Climate Change News & Discussions

[weatheriscool]

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[weatheriscool]

Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired

Source: The Guardian

Wed 11 Jun 2025 06.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 11 Jun 2025 08.24 EDT

A major US government website supporting public education on climate science looks likely to be shuttered after almost all of its staff were fired, the Guardian has learned. Climate.gov, the gateway website for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa)’s Climate Program Office, will imminently no longer publish new content, according to multiple former staff responsible for the site’s content whose contracts were recently terminated.

“The entire content production staff at climate.gov (including me) were let go from our government contract on 31 May,” said a former government contractor who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “We were told that our positions within the contract were being eliminated.”

Rebecca Lindsey, the website’s former program manager, who was fired in February as part of the government’s purge of probationary employees, described a months-long situation within Noaa where political appointees and career staff argued over the fate of the website. “I had gotten a stellar performance review, gotten a bonus, gotten a raise. I was performing very well. And then I was part of that group who got the form letter saying, ‘Your knowledge, skills, and abilities are no longer of use to Noaa’ – or something to that effect.”

Lindsey said she had been worried that climate.gov might be a target of the new administration soon after the election, but when a large Noaa contract was up for renewal at the end of May, her former boss told her that a demand came “from above” to rewrite parts of the contract to remove the team’s funding. “It was a very deliberate, targeted attack,” said Lindsey.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -down-noaa

[wjfox]

UK is basically uninhabitable under this scenario.

Little or no domestic food production (fields all frozen). Rivers, lakes, and water pipes frozen. Roads and railways largely unusable. Even the North Sea is covered in ice.

Tens of millions of people freezing to death. Survivors looting supermarkets, warehouses, etc.

Not just here, but across much of northern Europe.

But hey, let's all vote for Reform and other hard-Right parties, because Net Zero is "madness".


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Ocean current ‘collapse’ could trigger ‘profound cooling’ in northern Europe – even with global warming

11 June 2025

A “collapse” of key Atlantic ocean currents would cause winter temperatures to plunge across northern Europe, overriding the warming driven by human activity.

That is according to new research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, which looks at the combined impact of the shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and global warming on temperatures in northern Europe.

Scientists have warned that human-caused climate change is likely causing AMOC to weaken and that continued warming could push it towards a “tipping point”.

The study suggests that, in an intermediate emissions scenario, greenhouse gas-driven warming would not be able to outweigh the cooling impact of an AMOC collapse.

In this modelled world, one-in-10 winters in London could see cold extremes approaching -20C.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/ocean-curre ... l-warming/

[erowind]

AMOC collapse is stochastic but its chances increase as global warming progresses. My understanding is that there's around a 50% chance it happens by the end of the century and that's almost certain it will happen in the 22nd century if not. But also, it could happen tomorrow, probably more in the range of a 10-30% chance by 2050.

A lot of climate models are overly conservative though do to politics so I'd personally bump those figures up as many models only assume warming of 2-4C by 2100. Since we're in a business as usual scenario and climate change accelerates instead of increasing linearly it is entirely possible that Earth sees 5C or even 6C by the end of the century. The Earth has warmed by ~0.3C in the past 4 and 1/2 years whereas it took 10 years to accumulate ~0.3C of warming over the 2010-2020 timeframe and in the immediate decades prior the rate of warming was slower yet. At the current rate that would be ~0.6C of warming per decade which comes out right around ~5.8C by 2100 starting from our current base of 1.28C
Source for a chart to check my math.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/gl ... intent=121

All to say, maybe the real chances are something like 50% by 2050 and 70-80% by the 2100. It is likely that many people in their 20s and younger will live to see AMOC collapse.

What's interesting about AMOC collapse is that all that added sea ice would increase the Earth's albedo and counteract some climate change. I wonder if our own tapering/running out of fossil fuels combined with positive feedbacks that may occur like this swill stabilized the climate before a permian extinction level of warming occurs? If not I can't imagine how jarring it would be for someone born at the end the 21st century to watch Britain freeze over only for it to start turning tropical by the end of their life as the 22nd century dawns.

[firestar464]

nah things will not "stabilize"

[firestar464]

LA Times- America is moving backward on climate. Here’s how Hollywood can help

https://archive.ph/g3WTh

[firestar464]

US appeals court refuses to vacate Biden approval of Alaska’s Willow oil project

https://apnews.com/article/alaska-willo ... 01beb8cb20

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[wjfox]

World's farmers won't be able to keep up with climate change

18 June 2025

Rising global temperatures are likely to cause deep losses to the world’s most important crops – despite farmers’ best efforts to adapt. A global analysis of crop yields suggests that, by the end of the century, each degree Celsius of warming will reduce the food available per person by about 121 kilocalories per day.

Under a 3°C warming scenario – roughly our current trajectory – “that works out to giving up breakfast for everyone”, says Andrew Hultgren at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Hultgren and his colleagues collected data on the yields of the world’s six main staple crops, accounting for more than two-thirds of global calories. “It’s one of the largest datasets now available of high-resolution crop yields,” he says. They also collected information on local weather patterns from 54 countries.

