Insane temperature increase next year

 From Zeke Hausfather

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.

We're racing towards 2 degrees increase in temperatures since the 19th century.  And look how bad things already are.  The rate of increase is accelerating. 

Yet our politicians and CEOs lie to us, pretend to care, but take no action to slash emissions.  

Ocean temperatures reach June record high

From The Guardian

Temperatures on the ocean surface have hit a record high, raising fears of another burst of extreme heat this summer.

On 21 June, temperatures outside the polar regions exceeded the extraordinary highs observed at the same time in 2023 and 2024, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Wednesday.

It warned the new peak would probably bring “consequences for weather patterns, global climate and marine ecosystems”, not least because it would coincide with the earliest phases of an El Niño event they forecast to be the strongest in decades.

When the previous ocean record for June was set in 2023, scientists described the trends as “worrying”, “terrifying” and “bonkers” because they were so far outside their expectations. That presaged an El Niño and a period of devastating global heatwaves, floods and storms.

That 2023 record has now been surpassed and much of the world is once again seeing an alarming rise in temperatures. Last month, the UK and many other countries in Europe sweltered amid new heat records while Antarctica experienced unprecedentedly balmy winter conditions.

Although the focus is usually on land temperatures, oceans give a fuller picture of how much the climate is being pushed out of balance by human-caused warming.

Surface temperatures are affected by solar radiation, water currents and the buildup of heat in the depths.

Oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess energy in the Earth system, which is primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. That imbalance hit a record 23 zettajoules last year, more than double the average of the previous two decades.

As a result, the oceans are warming at an accelerating rate. In 2020, the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs a second. Last year, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions a second. The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has warned “Earth is being pushed beyond its limits”.

Scientists said it was too early to say whether the sea surface heating would prove temporary or even worsen because annual peaks are usually registered in July and August.

But Carlo Buontempo, Copernicus director at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, warned it could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory: “With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we are likely to see more temperature records fall in the coming months.”

Copernicus is part of the EU’s space programme.

We are not helpless.  

We can replace coal and gas power stations with wind, solar and batteries to at least 90% of total electricity generation.  We can replace petrol and diesel in land transport, in cars, light trucks, and buses, and we can switch diesel trains to bi-mode trains.  We can replace oil and gas heating with electric heating and/or heat pumps.  And 40% of all shipping emissions are produced just delivering fossil fuels around the world.   

Also, you can personally change things too.  Get balcony plug-in solar.  Get home plug-in batteries.  Nag your government until they make them legal.  Vote, vote, vote.  Stop eating meat, and if that's too hard, stop eating beef and mutton.  If you can afford it, when you replace your car, get an EV.  Outside the US, their up-front cost is now as low as petrol cars, and their running costs are much lower.

And you won't be spitting into the wind, because the world's biggest carbon-emitter, China, has probably peaked its emissions.  Even in Trump's US, though abolishing the incentives to switch to green alternatives has slowed bettrification down, EV sales have started to rise, and most of new generation capacity this year is renewables.  

Fossil fuel companies and the Right want us to give up.  Don't.

It's happening—a super El Niño is coming

 

A clear and excellent explanation of El Niño, and why it's likely to be so bad this time.   Ben Miles is usually quite optimistic.  This time, he struggles to find something hopeful to say.  The world faces famine and climate disaster.  Are politicians planning for this?  Are you?  And what are we doing to reduce global heating, which is making this worse?

European heatwave

 From The BBC

This El Niño will take temperatures to new highs. The acceleration in recent years is obvious, and I've talked about it before.  The trend will continue.

Will this latest heatwave encourage politicians to do more?  Don't count on it.

A humungous El Niño is on the way

From Zack Labe

Sea surface temperatures are already surging to record high levels for this time of year in key El Niño monitoring areas.

This will prolly push global temperatures towards 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels. This is releasing heat into the atmosphere already accumulated in the sea, so it doesn't change the underlying trajectory — though it may move some world climate systems past tipping points — but it will still deliver terrible heatwaves, droughts, bushfires and floods. And meanwhile the underlying temperature is continuing to rise, and its increase appears to have been accelerating.

