Welcome back to a new season of Radio Ecoshock. Extreme weather expert Jeff Masters tells us when climate disasters turn the U.S.A. upside down, and what we can do to prepare. What caused the unexpected rise in heat? Former NASA scientist James Hansen says reduction in ship emissions. Dr. Andrew Gettelman investigated and you get the verdict. Plus headlines of global climate chaos Pole to Pole in the summer of 2024.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
HERE IS THE PLAN FOR NEXT SHOWS
Many of you experienced extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere. You sweated it out, hid from wildfire smoke, or hunkered down during super storms. All of us heard about it. Is this a step up in climate heating, or just a bump in the upward curve of global warming? What caused it? Scientists are also worried. They investigated and published breaking science research.
In each of the next few shows, you and I will check out suggested causes – like the Pacific volcano eruption, changes to ship emissions, an intersection of natural cycles, El Nino – the works. We start this week with Dr. Andrew Gettelman on the contentious ship emissions question.
We also need some big picture thinking. What actually happened in climate-driven weather these past few months? Jeff Masters covers that in this week’s show. Next week, we hear from George Tsakraklides – a voice outside the bubble calling out.
First, you get my collection of jaw-dropping news headlines from around the world. This is stuff I tried hard to ignore while gardening and just living. But after 18 years of tracking climate change for radio, I was stunned. This is just a tiny dribble. It would take a whole book “What the climate did last summer”.
By the way, I always need your support to keep going. Radio Ecoshock has no foundation or government grants. All shows are provided free to radio stations and listeners downloading around the world. A few listeners make it all possible with small donations. Please help if you can – here.
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GLOBAL CLIMATE NEWS HEADLINES SUMMER 2024
(as broadcast in this show, with links to follow up)
Here we go with as many climate chaos headlines as I can read in minutes: climate chaos around the world in just the last few months.
APRIL
A historic heat wave roiled South Asia in April. Schools and business closed from Philippines to Thailand. 33 million kids out of school due to heat in Bangladesh alone. Cambodia among many breaking records, including hottest night ever.
Sydney Australia drowned with a month’s worth of rain overnight.
“‘Simply mind-boggling’: world record temperature jump in Antarctic” the Guardian reports – “An unprecedented leap of 38.5C in the coldest place on Earth”.
Weather historian Maximiliano Herrera says “Records are falling allover Asia from Middle East to Japan in thousands of stations.” “We are seeing what 3 centuries of climatology never saw” It’s still Spring.
NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory set a new record for largest 12-month gain in carbon dioxide concentration ever observed. Atmospheric CO2 hit a new record high for the human era of 428.63 PPM on Apr 26.
At the end of April, all of North Africa and the Middle East suffered through a record-smashing heat wave for months, including during the Muslim Haj where thousands died in the heat. Hottest days and hottest nights from Algeria to Saudi Arabia and on to Iran. North China and Japan also cooking.
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MAY
Guardian newspaper headline: “World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target. Planet is headed for at least 2.5C of heating with disastrous results for humanity, poll of hundreds of scientists finds”
Pakistan’s intense heat wave sends day temperatures over 50 C, with nights of 30 C and above. More economic costs, suffering, and deaths.
New study finds “Climate change is linked to worsening brain diseases”.
UC Irvine-led team uncovers ‘vigorous melting’ at Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier
May 29, 2024: “Delhi Temperature Hits Highest Ever In India, 52.3 Celsius: Weather Bureau” – reported by Agence France Presse.
Earth goes past the 1.5 danger line: According to the EU Copernicus service “The global-average temperature for the past 12 months (June 2023 – May 2024) is the highest on record, at 0.75°C above the 1991-2020 average and 1.63°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.”
JUNE
June 21st “Mexico just hit a searing 52°C (125.6°F), tying the highest temperature ever recorded in Mexico.” (Herrera on X)
Massive floods due to extreme rainfall in Guilin of the Guangxi Region, China.
Heat still stuck in Pakistan. Peter Dynes Tweets: “Karachi is one giant oven. It’s near 50C temperatures stretch the limits of human survivability daily. The ambulance service delivers 30 to 40 bodies to the #Karachi city morgue daily. In the last six days, they have collected 568 bodies, including 141 on Tuesday alone.”
