressively comprehensive," says <a href="http://www.bristol.ac.uk/geography/people/eunice-t-lo/overview.html" target="_blank">Dr Eunice Lo</a>, a research associate in climate extremes from the <a href="https://www.bristol.ac.uk/" target="_blank">University of Bristol</a>, who was not involved in the research. She tells Carbon Brief:</p><blockquote>I think the main take home message from this study is that we should use consecutive day-night hot extremes as a major heat-health indicator for policymaking, as compound hot extremes are projected to have larger future increases in frequency and intensity then hot days or nights.<br></blockquote><p>The findings produce "clear evidence" that human-caused climate change is leaving its mark on extreme heat events, says <a href="https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/people/peter-stott" target="_blank">Prof Peter Stott</a>, who leads on climate monitoring and attribution at the <a href="https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/climate-change/organisations-and-reports/met-office-hadley-centre" target="_blank">Met Office Hadley Centre</a>. Stott, who was also not involved in the research, tells Carbon Brief:</p><blockquote>I don't find the conclusions of the study very surprising, but I do like the way the authors have comprehensively set out the implications – the clear evidence that the changes to date are driven by human emissions and the clear evidence that future changes will result in significant increases in the frequency and intensity of these compound extremes worldwide.<br></blockquote>From Your Site Articles
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chuchart duangdaw / Moment / Getty Images
By Tim Radford
The year is less than four weeks old, but scientists already know that carbon dioxide emissions will continue to head upwards — as they have every year since measurements began — leading to a continuation of the Earth's rising heat.
<p>And they warn that the rise will be <a href="https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2020/2020-global-co2-forecast" target="_blank">steeper than usual, partly because of the devastating bush fires in Australia</a>.</p>
<p> <em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/2020-starts-with-the-plain-prospect-of-rising-heat/" target="_blank">Climate News Network</a>.<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2644916059#/" target="_self"></a></em><em></em></p>
<p>The warning is a reminder that global heating and <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change/">climate change</a> create their own positive feedbacks: more numerous and calamitous forest fires surrender more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which helps raise temperatures, <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/half-a-degree-may-make-heat-impact-far-worse/" target="_blank">accentuate droughts and heat extremes</a>, and create conditions for even more catastrophic forest fires.</p><p>The news is that the proportion of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will peak at 417 parts per million (ppm) in the next 11 months, but settle to an average of just over 414 ppm. This represents <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/australia-ablaze-up-close-and-in-your-face/" target="_blank">a predicted 10 percent increase on the previous year's rise</a>, and a fifth of that can be pinned on blazing eucalypts in New South Wales.</p><p>Atmospheric scientists began keeping meticulous records of CO2 levels in the atmosphere in 1958. The average for most of human history — until the Industrial Revolution and the mass exploitation of coal, oil and gas — was no higher than 285 ppm.</p><p>The warning, from the British Met Office, comes hard on the heels of an address by America's President Trump — who has previously claimed that climate change is a hoax — at Davos in Switzerland. He told the World Economic Forum (WEF) <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51189430" target="_blank">to disregard those he dismissed as "prophets of doom."</a></p>
<p>In fact he was addressing an organization that had only recently issued its own warning that "<a href="https://www.weforum.org/press/2020/01/burning-planet-climate-fires-and-political-flame-wars-rage/" target="_blank">severe threats to our climate</a>" accounted for all the identified top long-term risks that face the modern world.</p><p>The <a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2020" target="_blank">WEF Global Risks Report warned of extreme weather events</a> with major damage to property, infrastructure and loss of human life. It also pointed to other hazards: among them the failure of attempts to mitigate or adapt to climate change by governments and industry; human-induced environmental damage; and to biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, all of which are inseparable from the climate crisis.</p><p>Even the fifth set of global risks was environmental: these included earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and geomagnetic storms.</p><p>And, the WEF said, time to address these threats was running out. "The political landscape is polarised, sea levels are rising and climate fires are burning. This is the year when world leaders must work with all sectors of society to repair and invigorate our systems of co-operation, not just for short-term benefit, but for tackling our deep-rooted risks," said Borge Brende, president of the WEF.</p><p>And as the WEF issued its own doom-laden warnings, scientists at two great U.S. research agencies confirmed those fears. <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/nsfc-nna011520.php" target="_blank">The space agency NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration</a> examined their separate datasets to pronounce 2019 the second warmest year since global records began, and to confirm that the decade just ended was also the warmest since records began.</p>
Relentless Increase