The next el Niño---James Hansen

 From James Hansen's Climate Uncensored Substack

You can read the full article yourself, and I'll just post the main chart and the conclusion here.

Fig. 1. Global surface temperature (relative to 1880-1920 base period).[1]
click on chart to enlarge

 Abstract: 

The world seems headed into another El Niño, just 3 years after the last one. Such quick return normally would imply, at most, an El Niño of moderate strength, but we suggest that even a moderately strong El Niño may yield record global temperature already in 2026 and still greater temperature in 2027. The extreme warming will be a result mainly of high climate sensitivity and a recent increase of the net global climate forcing, not the result of an exceptional El Niño, per se. We find that the principal drive[r] for global warming acceleration began in about 2015, which implies that 2°C global warming is likely to be reached in the 2030s, not at midcentury.

The key lines on the chart are the 1970-2010 linear trend, of an increase of 0.18 C per decade, the linear trend from 2010 to the present of 0.3 C per decade (last 15 years) and the linear trend from 2015 to date of 0.41 C per decade.

It's really a clear-cut proposition:  either we slash emissions very fast, or there will be climate catastrophe.  Yes, emissions have probably peaked, but they're only likely to fall slowly at first, and for the rate of increase in temperatures to slow to, say, 0.1 C per decade, we will need to cut emissions by 2/3rds or 3/4qtrs.

Can we do that?  

The chart below, from Our World in Data, shows emissions by sector, which includes direct emissions, as well as indirect emissions.  For example, you could be burning oil directly to heat your house, or using fossil fuels indirectly, via electricity.  Electricity generation produces roughly 30% of global emissions.  Apart from aviation and shipping, almost all of the sectors in the red quadrant can be electrified.  Converting the grid to green tech will be a huge step towards eliminating all emissions from these sectors.

So it is possible.  But that means green electricity, and the electrification of everything.  Wind and solar and batteries instead of coal and gas power stations, plus EVs and heat pumps.  Electric trains, electric planes, electric ships.  Chemicals and cement.  Landfill.

And we need to deal with emissions in agriculture.  That will be complicated and will vary by source, so the sooner we start, the better.

It's doable.  But will we do it?  It's up to us.

Source: Our World in Data

 

Third hottest September ever

From Berkeley Earth.

This chart shows the temperature anomaly relative to the 1850 -1900 September average temperature, for each September since 1850.  You can see how temperatures spiked during El Niño, and have since been falling as El Niño was replaced by La Niña.  The red line shows the trend, which you can see is accelerating.  This is the third-warmest September on record.

September 2025 was the third warmest September on record behind 2023 and 2024, with a global average of 1.48 ± 0.15 °C (2.67 ± 0.26 °F) above the 1850-1900 average.

This chart shows the 12-month moving average of the temperature anomalies up to September 2025.  The 12-month moving average has rolled over after the end of El Niño, but don't mistake this for a change in the longer-term trend, shown by the red LOESS smoothed line.

With the Paris Climate Agreement (COP21), 10 years ago, the world agreed to aim for a maximum increase in temperatures over the 1850-1900 average of 1.5 degrees C.  We're there already, and even though temperatures have fallen marginally from the El Niño high 3 years ago, the trend is inexorably upwards.  We have failed.  COP conferences have turned into pointless gabfests, where lobbyists from fossil fuel industries outnumber government delegates.

Only the continued decline in solar panel, battery and EV costs gives me any hope that mankind will act quickly enough to cut emissions and prevent a climate catastrophe.

Our planet is warming twice as fast as we thought

 A video from Just Have a Think.  He discusses a paper by Grant Foster and Stefan Ramsdorf, which confirms that the rate of global warming has accelerated from 0.2 degrees C per decade to 0.4 degrees C.   One of the authors of this paper is Grant Foster, who is "Tamino'", and I've commented on his pieces published on his blog "Open Mind" several times over the last few years.  See this, and this, and this.

Just Have A Think  explains quite well the techniques used to prove their point.  He cautions that just because temperatures have been rising twice as fast as they were between 1970 and 2010 over the last decade, it doesn't mean that they will necessarily continue to do that.  