Phoenix pavement temperatures reach 160 to 170 degrees F (71 to 77 degrees C) – not far from boiling. People with severe burns arriving in Emergency.
JULY
“Texans seek out power as brutal heat, humidity builds” “Over 2 million electric customers across Texas are still without power following [Hurricane] Beryl” AccuWeather reports.
July 15, “Chicago is about to be hit by the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane or a landphoon.” Tweets Ryan Maue.
July 16: Colin McCarthy Tweets: “Dubai recorded a heat index of 144°F (62.2°C) today at 3 PM. The heat index is currently 129°F (53.9°C) at 5 AM local time. Life-threatening heat.”
Next day: the Acropolis in Athens is shut down again during life-threatening extreme heat. Tourists die in heat.
One hundred people in Phoenix die of heat in one week – NBC News.
Washington Post July 23: “Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth, scientists say.”
July 31st in the Post: “Antarctic temperatures soar 50 degrees above norm in long-lasting heat wave”. A winter heat wave at the South Pole.”
India facing a deadly heat crisis.
AUGUST
Jeff Goodell Tweets: “Heat kills *at least* 175,000 people a year in Europe, World Health Organization says.
August 26 40 degrees Celsius in some parts of Australia. It’s still winter.
Colin McCarthy: One of the highest sea surface temperatures ever recorded on Earth in the Persian Gulf. The sea was almost as warm as your body: 97.7°Fahrenheit or 36.5°Celsius.
August 26 “Australia just experienced its hottest winter day ever recorded, topping out at an unbelievable 106.8°F (41.6°C).” [McCarthy on Twitter]
The Amazon is on fire. Smoke fills the capital Brasilia and even São Paulo.
New study find heat-Related Deaths in the U.S. rose 117 percent between 1999 and 2023.
“A city in Iran along the Persian Gulf, home to over 160,000 people, reported a heat index of 152°F (66.7°C)” – Colin McCarthy Tweeted. ‘
Strange twist: “The UK had its coolest summer since 2015, according to provisional Met Office statistics.”
Phoenix hits 100 straight days of 100-degree heat.
August 2024 ties the record for hottest August on record.
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REAL WEATHER WITH JEFF MASTERS
When will climate change turn life in the U.S. upside down? What should you do to prepare for the climate change storm? Those are blog titles from Dr. Jeff Masters. Jeff has 45 years of experience as a meteorologist, including four years of flying with the NOAA Hurricane Hunters. For twenty years he’s blogged about extreme weather and climate change, drawing millions of comments from a world-wide community of weather-watchers.
Jeff continues as an authoritative source on each big hurricane, but he is not just your standard meteorologist. Recently Jeff summarized decades of experience to predict how climate change unfolds, and what we can do to prepare.
Listen to or download this 30 minute interview with Dr. Jeff Masters in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
Before we dive into Jeff’s big picture writing, let’s talk about the eerie pause in Atlantic hurricanes. This summer, NOAA predicted above-normal 2024 Atlantic hurricanes with 17 to 25 named storms and 4 to 7 possible major hurricanes. That has not happened. Yet. Masters just posted with Bob Henson about this. As a world expert on hurricanes Jeff has an answer: nobody knows.
There are suggestions that a change to tropical winds over Africa may be at the root of the strange pause in North Atlantic hurricanes. This was a weird time. The rainy tropical winds normally hovering over the African Tropics moved north. The Sahara Desert was hit with heavy rain, very heavy rains. I’ve never seen a satellite weather map like it.
There have been studies on the role of Saharan dust blown over the Atlantic and the formation of hurricanes in the Caribbean. That dust did not arrive?
As far as I can tell, no one knows exactly what triggers hurricanes. The situation is like wildfires. One year you can have very hot temperatures and the landscape is tinder, ready to burn, but few wildfires start. Conditions are not enough, fires need a spark. Perhaps hurricanes are the same.
A small hurricane just hit the Gulf coast of Louisiana. But so far, fingers crossed, I’m happy people in the Caribbean, Mexico and the U.S. south have not been hammered as in years past. There are still a couple of months to go in the season.