<p>"Every decade since the 1960s has been warmer than the one before," said <a href="https://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/gschmidt/" target="_blank">Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies</a>.</p><p>The British Met Office — working from yet another set of data — agreed that <a href="https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2020/confirmation-that-2019-concludes-warmest-decade-on-record" target="_blank">2019 had been 1.05°C above the average for most of human history</a>, and that the last five years were the warmest since records began in 1850.</p><p>And only days beforehand, Chinese scientists had taken the temperature of the world's oceans to find them <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/ioap-row010920.php" target="_blank">warmer than at any time in recorded history</a>. The past 10 years had been the warmest decade for ocean temperatures worldwide.</p><p>In 2019, they write in the journal <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00376-020-9283-7" target="_blank">Advances in Atmospheric Sciences</a>, a partnership of 14 researchers from 11 institutes around the world had measured from the surface to a depth of 2000 meters to find that the global ocean — and 70 percent of the planet is covered in blue water — is now 0.075°C warmer on average than it was between 1981 and 2010.</p><p>Measured in the basic units of heat-energy, this means that the seas have soaked up 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of heat.</p>100 Seconds to Midnight
<p>"That's a lot of zeros indeed. To make it easier to understand, I did a calculation," said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lijing_Cheng" target="_blank">Lijing Cheng, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences</a>, who led the study.</p><p>"The amount of heat we have put into the world's oceans in the last 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atomic bomb explosions. This measured ocean warming is irrefutable and is further proof of global warming. There are no reasonable alternatives aside from the human emissions of heat-trapping gases to explain this heating."</p><p>On Jan. 23 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it had moved the hands of its symbolic Doomsday Clock to <a href="https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/" target="_blank">100 seconds from midnight</a> <i>—</i> the closest they have ever been to the time chosen to represent apocalypse.</p><p>The reason? "Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers <i>— </i>nuclear war and climate change <i>—</i> that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society's ability to respond," said the scientists.</p><p>"World leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode."</p>From Your Site Articles
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Rising Temperatures to Be More Deadly Than Infectious Diseases, New Study Says
04 August
Health + Wellness
A girl sits under a temporary shade made by joining two bed in Churu, Rajasthan on June 4, 2019. Temperatures in the Indian desert city hit 50 degrees C (122 F) for the second time in three days, sending residents scrambling for shade. MONEY SHARMA / AFP via Getty Images
Current efforts to curb an infectious disease show the potential we have for collective action. That action and more will be needed if we want to stem the coming wave of heat-related deaths that will surpass the number of people who die from all infectious diseases, according to a new study, as The Guardian reported.
<p>By the end of this century, extreme heat spells could kill roughly as many people as all infectious diseases combined, including HIV, malaria and yellow fever, according to <a href="http://impactlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/CIL_NBER_MortalityPaper_3Aug2020.pdf" target="_blank">a new study</a> from the Climate Impact Lab, a group of <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-crisis" target="_self">climate</a> economists and researchers at several U.S. universities. Specifically, the study projects that climate change's effect on temperatures could raise global mortality rates by 73 deaths per 100,000 people in 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions stay where they are, according to <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/03/1005965/climate-change-fueled-heatwaves-could-kill-millions/" target="_blank">MIT Technology Review</a>. Under a scenario of continued high emissions, the researchers estimate that climate change's impact on mortality will cost the world roughly 3.2 percent of global economic output in 2100, according to the <a href="http://www.impactlab.org/news-insights/global-death-rate-from-rising-temperatures/" target="_blank">Climate Impact Lab</a>.</p><p>"The global cost to human health from warming is likely to be profound," said Solomon Hsiang, a climate policy researcher at UC Berkeley and an author of the study, in a UC Berkeley <a href="https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/without-action-climate-deaths-could-soar-by-centurys-end-says-new-study/" target="_blank">press release</a>. "We are studying the risk of death faced by our own children. Today's 10-year-old fifth-grader will turn 65 in 2075, facing mortality risks from climate change every year of their retirement. Failing to address climate change is not that different from driving your kids around without a seat belt: you are putting their lives at risk."</p>
<p>To conduct the study, the authors analyzed the historic links between temperature records and mortality data in dozens of nations, and projecting future deaths using highly regional climate projections. They sifted through the information in an enormous global dataset of 399 million death records across 41 countries, accounting for 55 percent of the global population. They also looked at temperature records to see how the two are related. That methodology allowed them to pinpoint both direct causes such as heat stroke and less obvious links such as a spike heart attacks during a heat wave, as The Guardian reported.</p><p>The researchers accounted for the mitigations that wealthy countries make, like air conditioning and cooling centers, leading them to the conclusion that poorer countries will bear the brunt of the suffering from extreme heat.</p>