On the other hand they might, and they might even accelerate.  Just being prudent and cautious would suggest that we should accelerate our attempts to slash emissions, especially since wind and solar power and batteries and EVs have fallen so much in cost. 

A chart from the paper referred to in the video, showing the unadjusted and the adjusted (for volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and the sunspot cycle) time series from 5 different estimates of the average global temeperature anomaly.

The January global temperature is really, really bad

 From Brian Bretschneider

Global average January temperature - color coded by ENSO status. One of these years is not like the others.

The chart shows the average January temperature for the world. Red dots show El Niño years, blue dots La Niña. During El Niño, air temperatures are higher, as heat is released from the sea. During La Niña, the reverse is true: air temperatures are cooler as more heat is absorbed by the oceans. Notice how temperatures above the trend line are mostly red dots (El Niño), while temperatures below the trend line are mostly blue dots. January 2025 is the glaring exception. It is now a La Niña phase, yet global temperatures moved to a new maximum.

click on chart to enlarge

World temperatures still rising.

From Prof Eliot Jacobson

Daily global surface temperature updates were delayed a few days. They were finally posted this morning. And the records keep on falling. [The *temperatures* keep on rising] 

So glad El Niño is over and La Niña is helping cool things down ...

1.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels.  Yet still we do nothing.

Rise in world's temperatures accelerates

 Open Mind (Tamino) produced a previous piece about the acceleration in the rise in global temperatures, which I reported on here.  He has returned to the analysis, and confirms his position in his latest post. 

I now have global temperature data through October of this year from NASA, NOAA, and ERA5, as well as data through September from HadCRU and Berkeley. I’ve translated them to “since pre-industrial” values using one of the methods in the IPCC special report on 1.5°C. Then I computed yearly averages (this year is incomplete so values for 2024 are year-so-far averages)

There are two clear episodes in this plot: before and after 1975. Before, GMST was fluctuating but not trending either way; since, it has been trending consistenly up and fluctuating. As for its rate of increase, for four and a half decades (from 1975 until 2020) temperature seemed to rise at a pace (about 0.02°C per year) that was unchanging, and statistics couldn’t deny it.

But the last two years (2023 and 2024) have been “off the charts,” so to speak. For the data from ERA5, the value for 2024 year-so-far is already above 1.5°C, which is exactly what the Paris agreement seeks to avoid.

I investigated the rate of warming, and how it may have changed over time, in two ways. First, I fit a modified lowess smooth which I’ve programmed to estimate the rate as well as the value. Second, I computed a piecewise linear fit (PLF) with knots at 1975 and 2010. Both models (lowess and PLF) were fit to the monthly-average data, but in the graphs that follow I’ll plot yearly averages so the graphs will be less cluttered. Here’s how the PLF model fits the data from NASA:

PLF = piecewise linear fit 

 

[....]

For the 45-year period from 1975 through 2009, the average warming rate according to NASA data is just about 0.018°C/yr. For the 15-year period since 2010, it has been a lot faster at 0.031°C/yr. Statistically, the difference is significant at over 99% confidence.

I have also adjusted all the data sets, to compensate for the influence of el Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar variations, with a method not unlike that of Foster & Rahmstorf (2011). Here are the adjusted temperatures, together with their PLF fit, for the data from NASA:

This chart shows the temperature anomaly adjusted for El Niño/La Niña and for vulcanism. 
PLF = piecewise least fit.

The rate from 1975 to 2010 now seems to be only 0.017°C/yr, and after 2010, the best estimate is 0.033°C/yr. These aren’t much different from the estimates using the raw data, although the uncertainties are now smaller so the confidence intervals are narrower.

Falling emissions (which of course we don't have--emissions continue to rise) do NOT mean that temperatures will start falling.  The RISE in the temperature anomaly is proportional to the LEVEL of emissions.  In other words, for temperatures to stop rising, we need to reduce emissions to zero.  If we halve emissions, the increase in temperature anomaly will halve, but that only reduces it to what it was before this recent acceleration, 0.17 degrees per decade.  