The whole climate-weather future is like that, Jeff says. In his first piece in Yale Connections, he begins with a quote from explorer John Wesley Powell as his team set down the unmapped Colorado River, rushing through the Grand Canyon. That was 1869 and not everyone survived.
“We are now ready to start our way down the Great Unknown. We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.”
– John Wesley Powell 1869
Powell was a National Geographic founding member who gave the Society’s first lecture on February 13, 1888. The explorer is brought to the stage by American actor Clay Jenkinson. Recorded from YouTube.
Powell’s expedition made it through the canyon, but the explorers endured great hardship, suffering near-drownings, the destruction of two of their four boats, and the loss of much of their supplies. In the end, only six of the nine men survived.
Likewise, we find ourselves in an ever-deepening chasm of climate change impacts, forced to run a perilous course through dangerous rapids of unknown ferocity. Our path will be fraught with great peril, and there will be tremendous suffering, great loss of life, and the destruction of much that is precious.
Here are the topics Jeff Masters covers in his important Yale Connections article – and we talk about many in our interview.
What is a dangerous level of climate change?
Climate change’s impacts will be highly asymmetric
An immediate U.S. climate change threat: an insurance crisis
A second potential immediate U.S. climate change threat: a global food shock
“Black swan” and “gray swan” extreme weather events
A “new normal” of extreme weather has not yet arrived
Longer-range concerns: global catastrophic risk events
Devastating impacts from climate change are accelerating
Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology
Hope for the future via ‘cathedral thinking’
ARTICLE TWO – WHAT TO DO
Should you move or should you stay? One group already has the answer: anyone living within sea level rise, storm surges, or hurricane-driven floods should get out now – while their property is still worth something. Eventually government may buy out those forced into retreat. But why wait? It can take a few years to sell, buy somewhere, maybe change jobs. Best to start now.
Jeff published a list of “30 great tools to determine your flood risk in the U.S.”.
For the rest of us, the choice is not so easy. We talk about whether there are ANY climate “safe havens” in the United States. Maybe living around the Great Lakes area would be safer. People may think of Vermont – but strangely, as Jeff tells us, Vermont gets more natural disasters than many other parts of the country! A person really has to do their homework.
We don’t discuss Europe or the UK, but obviously much of the same applies. People living in possible flood lands should seek higher ground. We have already seen record-breaking extreme rainfall events in Europe, and rivers that burst out of their banks. More will come. Plan accordingly. I also suggest to UK residents planning on retiring in southern Spain, or anywhere on the Mediterranean: stay home. The climate of the North Africa (think Sahara Desert) is moving northward. We can already see the great drought rising in Sicily, North Greece, and parts of Spain. The heat in those areas is already tremendous, beyond humans ability to live outside.
Check out Jeff’s article for sure: “What should you do to prepare for the climate change storm” by Jeff Masters August 20, 2024.
ALL PART OF A FOUR PART SERIES
We talked about two articles from a four-part series on U.S. climate change adaptation. The other parts:
Part one looked at a number of recent government adaptation efforts to prepare the U.S. for our new climate.
The U.S. is finally making serious efforts to adapt to climate change
Part two looked at how far short U.S. climate change adaptation efforts fall from what is needed.
Part three is an essay giving observations and speculations on how the planetary crisis may play out
Jeff Masters co-founded Weather Underground in 1995. He was a flight meteorologist for NOAA’s famous Hurricane Hunters, flying into the eye of the storm. Take time to explore Jeff’s recent posts at yaleclimateconnections.org.
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MORE INFO ON MOVING OUT
See also this video review by Ecoshock guest Jeff Goodell about the book “On the Move” by Abrahm Lustgarten.
SEE MY RADIO ECOSHOCK INTERVIEW OF GAIA VINCE and her book “Nomad Century – How To Survive The Climate Upheaval”.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock interview with Gaia Vince in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
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WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO OUR CLIMATE?
Are we in extreme climate danger? Will it cool off next year? What caused this incredible long-lasting burst of heat around the world? We go to scientists for answers in my multi-part series: “What Just Happened to Our Climate”.
IS IT LACK OF SHIP POLLUTION CHANGING CLOUDS?