<p>"A lot of older people die due to indirect heat [effects]," said Amir Jina, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, as The Guardian reported. "It's eerily similar to Covid – vulnerable people are those who have pre-existing or underlying conditions. If you have a heart problem and are hammered for days by the heat, you are going to be pushed towards collapse."</p><p>In the worst-hit countries, including Ghana, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan, climate change could be responsible for an additional 200 or more deaths per 100,000 by the end of the century, the research shows, according to the Climate Impact Lab. By contrast, places like Canada and Norway will see fewer weather-related deaths and fewer people will die from freezing temperatures as they become less frequent.</p><p>"You see the really bad impacts at the tropics," added Jina. "There's not one single worldwide condition, there's a lot of different changes with poorer people much more affected with limited ability to adapt. The richer countries, even if they have increases in mortality, can pay more to adapt to it. It's really the people who have done the least to cause climate change who are suffering from it."</p>
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Scientists say that a record-breaking Arctic heat wave was made 600 times more likely by the man-made climate crisis. PBS NewsHour / YouTube
The record-breaking heat in the Arctic saw temperatures soar above 100 degrees for the first time in recorded history. Now, a new analysis has put to rest any notion that the heat was caused by natural temperature fluctuations.
<p>The study found that the record-breaking <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/heat-wave" target="_self">heat wave</a> was made 600 times more likely by the man-made <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-crisis" target="_self">climate crisis</a>, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/15/climate-change-made-siberian-heatwave-600-times-more-likely-study" target="_blank">The Guardian</a> reported. In other words, the heat wave is nearly impossible without the climate crisis.</p><p>The heat in Siberia has produced conditions both strange and awful, with massive wildfires, ravening mosquitoes and shaky permafrost that has caused infrastructure damage, including a burst fuel tank that released about <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/russia-oil-spill-arctic-lake-2646167101.html?rebelltitem=1" target="_self">23,000 tons of diesel fuel into a pristine lake</a>. The wildfires have spread farther north than ever before and have put more greenhouse gases into the earth's atmosphere than in any other month in 18 years of data collection, according to one report.</p>
<p>To figure out if human actions played a role in the unprecedented heat wave in Siberia, the researchers looked at two recent examples of exceptional heating in the region. The first was a look at the trend line from January through June of this year, when the average temperatures in the region were 9 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the average temperatures from 1951 to 1980. The second was the remarkable heat on June 20 that saw temperatures at the Russian town of Verkhoyansk at a reported 100.4 degrees, which the Russian Meteorological Service said is a record for temperatures anywhere north of the Arctic Circle, as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/climate/siberia-heat-wave-climate-change.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a> reported.</p><p>The research was conducted by a group of 14 scientists from six countries who collaborated to figure how something this out-of-bounds could occur. Their comprehensive climate attribution study declared, "This large-scale prolonged event would have been essentially impossible without climate change," as <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arctic-heat-wave-human-caused-climate-change/" target="_blank">CBS News</a> reported.</p>
<p>For context, the researchers said that if, hypothetically, you lived in this region before around 1900, when human-caused climate impacts started to emerge, a heat event as widespread, prolonged and intense as this would only occur once every 80,000 years — or about once every 1,000 lifetimes, according to CBS News.</p><p>For all practical purposes, said <a href="https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/fotto.html#:~:text=Friederike%20(Fredi)%20is%20the%20Acting,focus%20on%20Africa%20and%20India." target="_blank" title="">Friederike Otto</a>, acting director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and an author of the paper, "you would not have gotten an event like this without climate change," as The New York Times reported.</p><p>In a statement, Andrew Ciavarella, the lead author of the research and senior detection and attribution scientist at the Met Office, the national meteorological service for Britain, called the result "truly staggering," according to The New York Times.</p>
<p>Climate scientists use advanced computer simulations to compare the climate as it is today with the climate as it would have been without human influence to see how likely different weather events would have been if our species had never altered the atmosphere, according to the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53415297" target="_blank">BBC</a>. In this study, the researchers looked at the temperature abnormalities by observational surface temperature records and they recreated the climate using dozens of climate computer models. They delved into rich troves of data to determine how much of a weather phenomenon may have been caused by human activities that have generated planet-warming greenhouse gases, as The New York Times reported.</p><p>The researchers say that the current Siberian heat "has contributed to raising the world's average temperature to the second hottest on record for the period January to May," as the BBC reported.</p><p>"This study shows again just how much of a game-changer climate change is with respect to heat waves," said Otto, as The Guardian reported. "As emissions continue to rise, we need to think about building resilience to extreme heat all over the world, even in Arctic communities – which would have seemed nonsensical not very long ago."</p>
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Scientists at the Australian Institute of Marine Science are engineering heat-resistant corals. Jonas Gratzer / Mongabay
By Johan Augustin
In a lab on Australia's east coast, scientists are concocting what they hope will be the solution to the steadily worsening problem of coral bleaching.