There are positive signs that emissions will peak soon.  Wind and solar continue to expand exponentially.  The costs of battery storage are plunging, and the recent first commercial solid-state battery points to continued and sustained cost declines and efficiency improvements.  Yet, even if we completely switch ALL electricity generation and ALL land transport to carbon-free methods, that will still only halve emissions.  If we were to start cutting emissions by 5% a year, compound, it would take us 40 years to reduce emissions to 10% of current levels.  Assuming we did this (but we are not) temperatures would rise for the next decade by 0.33 degrees, for the decade after by 0.17, by the decade after that by 0.l2 degrees and for the final decade by 0.06.  Roughly.  In other words, temperatures would rise by another 0.33+0.17+0.12+0.06, or ~0.7 degrees, making the rise since 1850-1900, the traditional "pre-industrial" starting point 2.2 degrees.

We face catastrophe, and still we dither and phaff.  The Right is dead against doing anything at all to slash emissions, and the Left argues with itself about what to do.  Meanwhile, we are lied to by corporations and governments, and protesters go to jail while oil execs are fêted.

Climate models can't explain 2023's huge heat anomaly

Source: NOAA
Note: this is relative to 1901-2000 average
Relative to the 1850-1900 average, the anomaly is already over 1.5 degrees C

From Nature, by Gavin Schmidt

When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Niña, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.

El Niño — the inverse of La Niña — causes the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean to warm up. This weather pattern set in only in the second half of the year, and the current spell is milder than similar events in 1997–98 and 2015–16.

However, starting last March, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean began to shoot up. By June, the extent of sea ice around Antarctica was by far the lowest on record. Compared with the average ice cover between 1981 and 2010, a patch of sea ice roughly the size of Alaska was missing. The observed temperature anomaly has not only been much larger than expected, but also started showing up several months before the onset of El Niño.

So, what might have caused this heat spike? Atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels have continued to rise, but the extra load since 2022 can account for further warming of only about 0.02 °C. Other theories put forward by climate scientists include fallout from the January 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai volcanic eruption in Tonga, which had both cooling effects from aerosols and warming ones from stratospheric water vapour, and the ramping up of solar activity in the run-up to a predicted solar maximum. But these factors explain, at most, a few hundredths of a degree in warming (Schoeberl, M. R. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 50, e2023GL104634; 2023). Even after taking all plausible explanations into account, the divergence between expected and observed annual mean temperatures in 2023 remains about 0.2 °C — roughly the gap between the previous and current annual record.

There is one more factor that could be playing a part. In 2020, new regulations required the shipping industry to use cleaner fuels that reduce sulfur emissions. Sulfur compounds in the atmosphere are reflective and influence several properties of clouds, thereby having an overall cooling effect. Preliminary estimates of the impact of these rules show a negligible effect on global mean temperatures — a change of only a few hundredths of a degree. But reliable assessments of aerosol emissions rely on networks of mostly volunteer-driven efforts, and it could be a year or more before the full data from 2023 are available.

This is too long a wait. Better, more nimble data-collection systems are clearly needed. NASA’s PACE mission, which launched in February, is a step in the right direction. In a few months, the satellite should start providing a global assessment of the composition of various aerosol particles in the atmosphere. The data will be invaluable for reducing the substantial aerosol-related uncertainty in climate models. Hindcasts, informed by new data, could also provide insights into last year’s climate events.

But it seems unlikely that aerosol effects provide anything close to a full answer. In general, the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system. If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.

Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behaviour is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time. We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.

Nature 627, 467 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00816-z

We face a climate catastrophe.  And we are still doing too little to stop it.

2024 likely to be another record year, despite La Niña

From Discover Magazine

As La Niña continues to stir in the tropical Pacific Ocean, the latest analysis shows there’s a 70 percent chance it will develop between August­ and October.

The climate phenomenon shifts the world's atmospheric circulation, changing weather patterns around the globe. Characterized by cooler-than-average sea surface waters in large swaths of the tropical Pacific, it also usually takes the edge off human-caused heating of the planet, albeit temporarily.

But even taking that likely cooling effect into account, a new annual global heating record is very likely in 2024, according Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Schmidt made the prediction on the Bluesky social media platform after his institute's analysis showed last month to be the warmest June on record. It was also the 13th straight month with record-breaking global temperatures. (Other analyses have shown the same, including one released by NOAA today.)

