More and worse than ever: World Meteorological Organization new climate report

 There are those—some of them in our nation’s leadership—who still deny climate science.

It’s a little like rejecting the rain forecast when the flood is already up to your knees.

The World Meteorological Organization just issued its State of the Climate report. It is no longer about predictions, because the predictions of past decades are all now coming to pass.

 Here is the WMO press release about the report. 

Here is the actual WMO report. 

World atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels are the highest they have been in 800,000 years, and so are its fellow greenhouse gases methan and nitrous oxide.

Global surface temperatures are the highest they have been since records have been kept. Last year was the single hottest year on record, and the past decade is the single hottest decade on record. And it continues. January 2025 was the hottest January on record.

The oceans, which store massive amounts of heat, are hotter than ever. Each of the past eight years has been the hottest. Oceans take up 90% of the heat rise that is driven by greenhouse gas increases. Without the oceans taking up heat, the atmospheric temperatures would be even higher.

In part because of the heat, sea levels are rising faster than ever—both because warmer water takes up more volume and because glaciers are melting their stored water back into the sea.

The ocean is acidifying at a record pace—and changing the chemistry of the oceans will have significant effects. Says WMO: “The effects of ocean acidification on habitat area, biodiversity and ecosystems have already been clearly observed, and food production from shellfish aquaculture and fisheries has been hit as have coral reefs.”

All that warming and its impacts lead to weather disruptions, and the report says that extreme weather events in 2024 led to the highest level of human disruptions on record.

It takes all kinds of forms. One of them, for Hawai`i residents, is an ongoing drought that has produced the lowest stream flows since we started keeping records more than a century ago.

 The changes in climate also lead to reductions in food and fishery production, driving food insecurity on a global scale.

The severity of the climate disruption is such that the WMO is now more about responding to the chaos than stopping it. In the foreword to the report, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said this:

“WMO and the global community are intensifying efforts to strengthen early warning systems and climate services to help decision-makers and society at large be more resilient to extreme weather and climate. We are making progress but need to go further and need to go faster. Only half of all countries worldwide have adequate multi-hazard early warning systems. This must change.”

The World Meteorological Organization is a non-governmental international organizatioTn founded as a place where international researchers could share data. It was created in 1950, but is rooted in the International Meteorological Organization, which dates back to 1873.

It is not just WMO reporting this.

Here is NOAA’s report: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202413

And here is the European Union’s Copernicus Program report: https://climate.copernicus.eu/global-climate-highlights-2024

 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2025

As Florida cleans up from two hurricanes, Hawai`i is dodging the bullet. Instead, we get hot and dry.

 Hawai’i has benefitted in recent years from the lack of strong hurricanes, while the folks on the Atlantic coasts have taken multiple hits from big spinning storms.

Tropical storm activity can be cyclical. Sometimes it’s higher in the Atlantic; sometimes in the Pacific. That seesaw pattern has been linked to the El Nino Southern Oscillation, a climate pattern associated with ocean water temperature, air temperature, jet streams and rainfall patterns.

During El Nino events, warm water pushes into the eastern Pacific, and tropical cyclones are more likely and stronger in the Pacific. They call El Nino the warm phase. In La Nina, those waters are cooler, and the storm action moves into the Atlantic. They call it a cool phase.

Currently, we’re in a neutral period, but NOAA says we’re likely moving into another La Nina.

Back in May 2024, the National Weather Service predicted a lower-than-normal hurricane season for the Islands, anticipating that shift from neutral to a cooler phase. In a May 21, 2024 press release, NOAA reported:

“Hurricane season in the central Pacific region is likely to be below average this year,” said Matthew Rosencrans, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, a division of NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS). “A key factor influencing our forecast is the predicted arrival of La Nina this summer, which typically contributes to less tropical cyclone activity across the central Pacific Ocean basin.” 

So far, only Hurricanes Gilma and Hone, at the end of August, came near enough to Hawai’i to cause significant weather events locally.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic has been ravaged, pretty much as predicted.

Nine hurricanes in the Atlantic so far this year, four of them Category 4 or greater. The Eastern U.S. has been hit by two powerful and destructive cyclones in just the past month: Helene and Milton.

And the continuing transition into another La Nina does not bode well for the Atlantic coastlines.

