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Tag: climate scientist

  • Climate setbacks and steps forward from 2025

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    There’s no mincing words: The list of climate records broken and the number of “unprecedented” extreme weather events this year goes on and on. Just in the past few months, at least 1,750 people died in monsoon flooding in Asia that a consortium of climate scientists attributed to human-caused global heating. Related video above: Solar and wind power increased faster than electricity demand in first half of 2025, report saysIn the U.S., investments in renewable, non-polluting energy were rolled back, and policy moves like the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and the Environmental Protection Agency’s reconsidering a key part of the federal government’s legal authority to regulate emissions.However, other nations have continued to make policy progress on prioritizing renewable energy and protecting the environment, and so have some scientists and groups on this side of the Atlantic.Here are a few of the highs and lows of humanity’s effect on our planet this year.The bad news firstGoal of keeping warming to 2.7 degrees no longer realisticHumans have failed to keep global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, long considered the goal following the original Paris climate agreement, according to UN Secretary General António Guterres. “Overshooting is now inevitable,” he said.Scientists widely consider the 2.7 degree goal the point at which climate change will begin hitting its most severe, irreversible damage.“We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible,” Guterres said ahead of the 2025 UN climate summit COP30, urging humanity to change course immediately. COP30 fails to make substantive progressUnfortunately, the outcomes from that UN summit did not live up to the secretary general’s hopes. This summit is an annual meeting where member countries measure their progress on addressing climate change and agree to legally binding goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.However, this final decision coming out of this year’s summit only included new voluntary initiatives to accelerate national climate action. According to commentary from the World Resources Institute, more than 80 countries advocated for a “global roadmap” to guide the transition away from fossil fuels, but negotiators didn’t include it in the final decision after they faced opposition from countries whose economies are built largely on oil and gas extraction and exports.World passes first climate ‘tipping point’This year, the world passed its first climate “tipping point,” meaning a threshold of irreversible change. Warming oceans have caused mass death in coral reefs, which are some of the world’s most diverse ecosystems. These reefs support a quarter of marine life and a billion people. Other tipping points, such as the devastation of the Amazon rainforest and melting ice sheets, are also approaching, scientists warn. Record-setting days of heat in major citiesThe world’s major cities now experience a quarter more very hot days every year on average than they did three decades ago, according to a September analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development.“This isn’t a problem we can simply air-condition our way out of,” said Anna Walnycki, a principal researcher, in a press release. “Fixing it requires comprehensive changes to how neighbourhoods and individual buildings are designed, as well as bringing nature back into our cities in the form of trees and other plants.“Climate change is the new reality. Governments can’t keep their heads buried in the sand anymore.”Where positive action made a differenceGlobal renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time This year, expanding solar and wind power infrastructure led to record shifts away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. Wind and solar farms produced more electricity than coal plants for the first time, a massive shift for power generation worldwide.According to a report from climate think tank Ember, in the first six months of the year, renewable energy overtook the global demand for electricity. The world generated almost a third more solar power in the first half of the year than it did in the same period last year, meeting a whopping 83% of the global increase in demand for electricity.Solar installations were up 64% around the globe after the first half of the year, driven largely by China, whose solar installations more than doubled compared to last year. Solar installations rose in the U.S. by only 4%, however.Pennsylvania children see drop in asthma after a coal plant closedAfter a coking plant closed near Pittsburgh, the population living in the area saw an immediate 20.5% drop in weekly respiratory trips to the emergency room, according to a study published almost 10 years later. Even more encouraging was that over the immediate term, pediatric emergency department visits decreased by 41.2%, a trend that increased as the months went on. The region also saw lower hospitalizations for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the fourth-leading cause of death worldwide.Congestion toll drops emissions in NYC by 22%In January, New York City became the first in the country to put in place a toll on drivers in certain parts of the city during rush hours. The measure was intended to reduce traffic and improve health. During the first six months of the policy, NYC emissions dropped 22%. The city is using the revenue to fund mass transit, including the subway system.

    There’s no mincing words: The list of climate records broken and the number of “unprecedented” extreme weather events this year goes on and on. Just in the past few months, at least 1,750 people died in monsoon flooding in Asia that a consortium of climate scientists attributed to human-caused global heating.

    Related video above: Solar and wind power increased faster than electricity demand in first half of 2025, report says

    In the U.S., investments in renewable, non-polluting energy were rolled back, and policy moves like the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and the Environmental Protection Agency’s reconsidering a key part of the federal government’s legal authority to regulate emissions.