Last year shattered the record for the hottest year globally since record-keeping began in the 1800s. With an El Niño adding to the global heating caused by our continuing emissions of greenhouse gases, a new record in 2023 should not have come as a surprise. But the heat over land and in the seas was so extreme that scientists were nonetheless shocked — and they're still working hard to understand the details of what happened.

Warming rate probably accelerating

 Another in depth statistical analysis from Open Mind (Tamino).  I won't repeat the whole article (best to read it for yourself).   In essence, what he does is look at the change in the temperature anomaly over 30 years, the conventional measure of climate change (because shorter periods are too susceptible to fluctuations from natural climate cycles such as, for example, El Niño/La Niña).    This chart shows what that looks like:

Note that the change over the 30-year span has been centred at 15 years,
which is why it apparently ends at 2009.

He then adjusts the data for volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and the sunspot cycle to test whether the change in trend since 2000 is statistically significant, and concludes that it is.

But wait, there’s more. We know the cause of some of the fluctuation, and we can adjust the data by removing our best estimate of those known factors. In particular, we can remove an estimate of the influence of volanic eruptions, solar variations, and the el Niño southern oscillation, and I’ve done so by a modified version of the method of Foster & Rahmstorf.

Comparing this graph of adjusted data since 1946, to the graph of raw data over the same time (the third graph in this post), two things are obvious. First, the level of scatter (of random fluctuation) is quite a bit less for the adjusted data than for the raw. Second, the “obvious” simple model for the raw data (a linear spline with two straight-line setments) isn’t so obvious for the adjusted data.

The same analysis used on the raw data, returns different results on the adjusted. This is mainly because the uncertainty levels are so much reduced. The warming rate for NASA data, for example, now looks like this:

Again, the change has been centred midway on the 30-year span

The final 30-year estimate suggests the rate was definitely bigger then 0.02°C/year, while the earlier rate is definitely less. Also, the statistical tests (fitting a parabola and a linear spline) now are definitely significant at 95% confidence.

Using adjusted rather than raw data, the same is true for all five data sources. While the significance is weakest for HadCRU and strongest for NOAA, it’s over 95% confidence for all of them. My conclusion is that recent acceleration of global warming isn’t just likely, it’s confirmed.

There is still room for doubt, if you doubt that the adjusted data represent things correctly then the recent apparent acceleration may be just random accident. All told, I find that too unlikely.

See also this piece I did, based on Open Mind's analysis: 

Terrifying acceleration in global heating

We are heading towards climate catastrophe, and still we do not act, stumbling blindly to the precipice.

Is global heating accelerating?

 From Just Have a Think

See also:   

Terrifying acceleration in global heating

Air, ocean and ice climate records tumbled in 2023

From Weatherzone

The World Meteorological Organization has confirmed that 2023 was an astonishing year for our planet’s climate, with records obliterated in the atmosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere.

 

Atmosphere

Global air temperatures frequently made headlines around the world in 2023 as records fell month after month.

Every calendar month from June to December set a new global average near-surface air temperature record for that time of year.

This string of exceptional warmth in the second half of 2023 pushed the annual global mean air temperature to 1.45°C (±?0.12?°C) above the 1850 to 1900 pre-industrial baseline. According to the WMO, this was the highest annual mean temperature on record, beating the previous record from 2016 by 0.16ºC.

Oceans

The record warmth in Earth’s atmosphere last year was also mirrored in the oceans, with global sea surface temperatures reaching record-breaking levels from March onwards.

Every month from April to December set a new respective monthly record in 2023, while a new daily sea surface temperature record was observed in August (note that this has since been exceeded in 2024).

 

Image: Daily global sea surface temperatures between 1979 and 2024 to date, based on the ERA5 dataset. Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service

The global mean sea level also reached a new record height in 2023, driven by abnormal ocean warmth and increased melting of glaciers and ice sheets.

According to the WMO, “the rate of global mean sea level rise in the past ten years (2014–2023) is more than twice the rate of sea level rise in the first decade of the satellite record (1993–2002).”