With two months to the end of the hurricane season, Hawai’i can hold its breath with a little hope. A storm might come, but it’s less likely than average.

So what about next year? The latest NOAA El Nino forecast suggests the incoming La Nina will last into the beginning of next year. Beyond that, it’s hard to know what will happen.

But all this is playing against a background of significant climate warming. The World Meteorological Organization notes that El Nino/La Nina is not the only climate driver. It is predicting warmer temperatures over all land areas and all oceans, besides the La Nina-impacted eastern Pacific.

As you’ll see from the World Meteorological Organiation chart below, that cooler weather is south of the Hawaiian Islands. Like most of the rest of the globe, we in the Hawaiian Islands have warmer than normal weather likelihood. 

The WMO also suggests rainfall for Hawai’i will likely be lower than normal from September through November 2024. 

Hotter and drier. Welcome to the future.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

 

 

 

John J. Berger''s new climate book: A comprehensive approach to saving the planet

 The top-of-mind responses to the climate crisis tend to be few and simple.

Use less fossil fuel and switch transportation to electric vehicles, restore forests, recycle, eat less meat.

But a serious response requires a broad rethinking of everything about how we live on the planet. And that’s complex.

John J. Berger’s new book runs through a lot of the approaches that are already underway and makes recommendations for how to proceed. The book is Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth.

Berger is the author of Climate Myths, Beating the Heat, Forests Forever and more. He is a noted environmental writer and climate policy expert, and in his latest book he conducts a comprehensive review of strategies to address our warming climate.

Some possible solutions are underway right now or at least starting. Manufacturing steel that doesn’t depend on massive fossil fuel inputs. Replacing oil-based products with ones made from plants. Electric and fuel cell aircraft.

There’s green concrete, new approaches to recycling, buildings that produce more power than they use, hydrogen cargo trucks and so much more.

There are examples of farmers who have turned problematic fossil-fuel-reliant businesses into thriving green enterprises that restore the soil and entrain carbon. He outlines the benefits of saving and expanding forests.

He reviews some of the geoengineering approaches, like sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, and seeding the skies with compounds that reflect solar radiation.

He takes a realistic look at the issues associated with decarbonizing planet-wide.

There’s clearly lots to be done at the legal, policy and international affairs levels, Berger writes. His to-do list starts with a national recognition that we are in an emergency, and that we need a National Clean Energy Transition Plan.

But it would all be so very costly, right? Maybe not.

“Various studies have found that a clean-energy transition would cost no more than 2 percent of gross domestic product in the United States,” Berger writes. He says he worries about the accuracy of those estimates, but even so, “that’s a pretty good deal, given all the other economic, environmental, and health benefits the United States would also receive.”

Berger’s book is a little overwhelming in its scope, but it’s well-written and anyone interested in how we need to approach this crisis will find lots to chew on. That, and some hope. It may be complicated, but it's possible, is Berger's message.

It does occur to me that, given the topic of the book, an actionable strategy for Berger would have been making the ebook dramatically less expensive than a paper copy of the book, but it’s close to $20 for the electronic version. Here, here, here and here are a some ways to find Solving the Climate Crisis.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Voyaging: Nailing down when the first canoe pulled up on a Hawaiian beach.

 

Your grandfather might tell you otherwise, but it is increasingly clear that the first humans set foot in Hawai’i in the year AD 1000, give or take a few decades.

Archaeologists and other researchers have been honing on that period for a couple of decades as their tools have improved for determining the age of human-related activities and artifacts. Early, widely varying carbon-14 dates have been adjusted and refined, and several new technologies have been added to the tool kit.

This isn’t brand new information, but I still hear older Hawai’i people advocating for dates they remember being taught as little as 30 or 40 years ago.

Until and into the 1980s, the common assumption was that the Hawaiian Islands were first inhabited early in the first millennium after Christ, and a few folks still still argue for AD 500, 300 or occasionally even earlier.

In his seminal 1985 book Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, leading Pacific archaeologist Patrick Kirch reflected the wisdom of the period: “It is clear that colonization parties from the Marquesas were responsible for the settlement of Easter Island by about A.D. 400 and of Hawai’i by possibly by A.D. 300.”

But the science has improved much since then, and the errors of the early dating have been corrected. By the 2023 revision of Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, Kirch and Mark McCoy had moved the number to closer to 1000.