    However, other nations have continued to make policy progress on prioritizing renewable energy and protecting the environment, and so have some scientists and groups on this side of the Atlantic.

    Here are a few of the highs and lows of humanity’s effect on our planet this year.

    The bad news first

    Goal of keeping warming to 2.7 degrees no longer realistic

    Humans have failed to keep global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, long considered the goal following the original Paris climate agreement, according to UN Secretary General António Guterres. “Overshooting is now inevitable,” he said.

    Scientists widely consider the 2.7 degree goal the point at which climate change will begin hitting its most severe, irreversible damage.

    “We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible,” Guterres said ahead of the 2025 UN climate summit COP30, urging humanity to change course immediately.

    COP30 fails to make substantive progress

    Unfortunately, the outcomes from that UN summit did not live up to the secretary general’s hopes. This summit is an annual meeting where member countries measure their progress on addressing climate change and agree to legally binding goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

    However, this final decision coming out of this year’s summit only included new voluntary initiatives to accelerate national climate action. According to commentary from the World Resources Institute, more than 80 countries advocated for a “global roadmap” to guide the transition away from fossil fuels, but negotiators didn’t include it in the final decision after they faced opposition from countries whose economies are built largely on oil and gas extraction and exports.

    World passes first climate ‘tipping point’

    This year, the world passed its first climate “tipping point,” meaning a threshold of irreversible change. Warming oceans have caused mass death in coral reefs, which are some of the world’s most diverse ecosystems. These reefs support a quarter of marine life and a billion people.

    Other tipping points, such as the devastation of the Amazon rainforest and melting ice sheets, are also approaching, scientists warn.

    Record-setting days of heat in major cities

    The world’s major cities now experience a quarter more very hot days every year on average than they did three decades ago, according to a September analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development.

    “This isn’t a problem we can simply air-condition our way out of,” said Anna Walnycki, a principal researcher, in a press release. “Fixing it requires comprehensive changes to how neighbourhoods and individual buildings are designed, as well as bringing nature back into our cities in the form of trees and other plants.

    “Climate change is the new reality. Governments can’t keep their heads buried in the sand anymore.”

    Where positive action made a difference

    Global renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time

    This year, expanding solar and wind power infrastructure led to record shifts away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. Wind and solar farms produced more electricity than coal plants for the first time, a massive shift for power generation worldwide.

    According to a report from climate think tank Ember, in the first six months of the year, renewable energy overtook the global demand for electricity. The world generated almost a third more solar power in the first half of the year than it did in the same period last year, meeting a whopping 83% of the global increase in demand for electricity.

    Solar installations were up 64% around the globe after the first half of the year, driven largely by China, whose solar installations more than doubled compared to last year. Solar installations rose in the U.S. by only 4%, however.

    Pennsylvania children see drop in asthma after a coal plant closed

    After a coking plant closed near Pittsburgh, the population living in the area saw an immediate 20.5% drop in weekly respiratory trips to the emergency room, according to a study published almost 10 years later. Even more encouraging was that over the immediate term, pediatric emergency department visits decreased by 41.2%, a trend that increased as the months went on. The region also saw lower hospitalizations for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the fourth-leading cause of death worldwide.

    Congestion toll drops emissions in NYC by 22%

    In January, New York City became the first in the country to put in place a toll on drivers in certain parts of the city during rush hours. The measure was intended to reduce traffic and improve health. During the first six months of the policy, NYC emissions dropped 22%. The city is using the revenue to fund mass transit, including the subway system.

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  • ‘Category 5’ was considered the worst hurricane. There’s something scarier, study says.

    ‘Category 5’ was considered the worst hurricane. There’s something scarier, study says.

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    As fearsome as Category 5 hurricanes can be for people living in harm’s way, a new study reports global warming is supercharging some of the most intense cyclones with winds high enough to merit a hypothetical Category 6.

    The world’s most intense hurricanes are growing even more intense, fueled by rising temperatures in the ocean and atmosphere, according to the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And, the authors say, a Category 5 on the traditional wind scale underestimates their dangers.

    “As a cautious scientist, you never want to cry wolf,” said Michael Wehner, co-author and climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But after searching for the signature of climate change in the world’s most intense cyclones, Wehner said he and co-author Jim Kossin found “the wolf is here.”