Ice

Parts of the cryosphere – the frozen portions of our planet – also broke records in 2023.

Antarctic sea-ice extent reached record lows for the seasonal minimum extent in February and maximum extent in September.

Glacier melt was also pushed to new levels in 2023. According to the WMO, “preliminary data from the global set of reference glaciers for the hydrological year 2022-2023 show they experienced the largest loss of ice on record.”

What made 2023 so warm?

Climate change and El Niño were both contributing factors to the record-breaking warmth in 2023. However, these drivers alone aren’t enough to account for the magnitude of last year’s abnormal warmth.

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, other influences that may have contributed to the exceptional state of the climate in 2023 are:

• Enhanced stratospheric water vapour due to the eruption in January 2022 of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai volcano
• Reduced aerosols due to lower sulphur dioxide emissions by shipping
• The approach of the current solar cycle to its peak.

These influences are still an active topic of research and may continue to influence Earth’s global climate system in 2024. Monitoring Earth’s global climate system is an essential part of understanding how the climate is changing and what steps need to be taken, now and in the future, to mitigate its effects.

Sea temperatures literally off the scale

 From a toot by 'Anne Ominous'.

After sustained record sea surface temperatures, Climate Reanalyzer has again adjusted the scale of their Y axis on the SST graph to a maximum of 21.5ºC (it was recently a max of 21.2ºC)

Average SST is now at an all-time record high - on March 9, 2024 = 21.2ºC

(this is also happening even as El Niño is getting weaker)

Solid black line = this year's temperatures
Orange line  = last year's
Dotted line = 1982 2011 average
Dashed line  = = or minus 2 sigma

Yet still we dither and phaff. WE ARE NOT DOING ENOUGH TO SLASH EMISSIONS.

How many more warnings must we get before we act decisively?

Amazon's record drought driven by climate change

From The BBC

One of our planet's most vital defences against global warming is itself being ravaged by climate change.

It was the main driver of the Amazon rainforest's worst drought in at least half a century, according to a new study.

Often described as the "lungs of the planet", the Amazon plays a key role in removing warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But rapid deforestation has left it more vulnerable to weather extremes.

While droughts in the Amazon are not uncommon, last year's event was "exceptional", the researchers say.

In October, the Rio Negro - one of the world's largest rivers - reached its lowest recorded level near Manaus in Brazil, surpassing marks going back over 100 years.

As well as being a buffer against climate change, the Amazon is a rich source of biodiversity, containing around 10% of the world's species - with many more yet to be discovered.

The drought has disrupted ecosystems and has directly impacted millions of people who rely on rivers for transport, food and income, with the most vulnerable hit hardest.

One trigger for these dry conditions is El Niño - a natural weather system where sea surface temperatures increase in the East Pacific Ocean. This affects global rainfall patterns, particularly in South America.

But human-caused climate change was the main driver of the extreme drought, according to the World Weather Attribution group, reducing the amount of water in the soil in two main ways.

Firstly, the Amazon is typically receiving less rainfall than it used to between June and November - the drier part of the year - as the climate warms.

Secondly, hotter temperatures mean there's more evaporation from the plants and soils, so they lose more water.

The researchers used weather data and computer simulations to compare drought conditions in two scenarios: one with human-caused warming, and one without.

In a world where humans hadn't heated up the planet by around 1.2C, such an intense 'agricultural drought' - where a lack of rainfall and high evaporation dry out the soils - may only have happened around once every 1,500 years, the study suggests.

Climate change has made a drought of this severity around 30 times more likely, according to the researchers, and one is now expected to happen every 50 years under current conditions.

"This really is something quite exceptional," says Dr Ben Clarke, a researcher with the World Weather Attribution group.

And if warming continues, such extreme droughts could become even more common.  "If we continue burning oil, gas and coal, very soon, we'll reach 2C of warming and we'll see similar Amazon droughts about once every 13 years," says Dr Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London.

More frequent and intense droughts test the Amazon's resilience. That has already been stretched by deforestation - around one-fifth of the rainforest has been lost over the last 50 years.

Trees help the area retain and release moisture, fuelling their own clouds, and they also help to cool temperatures.