<p>Few people understand the Great Barrier Reef, and the challenges it faces, better than the scientists at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). And events of the past few years have them concerned about how well it can cope with rising water temperatures that have increased the <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2018/01/reef-bleaching-five-times-more-frequent-now-than-in-the-1980s-study-finds/" target="_blank">frequency</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/04/06/great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching/" target="_blank">severity</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/world/australia/great-barrier-reefs-bleaching-dying.html" target="_blank">extent</a> of coral-bleaching events.</p><p>As water temperatures rise, the coral polyps flush out the photosynthetic algae that live in their tissue and give them their color. The corals depend on the algae for their energy, and without these symbionts, the newly bare, or "bleached," reefs slowly start to die.</p><p>Historically, bleaching events have occurred far enough apart in time that reefs have been able to recover, typically within about a decade. But in March this year, the Great Barrier Reef suffered its third <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/great-barrier-reef-suffers-biggest-bleaching-event-yet/" target="_blank">major bleaching event</a> in just five years.</p><p>"Three major widespread mass bleaching events throughout the Great Barrier Reef are clear indicators that ocean warming is happening faster than expected and the severity of the warming events is pushing corals beyond levels that these reefs can sustain," says Neal Cantin, a coral reef biologist at the AIMS.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzUxMDUxOS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxOTc5NTg3M30.8HWZCyAHlLzByK_5G-SdZvJsUteDk6kw_oVuOyA_Dkg/img.jpg?width=980" id="c18d4" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6b4668c3cc408cd0ea3e87af0beb870f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
A branch of bleached coral. Jonas Gratzer / Mongabay
‘Remarkable Resiliency’
<p>Water temperatures this time around didn't reach as high as during the <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2017/03/climate-change-induced-bleaching-decimating-great-barrier-reef/" target="_blank">2016 event</a>, but the bleaching was worse for two key reasons, Cantin says.</p><p>"The first is how soon it follows the 2016 and 2017 back-to-back bleaching events. The second concern is the footprint of heat in 2020," he says.</p><p>That "footprint" refers to the total extent of reef affected by bleaching. While the 2016 event had the most extreme levels of heat, Cantin says, it was limited mostly to the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef, severely bleaching 35% of the total reef area. This time around, the entire length of the reef — a span of 2,300 kilometers (1,300 miles) — was exposed to heat stress "capable of causing bleaching." That resulted in severe levels of bleaching on an additional 25% of the reefs, Cantin says.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzUxMDUzOS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1NTk5NzQxOH0.ZmUkJz3x1bsXmrwXBMKQ-VAFTrI8pbc4lG9R6GbLGmY/img.jpg?width=980" id="63720" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="531cdf1c8901036f10b2a06f846e65d5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef. Jonas Gratzer / Mongabay
<p>But brewing in the AIMS lab are pioneering experiments aimed at finding <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2019/05/models-maps-and-citizen-scientists-working-to-save-the-great-barrier-reef/" target="_blank">scientific breakthroughs</a> for a problem that experts agree is <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2019/05/new-map-shows-warming-waters-where-coral-reefs-could-be-under-threat/" target="_blank">bound to get worse</a> over time. And they've already come up with a strong candidate for the answer to the bleaching problem: corals engineered to take the heat. In a method known as assisted gene flow — similar to how food crops are crossbred to emphasize favorable traits — scientists here single out the genetic properties that make certain coral species more resistant to heat, and find ways to pass it on.