The researchers then used this information to project how the different crops would respond to a changing climate – and how farmers would adjust as well. “We mined that data for information about how farmers have reacted to weather shocks historically,” says Hultgren. This allowed the researchers to estimate how different agricultural adaptations, such as changing which crop varieties are grown, boosting irrigation or using more fertiliser, would mitigate crop losses.

For all crops except rice, which grows better when nights are warmer, they found that higher temperatures will lead to steep losses. For instance, global corn yields are projected to fall by about 12 or 28 per cent by the end of the century – depending on whether greenhouse gas emissions are moderate or very high respectively – relative to what they would be without global warming.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/24 ... te-change/

[weatheriscool]

Rapid cloud loss is contributing to record-breaking temperatures, new study shows
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-rapid-clo ... tures.html
by Monash University

Earth's cloud cover is rapidly shrinking and contributing to record-breaking temperatures, according to new research involving the Monash-led Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for 21st Century Weather.

The research, led by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and published in Geophysical Research Letters, analyzed satellite observations to find between 1.5% and 3% of the world's storm cloud zones have been contracting each decade in the past 24 years.

The trend has been linked to changing wind patterns, the expansion of the tropics and storm systems shifting toward the North and South poles, which are all well-documented responses to climate change.

With fewer clouds reflecting sunlight back into space to keep the planet cool, the warming effect of greenhouse gas emissions is being amplified and driving up global temperatures.

[caltrek]

How Climate Change Will Worsen Hunger
By Umair Irfan
Updated June 18, 2025

Introduction:

(Vox) Globally, humanity is producing more food than ever, but that harvest is concentrated in just a handful of breadbaskets.

More than one-third of the world’s wheat and barley exports come from Ukraine and Russia, for example. Some of these highly productive farmlands, including major crop-growing regions in the United States, are on track to see the sharpest drops in harvests due to climate change.

That’s bad news not just for farmers, but also for everyone who eats — especially as it becomes harder and more expensive to feed a more crowded, hungrier world, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.

Under a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario, six key staple crops will see an 11.2 percent decline by the end of the century compared to a world without warming, even as farmers try to adapt. And the largest drops aren’t occurring in the poorer, more marginal farmlands, but in places that are already major food producers. These are regions like the US Midwest that have been blessed with good soil and ideal weather for raising staples like maize and soy.

But when that weather is less than ideal, it can drastically reduce agricultural productivity. Extreme weather has already begun to eat into harvests this year: Flooding has destroyed rice in Tajikistan, cucumbers in Spain, and bananas in Australia. Severe storms in the US this spring caused millions of dollars in damages to crops. In past years, severe heat has led to big declines in blueberries, olives, and grapes. And as the climate changes, rising average temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are poised to diminish yields, while weather events like droughts and floods reaching greater extremes could wipe out harvests more often.

Read more here: https://www.vox.com/climate/417164/cro ... -midwest

[weatheriscool]

Global 'precipitation whiplashes' between droughts and floods could intensify by 2028, study warns
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-global-pr ... ughts.html
by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

A recent study by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) reveals a looming climate crisis: the world could face heightened risks of "precipitation whiplashes"—violent swings between extreme droughts and floods—as early as 2028.

This research, led by Prof. Lu Mengqian and Dr. Cheng Tat-Fan of HKUST's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, attributes the escalating risk to climate-driven intensification of Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) events. This large-scale pattern of tropical intraseasonal climate variability is now propagating faster due to global warming.

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[wjfox]

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[caltrek]

As Nations Lag on Climate Action, Cities are Stepping Up
By Matt Simon
July 2, 2025

Introduction:

(Grist) Your city is probably fighting climate change in more ways than you realize. Perhaps your mayor is on a mission to plant more trees, or they’ve set efficiency standards for buildings, requiring better windows and insulation. Maybe they’ve even electrified your public transportation, reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, nations are still nowhere near ambitious enough in their commitments to reduce emissions and avoid the worst consequences of climate change. More than that, they haven’t shown enough follow-through on the goals they did set. Instead, it’s been cities and other local governments that have taken the lead. According to a new report by the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, along with C40 — a global network of nearly 100 mayors prioritizing climate action, collectively representing nearly 600 million people — three-quarters of the cities in the latter group are slashing their per capita emissions faster than their national governments. As global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, per capita emissions across C40 cities fell 7.5 percent on average between 2015 and 2024.

The untold story is that cities and local leaders really mobilized in a big way in Paris, but also in the decade since,” said Asif Nawaz Shah, co-author of the report and the head of impact and global partnerships at C40 and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. “It’s where the action happens, and it’s also where people are suffering the impacts the most.”

Cities are adapting because they’re experiencing especially acute effects of climate change as their populations rapidly grow. They’re getting much hotter than surrounding rural areas due to the urban heat island effect, in which the built environment soaks up the sun’s energy during the day and slowly releases it at night. Because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, they’re suffering increasingly catastrophic flooding as rains overwhelm sewer systems designed for the climate of yesteryear. And coastal cities have to deal with sea level rise in addition to fiercer tropical storms.

Read more here: https://grist.org/cities/as-nations-la ... ping-up/