While the effect of deforestation was not directly tested in this latest study, previous research has shown it increases the vulnerability of the rainforest to drought.

The world's largest rainforest is seen as crucial in the battle to limit global warming.

"The Amazon could make or break our fight against climate change," says Regina Rodrigues, a professor of physical oceanography and climate at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.

In a healthy state, it takes up more carbon dioxide (CO2) than it releases.

This limits CO2 increases in the atmosphere from human activities, keeping a lid on temperatures.

But there is evidence that this may be changing, as trees die back due to drought, wildfires and deliberate clearance to make room for agriculture.

There is concern that if climate change and deforestation continue at their current pace, the Amazon could soon reach a "tipping point".

If crossed, this could lead to the rapid and irreversible dieback of the whole rainforest - potentially leading to the region becoming a significant source of CO2 emissions.

It's not known exactly where such a threshold might sit.

"I don't think that [tipping point] is what we are seeing [yet], at least in all but the driest part of the Amazon forest," says Yadvinder Malhi, a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the latest study.

This - alongside urgent action to slash the greenhouse gas emissions that are fuelling global warming - can still help to protect what's left of the Amazon, researchers say.

"The loss of the Amazon forest is far from inevitable in the short-term," as long as fire and deforestation can be controlled, Prof Malhi told BBC News.

"But we do need to get to grips with stabilising global climate, as the risk increases with every fraction of a degree the planet warms."

Australia's dodgy carbon offsets

From The New Daily.

July 5 was a big day. As well as being the planet’s hottest day ever, it was when the Bureau of Meteorology put the chance of an El Niño at 70 per cent this year, so it’s going to get worse, soon, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated that it will cost the world US$196 trillion to achieve net zero by 2050.

As you contemplate that trio of troubles, you might want to make yourself even more miserable with a website called the Carbon Integrity Explorer, as I’ve been doing.

It lets you examine in detail the regeneration projects in Australia that are behind the Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) issued by the Clean Energy Regulator (CER). These native forest regeneration projects are the largest project in the scheme, accounting for around 30 per cent of all ACCUs issued to date.

Buying ACCUs allows companies to offset their carbon emissions to meet emission reduction obligations under the Labor government’s new carbon pricing scheme without reducing their emissions.

I spent an absorbing, increasingly dismal few hours over the weekend clicking on random abatement projects, trying to find any in which the tree cover had materially increased, and is therefore responsible for removing some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of these projects were registered in 2015-16 but a large proportion of them claim they started in 2010-2012, so plenty of time for trees to have grown.

I found one, and only one, on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. It’s called the Arbon-Tooligie Human Induced Regeneration project, and covers 7863 hectares, which is very small. Tree cover has increased, and 148,397 ACCUs have been issued to its promoters, currently worth $29.75 apiece, or a total of about $4.5 million.

For every other project I clicked on, the tree cover had either decreased, or the increase was “negligible”. Yet they had all also been issued with ACCUs, hundreds of thousands of them, worth millions of dollars.

A group of academics at Australian National University led by Professor Andrew Macintosh has gone through all the projects on the Carbon Integrity Explorer so you and I don’t have to.

Here are their results:

To summarise: 27.5 million ACCUs, worth $825 million at today’s spot market price, have been issued for projects where the tree cover has decreased, or the increase has been negligible.

And to qualify as an “increase”, the trend in tree cover only has to be an increase of 0.25 per cent per year, which is hardly going to save the planet.

Two questions arise: First, what happens when the regulator eventually gets around to inspecting the projects to see whether they genuinely reduced atmospheric carbon? And second, what the hell is going on?

As to the first question: The rules require that by the 15th year of the project, 90 per cent of area that has been credited must have regenerated and have forest cover. If the credited area doesn’t have forest cover by then, proponents might have to hand back the ACCUs they have received.

To choose one at random – the 24,806 ha Wapweelah Regeneration Project near Bourke in New South Wales, which was registered in August 2015 and has produced a healthy crop of 441,526 ACCUs for its promoters, currently worth $13.2 million.