</p><p>These hybrids have already "demonstrated remarkable resiliency" to high water temperatures at the juvenile life stage inside the AIMS National Sea Simulator, says reef restoration scientist Kate Quigley. Her team also works with enhancing the symbiont algae.</p><p>"By pairing these enhanced corals with enhanced symbionts, we have been able to increase their heat resistance up to 26 times," Quigley says, pointing to a <a href="https://bio.biologists.org/content/9/1/bio047316" target="_blank">recently published study</a> with those findings. The researchers have also found that breeding these enhanced corals <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mec.15482" target="_blank">creates new genetic diversity</a> in key traits associated with resisting higher water temperatures.</p><p>"The early results we have found in regards to enhancing corals' heat tolerance are encouraging," Quigley says. "I would describe these early experiments as successes."</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzUxMDU0My9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MzY4NTQ1OX0.Ewr_3ToVZ8LuJBQPE_nFEMt-G3h01Z2Xsdv13F85gDI/img.jpg?width=980" id="f2a1b" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6fcfdaecd61d63211491732290baabbe" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
A tank of enhanced coral at the AIMS center being tested for their warm-water tolerance. Jonas Gratzer / Mongabay
Large-Scale Deployment
<p>The hybrids have one parent from northern, warmer, parts of the reef and one from the central, cooler, part. The results show that some of the strains have inherited the northern corals' temperature tolerance and can survive when placed in cooler environments. That suggests that over time, as these cooler regions heat up, these corals will be able to tolerate the rising temperatures better than the native corals.</p><p>"We have learned key fundamental biology about coral reproduction and heat tolerance that will be important moving forward in further developing new, scalable coral restoration methods," Quigley says. "We are [also] finding that heat tolerance can be passed from parents to offspring in reproducible, persistent ways."</p><p>These research projects fall under the wider Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, which Cantin calls "the biggest single effort anywhere in the world to develop options for intervening on the reef to help it adapt and cope better with climate change."</p><p>"These interventions are promising," Cantin adds, "but none are ready to deploy large-scale."<span></span></p><p>For the enhanced corals to have any meaningful effect across a reef that stretches the same distance as New York City to Miami, they will need to be deployed in massive volumes. Another experiment at the AIMS, the Larval Restoration Project, is looking into how to do this, but with naturally occurring warm-adapted corals rather than the gene-edited ones from the AIMS lab. It's the largest coral reseeding project in history, launched in 2016 and funded by the Australian government.</p><p>The idea is that during the annual mass coral spawning, which takes place every year during the November full moon, researchers harvest millions of coral eggs and sperm. They then grow them in enclosures on the reef to produce coral larvae, which are later released onto bleached and damaged sections of the reef to repopulate them.</p><p>The coral species that spawn this year will be the ones that survived the bleaching in March, and therefore those with proven better heat tolerance. The harvest this time around "will allow us to find reefs, populations and individuals that are particularly hardy and that will act as breeding stock for the production of coral offspring able to withstand high heat," Quigley says.</p><p>"The search for hardy and resilient corals continues, but we have already seen some very promising results," she adds.</p>From Your Site Articles
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New Year's fireworks in Sydney Harbour on Jan. 1, 2014. Richard Rydge / Flickr
Despites calls by politicians and more than a quarter of a million signatures on an online petition to cancel Sydney's New Years' Eve fireworks show, city officials are pushing forward and saying the show will happen, as CNN reported.