    “Significantly increasing” temperatures, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, up the energy available to the most intense tropical cyclones, reported Wehner and Kossin, a retired federal scientist and science advisor at the nonprofit First Street Foundation.

    More cyclones are making the most of it, gaining higher wind speeds and more intensity, the authors said, and their evidence shows that will occur even more often as the world grows warmer.

    They used a hypothetical Category 6, with a minimum threshold of 192 mph, to study hurricanes that have occurred in the modern satellite era, since around 1980. They found five hurricanes and typhoons that would have met the criteria and all five occurred within the last decade.

    To be clear, they aren’t proposing adding that category to the National Hurricane Center’s wind scale, which experts say would require a lengthy process and many partners. But they are hoping to “inform broader discussions about how to better communicate risk in a warming world,” Kossin told USA TODAY.

    Their findings emphasize that the dangers associated with a Category 5 cyclone are increasing as storms intensify above the Cat 5’s 157-mph threshold and that results in an underestimation of risk, he said.

    An enhanced satellite image released National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Oct.23, 2015, shows Hurricane Patricia as it approaches the coastline of Mexico from the Eastern Pacific.

    An enhanced satellite image released National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Oct.23, 2015, shows Hurricane Patricia as it approaches the coastline of Mexico from the Eastern Pacific.

    They found the chances of that potential intensity occurring in such storms have more than doubled since 1979. They say the areas where the growing risks of these storms are of greatest concern are the Gulf of Mexico, the Philippines, parts of Southeast Asia and Australia.

    Their peer-reviewed, scientific research provides the evidence pointing to climate change that some scientists have been waiting for.

    For more than 35 years, the scientific community has expected to see thermodynamic wind speeds increase in hurricanes, said Kerry Emanuel, the climate scientist who edited the paper for the journal. “And now we are seeing this increase in both climate analyses and models..”

    What is the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale?

    The hurricane center has used the well-known scale – with wind speed ranges for each of five categories – since the 1970s. The minimum threshold for Category 5 winds is 157 mph.

    Designed by engineer Herbert Saffir and adapted by former center director Robert Simpson, the scale stops at Category 5 since winds that high would “cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it’s engineered,” Simpson said during a 1999  interview.

    The Saffir-Simpson scale categorizes hurricanes.The Saffir-Simpson scale categorizes hurricanes.

    The Saffir-Simpson scale categorizes hurricanes.

    The open-ended Category 5 describes anything from “a nominal Category 5 to infinity,” Kossin said. “That’s becoming more and more inadequate with time because climate change is creating more and more of these unprecedented intensities.”

    A Category 6?

    Scientists, including Kossin, have occasionally brought up adding another category to the scale for more than 20 years.

    Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued for years that the Earth is “experiencing a new class of monster storms – ‘Category 6’ – hurricanes,” thanks to the effects of human-caused warming.

    Mann wrote a commentary to the Wehner and Kossin study, published in the same journal Monday, saying their work lays out an objective case for expanding the scale to include the “climate change-fueled stronger and more destructive storms.”

    “We are witnessing hurricanes that – by any logical extension of the existing Saffir-Simpson scale – deserve to be placed in a whole separate, more destructive category from the traditionally defined (category 5) ‘strongest’ storms,” Mann wrote.

    The research adds to a growing discussion about how the center, emergency managers and others could better convey the full range of hazards from a major hurricane.

    Climate change Is it fueling hurricanes in the Atlantic? Here’s what science says.

    Hurricane scale doesn’t measure other, greater risks

    The Saffir-Simpson scale only describes the wind risk and does not account for coastal storm surge and rainfall-driven flooding, the two biggest killers in hurricanes.

    Adding a sixth category to the wind scale wouldn’t help address those concerns, Kossin said.

    The hurricane center has tried to steer the focus toward the individual hazards, including storm surge, wind, rainfall, tornadoes and rip currents, Jamie Rhome, the center’s deputy executive director, said last week. “So, we don’t want to over-emphasize the wind hazard by placing too much emphasis on the category.”

    Despite the center’s efforts, the storm’s wind category always gets the most attention from the public when a storm approaches.

    “That focus on category over the years has detracted from effective communication of the other hazards,” said James Franklin, a retired branch chief for hurricane specialists at the hurricane center. “The emphasis at the NHC, rightly, has been to focus on the hazards,” he said.

