Last 12 months on Earth were the hottest ever recorded, analysis finds The last 12 months were the hottest Earth has ever recorded, according to a new report by Climate Central, a nonprofit science research group. The peer-reviewed report says burning gasoline, coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels that release planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide, and other human activities, caused the unnatural warming from November 2022 to October 2023. Over the course of the year, 7.3 billion people, or 90% of humanity, endured at least 10 days of high temperatures that were made at least three times more likely because of climate change. FILE PHOTO: Residents of a riverside community carry food and containers of drinking water after receiving aid due to the ongoing drought in Carei...
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Climbers celebrate Everest 70th anniversary amid melting glaciers, rising temperatures
As the mountaineering community prepares to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the conquest of Mount Everest, there is growing concern about temperatures rising, glaciers and snow melting, and weather getting harsh and unpredictable on the world’s tallest mountain. Since the 8,849-meter (29,032-foot) mountain peak was first scaled by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay in 1953, thousands of climbers have reached the peak and hundreds of lost their lives. A security person stands guard in front of a statue of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary at the tourism board in Kathmandu, Nepal, Thursday, May 25, 2023. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha) The deteriorating conditions on Everest are raising concerns for the mountaineering community and the people whose live...
Read MoreFor the first time ever, global temperatures are now more likely than not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday. This does not mean the world would cross the long-term warming threshold of 1.5C above preindustrial levels set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement. But a year of warming at 1.5C could offer a glimpse of what crossing that longer term threshold, based on the 30-year global average, would be like. FILE PHOTO: The sun rises above the Atlantic Ocean as waves crash near beach goers walking along a jetty, Dec. 7, 2022, in Bal Harbour, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee) With a 66% chance of temporarily reaching 1.5C by 2027, "it's the first time in history that it's...
Read MoreLast year was the world's joint fifth-warmest on record and the last nine years were the nine warmest since pre-industrial times, putting the 2015 Paris Agreement's goal to limit global warming to 1.5C in serious jeopardy, U.S. scientists have said. Last year tied with 2015 as the fifth-warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880, NASA said. That was despite the presence of the La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean, which generally lowers global temperatures slightly. The world's average global temperature is now 1.1C to 1.2C higher than in pre-industrial times. FILE PHOTO: The sun rises behind the London skyline as a second heatwave is predicted for parts of the country, Richmond Park, London, Britain, August 8, 2022. REUTERS/Toby Melville The U.S. National Oceanic...
Read MoreAbout 1,000 years ago, a Viking woman named Ingrid built a wharf to load ships at a bay on the Swedish coast and commemorated the site with a looping runic inscription on a grey boulder. Today Ingrid’s harbour, surrounded by birch and pine trees, is high and dry, on land 5 metres (16 feet) above sea level and 20 kms (12 miles) inland from coastal Stockholm, on the Baltic Sea. Land across much of the Nordic region has been rebounding since the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago, as a heavy smothering of ice up to 3 km (1.9 miles) thick melted away. That rise should make the region an unlikely candidate to suffer problems from a global rise in ocean levels as seas warm and glaciers melt - a threat for low-lying nations and coastal cities around the world, from Shanghai to Mi...
Read MoreAfrica’s migratory birds are threatened by changing weather patterns in the center and east of the continent that have depleted natural water systems and caused a devastating drought. Hotter and drier conditions due to climate change make it difficult for traveling species who are losing their water sources and breeding grounds, with many now endangered or forced to alter their migration patterns entirely by settling in cooler northern areas. Roughly 10% of Africa’s more than 2,000 bird species, including dozens of migratory birds, are threatened, with 28 species — such as the Madagascar fish eagle, the Taita falcon and hooded vultures — classed as “critically endangered.” Over one-third of them are especially vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather, an analysis by environm...
Read MoreThe rapid expansion will have significant impacts on ecosystems and the people and animals who rely on them As global temperatures rise, desert climates have spread north by up to 100 kilometres in parts of Central Asia since the 1980s, a climate assessment reveals1. The study, published on 27 May in Geophysical Research Letters, also found that over the past 35 years, temperatures have increased across all of Central Asia, which includes parts of China, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In the same period, mountain regions have become hotter and wetter — which might have accelerated the retreat of some major glaciers. Such changes threaten ecosystems and those who rely on them, says Jeffrey Dukes, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology in St...
Read MoreAn international team of astronomers have used ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), to track Neptune’s atmospheric temperatures over a 17-year period. They found a surprising drop in Neptune’s global temperatures followed by a dramatic warming at its south pole. “This change was unexpected,” says Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester, UK, and lead author of the study published today in The Planetary Science Journal. “Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we expected temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder.” This composite shows thermal images of Neptune taken between 2006 and 2020. The first three images (2006, 2009, 2018) were t...
Read MoreUsing lake sediment in the Tibetan Plateau, a team of researchers was able to show that permafrost at high elevations is more vulnerable than arctic permafrost under projected future climate conditions From the ancient sludge of lakebeds in Asia's Tibetan Plateau, scientists can decipher a vision of Earth's future. That future, it turns out, will look very similar to the mid-Pliocene warm period – an epoch 3.3 million to 3 million years ago when the average air temperature at mid-latitudes rarely dropped below freezing. It was a time when permanent ice was just beginning to cling to the northern polar regions, and mid-latitude alpine permafrost – or perpetually frozen soil – was much more limited than today. Global permafrost today contains a whopping 1,500 trillion grams of carbon....
Read MoreNew research from Northern Arizona University shows rising temperatures are causing Earth’s coldest forests to shift northward, raising concerns about biodiversity, an increased risk of wildfires and mounting impacts of climate change on northern communities. Logan Berner, assistant research professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) and Scott Goetz, Regents’ professor and director of the GEODE Lab, authored the article, “Satellite observations document trends consistent with a boreal forest biome shift,” which was published Thursday in Global Change Biology. The boreal forest is a belt of cold-tolerant conifer trees that stretches nearly 9,000 miles across northern North American and Eurasia; it accounts for almost a quarter of the Earth’s forest area...
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