<p>The <a href="https://www.change.org/p/pm-scott-morrison-say-no-to-fireworks-nye-2019-give-the-money-to-farmers-and-firefighters" target="_blank">Change.org petition</a> now approaching 300,000 signatures asks for the money spent on the iconic fireworks display to be given to the firefighters and farmers struggling to battle the prolonged <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/wildfires" target="_self">brushfires</a> in New South Wales, according to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/12/29/792214904/threat-of-wildfires-not-enough-to-cancel-sydneys-new-year-s-eve-fireworks" target="_blank">NPR</a>.</p><p>Temperatures in the harbor near the Sydney Opera house will push past 90 degrees on Tuesday, while temperatures in Western Sydney are expected to exceed 100 degrees. The <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/heat-wave" target="_self">heat wave</a> coupled with the smoke already in the air and the threat of more brushfires has forced several towns in New South Wales to cancel their fireworks displays, according to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/30/sydney-new-years-eve-fireworks-debate-rages-as-nsw-deputy-premier-calls-for-event-to-be-cancelled" target="_blank">The Guardian</a>.</p><p>Deputy Premier of New South Wales John Barilaro took to Twitter to say the Sydney show should be cancelled.</p><p>"Sydney's New Years Eve Fireworks should just be cancelled, very easy decision," Barilaro <a href="https://twitter.com/JohnBarilaroMP/status/1211408617733115905" target="_blank">tweeted</a>. "The risk is too high and we must respect our exhausted RFS volunteers. If regional areas have had fireworks banned, then let's not have two classes of citizens. We're all in this crisis together."</p><p>The NSW Rural Fire Service forecast "severe" fire danger for the region on Tuesday and did not lift the total fire ban for several rural communities that had applied for an exemption to the ban so they too could have a fireworks display. Several mayors of towns where fireworks were cancelled said the wind conditions made it irresponsible to continue with a fireworks display, according to the <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-s-new-year-s-eve-fireworks-to-go-ahead-some-suburbs-cancelled-20191230-p53noh.html" target="_blank">The Sydney Morning Herald</a>.</p><p>As one of the first cities in the world to welcome in the new year, Sydney invests heavily in a spectacular fireworks show in the city's harbor, which generates roughly $90 million for the New South Wales economy, as <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-s-new-year-s-eve-fireworks-to-go-ahead-some-suburbs-cancelled-20191230-p53noh.html" target="_blank">The Sydney Morning Herald</a> reported</p><p>"Cancelling would seriously hurt Sydney businesses, particularly in the wake of reports of a weaker retail season, and would also ruin plans for tens of thousands of people who have come from across the country and overseas," said Tanya Goldberg, city of Sydney spokeswoman, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/30/sydney-new-years-eve-fireworks-debate-rages-as-nsw-deputy-premier-calls-for-event-to-be-cancelled" target="_blank">The Guardian</a> reported.</p><p>Officials added that despite calls for redirecting money toward the front lines of the brushfires, the money appropriated for the fireworks display had already been spent and could not just be moved to help farmers and firefighters.</p><p>"Our fireworks are planned 15 months in advance and most of the budget — which is largely allocated to crowd safety and cleaning measures — has already been spent," said Sydney's Lord Mayor Clover Moore, as <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/29/asia/sydney-new-year-fireworks-intl/index.html" target="_blank">CNN</a> reported.</p><p>"We appreciate that there is a lot of suffering in the community at the moment," said New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, as <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-s-new-year-s-eve-fireworks-to-go-ahead-some-suburbs-cancelled-20191230-p53noh.html" target="_blank">The Sydney Morning Herald</a> reported. "NSW has always been a state that's hopeful about the future, that's resilient, that's optimistic. And we need to stay strong so we can keep supporting our communities that are doing it tough.</p>"Sydney is one of the first cities in the world that welcomes in the new year, and if it's safe to do so, we should continue to do it as we've done every other year," she added.