    Ultimately, the decision would likely rest with the center, but Kossin said the conversation would “have to happen over time with a lot of input” from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, social scientists and others.

    It’s likely the World Meteorological Organization would be asked to weigh in because of the international scope involved in hurricane and typhoon forecasting, Franklin said. That’s the same group that sets the list of hurricane names for each season.

    To Franklin, the question is what would a sixth category accomplish?

    “If there are things that emergency managers would do differently, or the public might do differently because a storm has 195 mph winds versus 160 mph winds, then maybe the categories should be changed,” he said. “Personally, I’m getting out of the way if it’s 165 mph winds or 195 mph winds.”

    This infrared satellite image shows Hurricane Patricia over the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 23, 2015.This infrared satellite image shows Hurricane Patricia over the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 23, 2015.

    This infrared satellite image shows Hurricane Patricia over the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 23, 2015.

    Which storms fit the study’s hypothetical Category 6 description?

    One hurricane in the eastern Pacific, Patricia, and four typhoons in the western Pacific:

    ◾ Haiyan, November 2013: Struck the southern Philippines with 196-mph winds and a storm surge of almost 25 feet, killing 6,300 people and leaving 4 million homeless.

    ◾ Patricia, October 2015: Reached winds of 216 mph at sea, then dropped before it made landfall in Jalisco, Mexico as a Category 4 storm.

    ◾ Meranti, September 2016: Moved between the Philippines and Taiwan before making landfall in eastern China. Its winds reached 196 mph.

    ◾ Goni, November 2020: Made landfall in the Philippines with winds estimated at 196 mph.

    ◾ Surigae, April 2021: Reached wind speeds of 196 mph over the ocean, tracking east of the Philippines. Its max winds were the highest ever recorded for a storm from January to April anywhere in the world.

    Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate and environmental issues for USA TODAY. Reach her at dpulver@gannett.com or @dinahvp.

    This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Category 6 hurricane? That’s what a new study suggests. Here’s why.

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  • A warm, wet El Niño winter is in store for California and much of the U.S.

    A warm, wet El Niño winter is in store for California and much of the U.S.

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    After a blistering summer of record heat, raging wildfires and unpredictable storms, federal scientists on Thursday said a warm, wet winter driven by El Niño is in store for California and much of the rest of country.

    The first winter outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that a strong El Niño will remain in place through at least the spring, with further strengthening possible over the next couple of months.

    El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-La Niña Southern Oscillation pattern — sometimes referred to as ENSO — and is a major driver of temperature and precipitation patterns across the globe.

    “The anticipated strong El Niño is the predominant climate factor driving the U.S. winter outlook this year,” said Jon Gottschalck, chief of the operational prediction branch at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

    Aggressive and impactful reporting on climate change, the environment, health and science.

    Temperature forecasts for December, January and February favor warmer-than-average conditions across the northern tier of the U.S. and much of the West, with the highest chance of above-normal temperatures expected in Northern California, the Pacific Northwest and northern New England. Odds are tilted toward warmth in Central and Southern California as well.

    The forecast also favors wetter-than-average conditions in many regions of the country, including nearly all of California, the southern Plains, Texas and the Southeast. Widespread drought will persist across much of the central and southern U.S., but not in California, where the Central Valley and San Francisco Bay area have the highest odds in the state of above-normal rainfall.

    Map showing warmer-than-average temperatures are favored across the northern tier of the U.S. and West Coast.

    Warmer-than-average temperatures are favored across the northern tier of the U.S. and West Coast, according to a new winter outlook from NOAA.

    (NOAA)

    The outlook conjures the specter of another soggy season for the Golden State, which was pummeled by 31 atmospheric river storms, deadly floods and record-setting snow last winter.

    Gottschalck said the combination of wetness and warmth means more precipitation is likely to fall as rain instead of snow. But he and other experts also said it’s too soon to say whether California will see a repeat of the atmospheric rivers it experienced at the start of this year.

    Map showing likelihood of wetter-than-average conditions across much of California and other parts of the country.

    Wetter-than-average conditions are likely across much of California, as well as the central Rockies, the southern Plains, Gulf Coast, Southeast and lower-mid-Atlantic and northern Alaska, according to a new winter outlook from NOAA.

    “It’s important to stress that even though we see these general patterns during El Niño and La Niña years, there is still a lot of variability and not every event is going to follow the general pattern,” Julie Kalansky, a climate scientist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a recent El Niño update.