Why? Wrote the authors: “No one could have foreseen…the major technological advances that would come…the use of GPS and GIS in settlement archaeology, AMS radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modeling…high-precision dating of corals, stable isotope analysis of faunal remains or XRF geochemical analysis of stone artifacts.”

Professional archaeology now assumes there weren’t any humans in the eastern Pacific as early as CE 300 or 400. (Maybe a lost fisherman or an intrepid sailor who left no evidence.) It is more likely that Polynesian voyaging canoes around AD 900 began pushing—probably from the Samoa islands—into eastern Polynesia.

Why did those Polynesians voyage? There have been many theories, but one recent one is that they were driven out of their home islands by drought. David Sear and co-authors Melinda Allen, Jonathan Hassall and Emma Pearson said that drought may have lasted 200-400 years, certainly from before AD 900 to after 1100. 

Whether or not drought alone was enough to coerce people to abandon their homes, there’s an associated stressor. Population pressure would have been a big factor as expanding island families began outgrowing their small islands’ ability to feed them.

Science now generally presumes that on departure from the central Pacific islands, some of the eastern Pacific islands south of the Equator were populated first. Perhaps the Cook Islands, which are just to the southeast and downwind of Samoa. Then the nearby islands and finally then canoes came north to Hawai’i, east to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and then west to Aotearoa (New Zealand.) The chronology could change with additional findings and new technologies.

But all of that voyaging may have occurred in a pulse of only a few generations. The voyaging canoes left Samoa around 900 and would have populated all those other islands within just a couple of hundred years.

“The archaeological and paleoenvironmental estimates of the colonization date show a striking convergence, indicating that initial settlement (of Hawai’i) occurred at A.D. 940–1130…and most probably between A.D. 1000 to 1100,” wrote pollen expert Stephen Athens and Timothy M. Rieth and Thomas S. Dye, in a 2017 article in the journal American Antiquity, entitled, “A Paleoenvironmental and Archaeological Model-Based Age Estimate for the Colonization of Hawai’i.” 

They cited updated radiocarbon dating and pollen from archaeological coring data.

One of the best resources for dating first human activity on Kaua’i was developed by David Burney and William “Pila” Kikuchi at Makauwahi Cave on the swampy south coast of the island. Their 2006 paper, based on flooded sediments in the cave floor, estimated first Polynesian activity at between AD 1039-1241. 

A lot of the earliest archaeological dates in Hawai'i are now settling in on that time period.

What is amazing, given the compressed period of Hawaiian occupation, is the extent of the great public works that were completed: the many hundreds of fishponds, the massive stone temples, the remarkable waterworks for flooded kalo fields and the vast dryland field agricultural systems.

© Jan TenBruggencate

Global temperature estimates are way low; newest data shows the pace of change is accelerating

 

Global temperature will rise far faster than current UN estimates, even if we don’t keep dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A lot of the projected heating is already baked in.

That will lead to temperatures higher than the human race has experienced in its few hundred thousand years of existence, according to new research published in June 2024.

For coastal areas like the Hawaiian Islands, that also means dramatic changes in sea level estimates. Changes in terms of several feet rather than inches. In some areas, even rock walls won’t protect from that. Retreat to higher ground may be the only option. The cost, for low-lying facilities like airports, harbors, resorts and high-end beach communities may be unsupportable.

Here’s the threat, in jargon:

“We calculate average Earth system sensitivity and equilibrium climate sensitivity, resulting in 13.9 °C and 7.2 °C per doubling of pCO2, respectively. These values are significantly higher than IPCC global warming estimations, consistent or higher than some recent state-of-the-art climate models, and consistent with other proxy-based estimates.” (Those numbers in Fahrenheit are 25 and 13 degrees.)

That quote is from a paper by a team of Dutch and British researchers who tracked global temperatures against atmospheric carbon dioxide over 15 million years, using proxy sources including deep ocean core samples.

You can read what the journal Phys.Org wrote about the paper, in plainer language, here.  

The authors are Caitlyn R. Witkowski, of the Department of Marine Microbiology and Biogeochemistry at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, and Anna S. von der Heydt, Paul J. Valdes, Marcel T. J. van der Meer, Stefan Schouten and Jaap S. Sinninghe Damsté.