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Most of the U.S. will likely see higher than normal temperatures this autumn, according to a three-month forecast projected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
<p>The entire nation will experience warmer weather now through December, but those with the greatest temperature increases include northern <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/alaska" target="_self">Alaska</a>, the Southwest and the Four Corners Region of New England, according to <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/23/fall-forecast-warm-autumn-predicted-all-50-states/2418073001/" target="_blank">USA Today</a>. It's a continuation of a warming trend observed for the last few decades.</p>
<p>"During the past 30-35 years, there has been an underlying warm-up in the climate," NOAA meteorologist Anthony Artusa told the publication. "Unless we can predict climate factors or drivers that can override this warm trend (such as El Niño or La Niña), it's best to go with trends."</p><p>Through the end of this week, temperatures will be between 10 and 20 degrees above average across the Deep South and into the Ohio Valley and mid-Atlantic, reports <a href="https://weather.com/forecast/national/news/2019-09-21-record-high-temperature-southeast-fall" target="_blank">The Weather Channel</a>. NOAA's <a href="https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range/seasonal.php?lead=4" target="_blank">three-month outlook</a> suggests that through the end of the year, there is a 30 to 50 percent chance that states on both the east and west coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, southern border states and Alaska will see temperatures above normal. Parts of the Midwest and around the Great Lakes are expected to see temperatures near normal. Precipitation is expected to juxtapose that outlook, with the Great Lakes region and parts of the northern Midwest having a high chance of above-average rain and snowfall. Meanwhile, most of California and western Nevada will see lower-than-normal precipitation through the end of the year.</p>
<p>It comes after one of the hottest summers on modern record with <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2019/6/26/18744518/heat-wave-2019-europe-france-germany-spain" target="_blank">deadly heat waves</a> that swept across much of Europe and <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/alaska-wildfires-forests-trees-2640081853.html" target="_self">disastrous wildfires</a> that burned through Alaska and parts of the Arctic.</p><p>"The overall retreat in the Beaufort Sea is about as extreme as our analyses have shown in the last 20 years," <a href="https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/raw/fz/fzak30.pafc.ico.afc.txt" target="_blank">wrote</a> the National Weather Service in Anchorage. As the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/09/20/noaas-fall-outlook-above-average-temperatures-everywhere/" target="_blank">Washington Post</a> reported, Alaska's most northern town saw temperatures above freezing since June 25.</p><p>July 2019 was the hottest month on record for the planet with polar <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/sea-ice">sea ice</a> melting to record lows, according to an August statement released by <a href="https://www.noaa.gov/news/july-2019-was-hottest-month-on-record-for-planet" target="_blank">NOAA</a>. Globally, July was 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees, making it the hottest July since modern records began 140 years ago. A newly <a href="https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/" target="_blank">released analysis</a> of preliminary findings by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) found that sea ice coverage in the Arctic dropped 1.6 million square miles (4.15 square kilometers) over the course of the summer, tying 2019 as the second-lowest year along with 2007 and 2016. The record for lowest sea ice extent is still held by 2012.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The climate crisis is here. Now. The only question is whether we decide to fight for safety and stability. <a href="https://t.co/aCHhFGkFH0">https://t.co/aCHhFGkFH0</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ClimateCrisis?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#ClimateCrisis</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ActOnClimate?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#ActOnClimate</a></p>— Enviro Voter Project (@Enviro_Voter) <a href="https://twitter.com/Enviro_Voter/status/1172506502730584064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 13, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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The Qamutik cargo ship on July 28, 2020 in Canada's Nunavut province, where two ice caps have disappeared completely. Fiona Paton / Flickr
Three years ago, scientists predicted it would happen. Now, new NASA satellite imagery confirms it's true: two ice caps in Canada's Nunavut province have disappeared completely, providing more visual evidence of the rapid warming happening near the poles, as CTV News in Canada reported.
<p>According to <a href="https://earther.gizmodo.com/a-pair-of-canadian-ice-caps-has-disappeared-completely-1844592208" target="_blank">Gizmodo</a>, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) <a href="https://nsidc.org/news/newsroom/st-patrick-bay-ice-caps-canada-have-completely-disappeared" target="_blank">said</a> last week that the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in the northeastern Ellesmere Island are nowhere to be seen on satellite imagery. The revelation that the ice caps have disappeared came sooner than scientists had expected.</p><p>"I can't say I was terribly surprised because we knew they were going, but it has happened really fast," Mark Serreze, director of NSIDC in Colorado, told <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/05/weather/st-patrick-bay-ice-caps-climate-change-trnd-scn/index.html" target="_blank">CNN</a>. Serreze co-authored a <a href="https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/11/169/2017/" target="_blank">paper</a> in 2017 estimating the ice caps would be gone within five years.</p>