    Kalansky noted that last year’s La Niña was a perfect example, as the state received a deluge of moisture despite the pattern’s association with drier conditions in Southern California.

    “So, the declaration of an El Niño doesn’t guarantee that Southern California is going to have a wet, stormy winter, but it does stack the deck in that direction,” she said.

    The wet outlook follows the planet’s hottest summer ever recorded.

    Global average surface temperatures in June, July, August and September were the highest they’ve ever been, marked by sizzling heat waves in Europe, China and the southwestern U.S. — including a record 31 consecutive days of high temperatures at or above 110 degrees in Phoenix.

    September was so hot — 2.59 degrees above the 20th century average of 59 degrees — that it also broke the record for the highest monthly global temperature anomaly, or the largest difference from the long-term average, NOAA officials said.

    Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Berkeley Earth, called the month’s temperature data “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

    A man hikes a trail at Eaton Canyon in temperatures above 100 degrees.

    Timothy Koelkebeck hikes an Eaton Canyon trail as temperatures reach 100 degrees and above.

    (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

    The September data and winter forecast make it 99% certain that 2023 will end up as the planet’s hottest year on record, according to Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Currently, 2016 and 2020 are tied for that record.

    Schmidt said this year’s monthly heat records are particularly remarkable because they are occurring before the peak of the current El Niño event. Other hot periods, including in 2016 and 2020, happened after the peak of El Niño.

    That doesn’t bode well for what might be in store next spring, he said.

    “I would anticipate that 2024 is still going to be warmer than 2023, even given the ‘gobsmackingly bananas’ anomalies that we’ve had this summer,” Schmidt said. “What we would predict for next year, based just effectively on the long-term trend and the predicted level of ENSO going into next year, is that it will be warmer again — and by quite a lot.”

    Schmidt said he was surprised by the unusually high temperatures this summer. Persistent climate warming driven by the burning of fossil fuels is to be expected, as are warmer global temperatures linked to El Niño, but scientists are still seeking answers about why 2023 has been so off-the-charts.

    Some theories include a recent change to shipping regulations concerning aerosols, which reduced the upper limit of sulfur in fuels. The change was geared toward cleaner air in ports and coastal areas but may have had an unintended planetary warming effect because the aerosols were reflecting sunlight away from Earth.

    A dearth of Saharan dust, possibly linked to weakened trade winds from El Niño, could also be a warming factor since the dust normally has a cooling effect on the North Atlantic, Schdmit and other researchers said.

    Residents checkout the damage after the fast moving and swollen Tule River crumbled parts of Globe Drive

    Residents check out the damage after the fast-moving and swollen Tule River crumbled parts of Globe Drive in Springville, Calif., in March.

    (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

    Additionally, the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in 2022 shot record-breaking amounts of water vapor into the stratosphere, which can act as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.

    “But all of the quantitative estimates of how big those effects are are way too small to explain what’s going on,” Schmidt said. “This is not a neat story. It could be the long-term trends, plus ENSO, plus a little bit from the volcano, plus a little bit from the marine shipping emission changes, plus quite a large chunk of internal variability.”

    Indeed, he said that while the long-term trends point to continued warming, there are likely to be years in the future that are cooler than 2023.

    What is indisputable, though, is that people are already experiencing the effects of warmer temperatures — including extreme rainfall, extended droughts, heat waves and sea level rise — through their impacts on infrastructure, coral reefs, fishing, crop yields and other sectors, Schmidt said.

    NOAA experts said this year’s El Niño probably won’t be as severe as the one in 2015-16, which ranked as a “very strong El Niño,” but that it would still be wise for the West Coast to ready itself for more El Niño-fueled moisture. This month, state officials said they are taking steps to prepare for such a possibility, including assembling flood control material and sandbags, and providing funds for critical levee repairs.

    Though the winter storms significantly eased drought conditions in California, the soggy winter was among dozens of billion-dollar climate disasters in the U.S. this year, with flooding in the state between January and March causing about $4.2 billion in damage, according to NOAA. In August, Tropical Storm Hilary dropped more than a year’s worth of rain in a single day in several regions of the state.

    Other billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. include major flooding in New York, Hurricane Idalia in Florida and a devastating firestorm in Hawaii.

    “So far this year we’ve had 24 confirmed billion-dollar disasters, which is already a record-breaking amount,” said Tom Di Liberto, a climate scientist with NOAA. “And we still have October, November and December to go.”

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