DR. ANDREW GETTELMAN
Famous climate scientist James Hansen warned warming was increasing rapidly. That was in the summer of 2021. Hansen cited inadvertent heating revealed by slashing sulfur emissions by international shipping. Then we had a string of record hot years including the first half of 2024.
No less than six teams of scientists investigated the role of shipping emissions. Could pollution controls cause the wild heat of 2023 and ’24? This is important to our future – and possibly for geoengineering.
Dr. Andrew Gettelman is a scientist specializing in clouds and climate change. His PdD investigated pollution of the atmosphere – not by ships, but by aircraft. After working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Dr. Gettelman moved to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a senior Earth scientist. Now Andrew develops and manages Earth system models.
Andrew led the new paper, published August 12 titled: “Has Reducing Ship Emissions Brought Forward Global Warming?”
Listen to or download this 23 minute interview with Dr. Andrew Gettelman in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
Hansen and his colleagues suggested up to half a Watt per square meter of additional energy would remain in the Earth system due to ship pollution cuts. That small number of half a Watt hides very large amounts of energy. Basically Gettelman’s study found a little over one fifth the amount first suggested by Hansen. That is enough to matter, but not enough to explain extraordinary ocean heating and heat waves on land around the world.
Hansen first raised the shipping sulfur change in 2021, after correspondence from the Dutch climate-watcher Leon Simons. Here is his post on that – not peer-reviewed. More recently Hansen estimates that the reduction in sulfur emissions from ships, which began around 2020, has resulted in a warming effect of at least 0.5 W/m² .
SIX TEAMS OF SCIENTISTS TOOK ON HANSEN’S THEORY
In the six studies, findings of radiative forcing due to low-sulphur fuels have a wide range. Yuan et al 2024’s highest estimate of .3 watts per square meter comes closest to Hansen’s .5, but the range of uncertainty in Yuan’s paper is big, with some very low estimates possible.. The lowest estimate is Hausfather and Forster 2023 at 0.08 w/m2. Gettelman’s team finds a middle estimate at 0.12 w/m2.
Zeke Hausfather compares various recent paper estimates on shipping emission warming here.
LIST OF RECENT STUDIES ON THIS QUESTION:
Hausfather and Forster 2023
Yuan et al 2024
Yoshoika et al 2024
Quaglia and Visioni 2024
Gettelman et al 2024
Jordan and Henry 2024
The answers to this sulfate pollutions question from ships is also important to geoengineering. One of the most talked about solutions is to inject sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect more sunlight (energy) away from Earth. This has never been tested, and can only be tested with a large real-world experiment. If there are unforeseen side-effects, like lower rainfall in some regions, we might have to live with that? Anyway, these studies of atmospheric physics and clouds shed a little more light.
BLAME POLLUTION – NOT FOSSIL FUEL BURNING?
Despite six papers questioning the role of ship emissions, mainstream press still lists this as the major cause of recent record-smashing warming. For example Moody’s insurance points to “ships’ funnels and the outcome of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulations on sulfate emissions.” It is handy for business to blame environmental regulations for global heating!
I find this headline at phys.org hard to understand. It says: “New study finds Earth warming at record rate, but no evidence of climate change accelerating.” If earth is warming at a record rate, is that not a priori evidence of climate change accelerating?
Two decades ago the rule of thumb was: humans were driving warming at about .1 added degree C. per decade, or one degree C in 100 years. Now scientists talk about .2 degrees C or higher warming per decade. How should we think about this, and have the extreme temperatures of the last two years added uncertainty?
To my mind, there are two schools envisioning the future. One expects a relentless ramping up of heat, big storms, and all that – over coming decades and centuries. The other sees climate change unfolding in steep steps followed by temporary plateaus. We may have just gone up a step.
If the high step theory is true, our weak planning and procrastination will be even more disastrous. Drainage systems need to be redesigned, agriculture must adapt, food shocks are inevitable, emergency systems need to be normalized (like cooling centers and coastal evacuations).
If a plateau follows 2024, that may give more time. If not, we are out of time. If we take expensive preparatory action and climate stays around 1.5 for another few years, the money, effort and social capital will not be wasted. We have to do those things in any case.
The “What Just Happened to Our Climate” science interviews will continue over the next few programs.
I’m Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.