<p>"When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape," said Serreze, in a <a href="https://nsidc.org/news/newsroom/st-patrick-bay-ice-caps-canada-have-completely-disappeared" target="_blank">statement</a>. "To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away."<br></p><p>The very hot temperatures in the summer of 2015 reduced the longevity of the St. Patrick's Bay ice caps. "You could really see they got hit. But that heat has really just not stopped. It's just getting too warm," Serreze told CNN.</p>
<p>This year has been especially tough on the region. Recent months have been plagued by heatwaves and wildfires across the <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/arctic">Arctic</a>, as Gizmodo reported. The extreme heat likely contributed to the melting of the ice caps. Research has found that summers in the region haven't been this warm in 115,000 years.</p><p>According to CNN, the nearby glaciers that sit at a higher elevation have been shrinking significantly as well.</p><p>"I'll make another prediction that they're gone in a decade," Serreze said to CNN.</p><p>Similar to scientists who <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/icelandic-glacier-monument-2639301498.html" target="_self">mourned a lost glacier in Iceland</a> and a <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/swiss-alps-pizol-glacier-funeral-2640547054.html" target="_self">funeral in Switzerland</a> held for a glacier, Serreze has felt the impact of losing these two ice caps.</p><p>"We've long known that as climate change takes hold, the effects would be especially pronounced in the Arctic," Serreze explained, as CTV News reported. "But the death of those two little caps that I once knew so well has made climate change very personal. All that's left are some photographs and a lot of memories."</p><p>Serreze first visited the ice caps in 1982 and has been studying them ever since, according to Gizmodo.</p>
<p>The melted ice caps were one half of a group of small ice caps on the Hazen Plateau, which formed during the Little Ice Age several centuries ago, according to the NSIDC.<br></p><p>Serreze told CNN that the small ice caps in the Arctic are clear indicators of the effects of the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-crisis">climate crisis</a>.</p><p>"There's something called 'Arctic amplification,' which refers to the observation – not the theory – that the Arctic is warming up at a much faster rate than the rest of the globe, anywhere from two to four times faster," Serreze said.</p><p>Hotter heat waves and cold waves that are not as cold as they were in the past are contributing factors.</p><p>"We are starting to see all these things come together." Serreze told CNN, adding that the disappearance of the St. Patrick's Bay ice caps is "an exclamation point of what's happening in the Arctic."</p>
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A thirsty koala suffering from the soaring temperatures in South Australia was helped out by a group of cyclists who stopped to offer it a drink from their water bottles.
<p>A video posted on Instagram by cyclist Anna Heusler shows the desperate marsupial climbing onto the frame of a bicycle to get a better sip.</p><p>The cyclists, <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/australia-bushfire-risk-soars-with-extreme-temperatures/a-51602824" target="_blank">who were riding towards Adelaide in 40°C (104°F) heat,</a> spotted the koala as they came around a bend on the road. "Naturally, we stopped because we were going to help relocate him off the road," Heusler told Australia's 7 News, as <a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12296980" target="_blank">reported in the New Zealand Herald</a><u style="">.</u></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">A desperate koala suffering through the soaring temperatures in South Australia approached a group of cyclists to drink from a water bottle.<a href="https://t.co/jV9mM4xn9y">https://t.co/jV9mM4xn9y</a></p>— nzherald (@nzherald) <a href="https://twitter.com/nzherald/status/1210720352176730112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 28, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>"I stopped on my bike and he walked right up to me, quite quickly for a koala, and as I was giving him a drink from all our water bottles, he actually climbed up onto my bike.</p><p>"None of us have ever seen anything like it."</p>
<h3>Koalas Suffering in Heat Wave</h3><p>The pictures are heartwarming, but the incident also shows the dangers posed to the animals' existence by the current <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/wildfires">fire</a> situation in the country. At least 2,000 koalas died in <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/australia-christmas-rain-fails-to-contain-bushfires/a-51791597" target="_blank">devastating and widespread bushfires</a> across South Australia and the east coast of the continent, a parliamentary inquiry heard earlier in December.</p><p>The animals died either in bushfires or from starvation and dehydration afterwards, North East Forest Alliance president and ecologist Dailan Pugh told the inquiry.</p><p>Director of the Total Environment Centre Jeff Angel warned that the risk to koalas' survival was at emergency level due to the bushfires, which have caused loss of habitat for the marsupials. "<a href="https://www.dw.com/en/australia-fires-prime-minister-defends-climate-policy-after-greta-thunberg-criticism/a-51782175" target="_blank">We urge the government to do more, and quickly</a>," Angel told News Ltd on Saturday.</p><p>The assessment of the situation facing Australia's koalas comes as its government drew criticism for a badly timed tourism campaign costing Aus$15 million ($10.5 million, €9.4 million). The campaign depicts scenes of cuddly koalas and blue skies — in stark contrast to current media images of <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/australian-fires-threaten-sydney-water-supply/a-51810150" target="_blank">Australia's inferno-like conditions.</a></p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/australia-thirsty-koala-stops-cyclist-to-take-a-drink-amid-heatwave/a-51817756" target="_blank">DW</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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