Another team last year had more modest estimates, but they were still higher than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They argued that doubling CO2 could result in 5-8 degrees Centigrade in warming, or 9-14 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone up 30 percent in just the last 60 years or so, according to Keeling Curve records at Mauna Loa on Hawai`i. Before the Industrial Age, there were 280 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. That number now is 419. That’s a 50 percent increase. And it continues to rise faster.

The CO2 numbers are the catalyst for catastrophic change.

There is an estimated 50-year lag between when the CO2 enters the atmosphere and when the temperature responds.

So it’s going to keep getting hotter for generations, based on what we’ve already done to the atmosphere.

And there is an additional lag between temperature increase and sea level rise, because of the thermal inertia in melting glaciers and thermal inertia in the oceans.

What does that mean for my favorite beach, surf break, coastal restaurant or shoreline hotel?

In the most recent estimates, the best case, according to an article in MIT’s Climate Portal, is 8 to 20 inches of additional sea level rise by 2100. That’s still catastrophic for low-lying areas. But the worst case is six feet.

The National Ocean Service estimates by 2100 we will have between 1 and 8 feet of sea level rise, a little higher at the top end. 

CO2 is not only rising, but the rise is accelerating. New data from this month. 

Temperature is not only rising, but accelerating.

The melting of Antarctic glaciers is accelerating, too. And another source on that.

Ocean temperature increases are accelerating.  

Sea level is not only rising, but the that rise is accelerating. 

It’s a bad trajectory, and as a species, we’re not taking it seriously.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Are we seeing more flight turbulence, and is it linked to climate change? Yes and yes.

 We have seen numerous reports of airliners suddenly plunging hundreds or thousands of feet midflight.

And a fair amount of suggestion that atmospheric turbulence is the cause, along with some guesswork that turbulence is increasing due to climate change.

Could that be true? The answer seems to be, yes.

There does seem to be a fair amount of turbulence-related airline drama this year. Here is a review of one kind, clear-air turbulence. 

There is also thunderstorm-related turbulence, and other kinds.

In February 10, 2024, a United flight experienced “moderate turbulence” between Newark and Los Angeles. Several passengers were injured.  

On May 20, a Singapore Airlines flight experienced severe turbulence over Myanmar, which caused significant injury.

Also in May, a Qatar Airways flight between Dohar and Dublin was knocked around, apparently by turbulence May 26. 

To be clear, a review of many recent incidents of bumpy plane rides suggests that a lot of them have little or nothing to do with climate or turbulence.

An April 11, 2024, Southwest flight had a sudden drop while approaching Lihue Airport, leveling off at about 400 feet above the ocean. That, investigators said, was due to mistake at the controls by a pilot.

In a Latam Airlines incident in March 2024, a plane apparently went into a dive when the cockpit crew briefly lost control of the aircraft. The pilots brought the plane back into control. Latam called it a “a technical event during the flight which caused a strong movement.”

A 2022 United flight event involving a sudden drop was determined to be pilot error, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. 

In 2019, Psychology Today published an article about a Delta flight, on the fear generated by these kinds of events. 

In that case, the incident was a controlled descent apparently associated with a cabin pressurization event. The article decries media sensationalizing and mischaracterization.

But there are plenty of occasions when actual turbulence, rather than equipment or human error, are involved.

Hawaiian Airlines had such an incident in December 2022, 65 miles north of Maui. The National Transportation Safety Board report said, “A cloud shot up vertically (like a smoke plume) in front of the airplane in a matter of seconds, and there was not enough time to deviate.”  

No previous flights in the area that day had reported turbulence, but the NTSB report said: “Postaccident examination of the weather in the area revealed that there was an occluded frontal system with an associated upper-level trough moving towards the Hawaiian Islands. Satellite and weather radar imagery, and lightning data depicted strong cells in the vicinity of the flight.”

An article in Smithsonian Magazine argues that climate change may be causing increases in turbulence, and therefore in aircraft-involved incidents. 

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg in May said turbulence is increasing, and that climate change is a big factor. The Smithsonian article said that technology is also improving, and will help moderate risk, but that bumpier flights may be in our future.

Many of the injuries in such incidents involve people being thrown around the aircraft. It’s a reminder to keep those seat belts fastened.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024