Yet its tree cover has decreased, and its integrity is assessed as “high risk” by the Explorer because most of the credited area has never been comprehensively cleared, its tree cover has gone backwards and the trends in tree cover in the credited areas are worse than those in the area surrounding the property.

Most of these projects are owned by farmers who have been persuaded by ACCU brokers like the firm called Climate Friendly to supplement their income by regenerating native forests in areas that have never been comprehensively cleared by reducing grazing pressure from livestock or feral animals like goats. They call it carbon farming.

According to the CER website, the “contractor” for the Wapweelah project is Phillip Ridge, who I learn from Google is the owner of the “iconic” Jandra Station near Bourke with his wife Di and four kids.

Phil and Di Ridge have until 2030 to get forest cover on this project from its current levels, of around 22 per cent, up to 90 per cent, even though it has been essentially static since the project was first registered. If they can’t, they might have to hand back their ACCUs.

The Ridges would be just one of dozens of farming families in a state of extreme “regulatory risk”. The CER doesn’t have to demand the return of ACCUs if the abatement of a project doesn’t measure up, but it can, and the farmers have no way of knowing whether they will.

In any case, the carbon abatement that was supposed to have happened largely doesn’t appear to exist. This means the steel manufacturer (or other emitter) who bought the ACCUs has been allowed to continue to emit but there has been no offsetting reduction in emissions elsewhere.

Meanwhile the brokers who organised the deal for the farmers and took their cut are long gone.

As for the bigger question of what the hell is going on here, I really have no idea, but I suspect it’s called politics.

Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen happily promotes the government’s emissions reduction credentials but given the amount of offsets that are being doled out for regenerating native forests in the desert that either aren’t regenerating or would have regenerated anyway without the projects, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the appearance of doing something is a lot more important than actually doing something.

And with an El Niño on the way, a lot of the trees that have been counted up to now will either die when Australia burns or die in the drought we’re about to have.

Apart from anything else, the CER, and therefore the government, is going to have some tough decisions over the next few years – either demand that drought-stricken farmers like the Ridges spend millions on ACCUs so they can hand them back or let the non-existent abatement stand.

Meanwhile, the government is facing a very awkward shortfall in its emissions reduction target.

The chairman of the new Net Zero Authority, Greg Combet, has the task of making net zero happen by 2050 by cajoling, bullying or paying the companies in the safeguard mechanism to cut their emissions by 4.9 per cent per year, as promised by the Prime Minister.

For airlines, cement and steel manufacturers and other big emitters still waiting for a technology breakthrough to rescue them, it will be all about buying ACCUs to offset their emissions rather than actually reducing them, because they can’t. And of course they’ll be passing on the cost of the ACCUs to their customers.

But what if the offsets don’t offset?

According to Carbon Integrity Explorer, 27.5 million – or about half of the ACCUs issued so far – don’t offset.

This is going to be one of those train crashes that everybody involved can see coming, but they are hiding their eyes, hoping to make it through till tomorrow.

Everybody --- almost everybody --- now pretends to believe that we need to slash emissions by 2030.   Yet, as the Ozzie offsets furphy shows, they don't really care, and they're not in fact going to introduce policies or take actions which will achieve this.  The ALP (Labor Party) is supposed to be a progressive party, "committed" to cutting emissions and reaching net-zero by 2050.  But Labor is still authorising new coal mines and gas fields, whose emissions, even in Australia, will dwarf existing emissions from all other sources.  Meanwhile, the purported fall in emissions as a result of offsets is in fact not happening.  

Greenwashing.  Lies.  Hypocrisy.

Record hot El Niño

 From a tweet by Professor Eliot Jacobson

Wow!

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has had both the most extreme and most accurate forecasts of the developing El Niño. But this forecast, just released, is so extreme it's hard to believe I'm seeing it.

3.0°C by October.  

3.2°C by November.

Wow!

(Source)

And to get an idea of just how massive the developing El Niño could be, the previous record high super El Niño peaked at 2.6°C in November/December of 2015. The 1997 El Niño peaked at 2.4°C. And this one is now modelled by the BoM to break 3.0°C.

(NOAA data) 

This virtually guarantees that the world will pass the 1.5 degree threshold.