By Gloria Dickie
BAKU (Reuters) – This year’s U.N. climate summit – COP29 – is being held during another record year of higher global temperatures, increasing pressure on negotiations aimed at curbing climate change.
The last global scientific consensus on climate change was released in 2021 through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but scientists say evidence shows global warming and its effects are unfolding faster than expected.
Here are some of the latest climate studies:
1.5C violated?
The world may already have reached 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above average pre-industrial temperatures – a critical threshold above which there is a risk of irreversible and extreme climate change, scientists say.
A group of researchers made the suggestion in a study published Monday based on an analysis of 2,000 years of atmospheric gases captured in Antarctic ice cores, which increases understanding of pre-industrial temperature trends.
Scientists have typically measured current temperatures relative to the basic temperature average of 1850-1900. By that measure, global warming is now almost 1.3 degrees Celsius.
But the new data suggests a longer pre-industrial baseline, based on temperature data from AD 13 to 1700, according to the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Either way, 2024 will certainly be the hottest year on record.
SUPERCHARGED HURRICANE
Warming oceans are not only making Atlantic storms stronger, but also causing them to intensify more quickly, for example jumping from a Category 1 to a Category 3 storm in just a few hours.
Growing evidence shows that this is also true in other ocean basins.
Hurricane Milton took just one day in the Gulf of Mexico in October to go from a tropical storm to the second most powerful hurricane on record, devastating the west coast of Florida.
Warmer air can also hold more moisture, allowing storms to carry and ultimately release more rain. As a result, hurricanes are causing flooding even in mountain towns like Asheville, North Carolina, which was swamped by Hurricane Helene in September.
KILLING BY WILDFIRE
Global warming is drying out waterways and stripping moisture from forests, creating conditions for larger and hotter wildfires from the western US and Canada to southern Europe and the Far East of Russia, creating more noxious smoke.
Research published last month in Nature Climate Change calculated that around 13% of deaths from toxic bushfire smoke, around 12,000 deaths, in the 2010s could be attributed to the climate’s effect on bushfires.
CORAL BLEACHING
With the world in the grip of a fourth mass coral bleaching event – the largest ever recorded – scientists fear the world’s reefs have passed a point of no return.
Scientists will spend the next few years studying bleached reefs from Australia to Brazil for signs of recovery as temperatures drop.
AMAZON ALARM
The Brazilian Amazon (NASDAQ:) is in the grip of the worst and most widespread drought since records began in 1950. River levels fell to historic lows this year as fires destroyed the rainforest.
This adds concern to scientific findings from earlier this year that between 10% and 47% of the Amazon will face combined heat and drought stress from climate change by 2050, as well as other threats.
This could push the Amazon past a tipping point, where the jungle is no longer able to produce enough moisture to extinguish its own trees, at which point the ecosystem could transition to degraded forests or sandy savannas.
Forests worldwide seem to be having a hard time.
A July study found that forests overall were unable to absorb as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere last year as in the past, largely due to drought in the Amazon and wildfires in Canada.
This means that a record amount of CO2 has entered the atmosphere.
VOLCANIC DISTURBANCE
Scientists fear that climate change could even stimulate volcanic eruptions.
In Iceland, volcanoes appear to be responding to the rapid retreat of the glaciers. As the ice melts, less pressure is placed on the Earth’s crust and mantle.
Volcanologists worry that this could destabilize the magma reservoirs and it appears that this leads to more magma being created, increasing underground pressure.
About 245 volcanoes around the world are under or near ice and could be at risk.
OCEAN DELAY
Warming of the Atlantic Ocean could hasten the collapse of a key current system that scientists warn is already sputtering.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which transports warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic Ocean, has helped keep European winters milder for centuries.
Research from 2018 showed that AMOC has weakened by about 15% since 1950, while research published in February in the journal Science Advances suggested it could be closer to a critical slowdown than previously thought.
