Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Lindsey Toomer):

April 3, 2025

Chris Wright said blaming Marshall Fire on climate change is ‘simply to not look at the data’

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, returning to the Denver area Thursday after he was confirmed as a member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, repeatedly minimized the consequences of climate change when speaking to reporters during a press conference. 

Wright, founder of Denver-based fracking services company Liberty Energy, spoke to employees at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden for less than 10 minutes, touching on powering artificial intelligence, electricity production and growth, and supporting national labs. 

Talking to reporters after he spoke to staff, Wright said “emotional, not-fact-based stuff” like targeting hydrocarbons — the main components of climate change-causing fossil fuels — for reductions is “disruptive” and led to higher electricity and energy prices during the Biden administration. 

Wright said that attributing the Marshall Fire — which in 2021 destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County, burned over 6,000 acres, caused more than $2 billion in property damage and killed two people — to climate change is “simply to not look at the data.” He said wildfires “peaked over 100 years ago” and that the U.S. government could better manage wildfire devastation through forest management to control wood fuels. 

“Calling climate change a crisis is just to say ‘I’m not going to look at the science, I’m not going to look at the economics, I’m just going to run with the politics,’” Wright said. 

Drier and hotter conditions in Colorado are widely viewed as having contributed to the severity of the Marshall Fire, making the potential for loss greater. Investigators said one of the fire’s origins was a spark from an Xcel Energy power line, and the utility company has since faced several lawsuits.

Wright has previously expressed deep skepticism of the scientific consensus that climate change is a global crisis.

Department layoffs

The Department of Energy, along with many other federal agencies, laid off probationary staff members, and a judge then ordered the department reinstate them. The Trump administration asked all department heads to plan for additional cuts through a “reduction in force” process. 

Wright did not say how many more employees within his department could expect to lose their jobs, but he said downsizing is an “ongoing process” and that “it would be downright irresponsible if we weren’t doing this.” He said department staff grew by 20% over the four years before he took over, and “what we got out of it was a little bit more restrictions in energy production around the country.” 

Energy Department leadership told workers this week it will undergo “restructuring.” Wright said each department will undergo “a very detailed organization, bottom up.” 

“Every part of the government, we have to look at, how can we make government services as good as they are today or better, but at lower cost,” Wright said. “Like I do with my business, we have to look carefully at the business of where we are today and how can we deliver services at least as good as we are today at lower cost.”

In Wright’s talk to staff at the NREL, he applauded the work and dedication of the employees he spoke with and said their work is “critical.”

“The range of stuff I saw today, different people that spoke on different technologies, incredibly impressive, passionate, smart people that you can see from their heart that believe in what they’re doing, that love what they’re doing,” Wright said. 

After he was appointed, Wright said one of his first moves was to bring together leaders of the national labs from around the country to ask what they needed to make their work more efficient. Last week, he issued a secretarial order making changes he said resulted from those conversations. 

Artificial intelligence is “the next energy-intensive manufacturing industry,” Wright said in Golden, and the U.S. should not outsource that energy production to other countries. He said he issued a request for information Thursday to gauge developer interest in building on DOE land around the country to power AI.  

“We have land at all of our national labs and DOE sites around the country — who wants to come build a data center, build (a) nearby energy system, use the technology and smarts we got at the national lab … Maybe donate some computing power to us, or some lease money for the lands that’ll help fund our research,” Wright said. “We’re trying to find different ways to make the labs faster, smarter, better and more self-sufficient, more funding from other sources as well.” 

Wright said he would make “a commercial arrangement” with private data center companies that want to use federal land, because “that’s where the capital is.” 

NREL is responsible for researching and developing renewable energy systems and improving energy efficiency in the U.S. It has another campus in Arvada, as well as one in Alaska and in Washington, D.C., with 3,675 employees across the four locations.

Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

Januray 24, 2025

Trump Ticker

After last year’s presidential election, I — and many others — predicted that a second Trump term would be even more destructive than the first because this time the administration would be better prepared, and would not be plagued by the same incompetence, legal shoddiness, or misdirection as last time.

I was wrong. During his first few days in office, Trump issued dozens of executive orders, resolutions, pardons, and other “presidential actions.” Some were mere bluster. Others blatantly unconstitutional. Almost none displayed any evidence of forethought or, well, thought. It’s more like a hastily sketched, grievance-laden wish list penned on the back of a faux-silk napkin by lobbyists, ideologues, and oligarchs at one of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago soirees. The list, so far, is the product of greed, spite, right-wing ideology, and power-hunger. Rather than approaching policy — if you can call it that — with more competence and intelligence than before, it appears that Trump and friends are relying on the sheer volume of action to overwhelm any legal challenges.

I’m not going to even try to list them all here. Rather, I’ll take a look at a small sampling that fit under the Land Desk’s usual beat.

Declaring a National Energy Emergency: It takes a few paragraphs to even figure out what is meant by “energy” or, for that matter, “emergency” here. The preamble makes it sound as if the nation’s collective gasoline pumps could run dry at any moment. But that can’t be it, because the U.S. is pumping more crude oil than ever before from the Permian Basin and other fields, it is the largest petroleum producer in the world, and it is a net exporter of petroleum products. There is no danger of any sort of fossil fuel shortage. Surely they know that, right?

Then at paragraph six, we finally get a hint:

Okay, then, they’re talking about electricity. Yeah, that actually makes some sense. No, there’s not an electricity shortage. But the growing number of power-sucking AI and cryptocurrency-mining data centers, electric vehicles, and electrified buildings are significantly increasing demand for power, which threatens to strain the grid and raise electricity prices for everyone else.

That’s why, for better or worse, the Biden administration encouraged utility-scale solar and wind facilities on federal lands, subsidized enhanced geothermal research and development, and subsidized and fast-tracked huge transmission projects — despite hefty opposition and environmental and cultural impacts — such as SunZia. And it’s why both the Biden and California’s Newsom administrations poured billions of dollars into keeping Diablo Canyon nuclear plant running.

In the West, utilities and grid operators are trying to address these issues by creating a regional transmission organization and day-ahead and real-time power markets. These will help get power from where it’s generated to where it’s needed.

Trump’s order, on the other hand, does nothing tangible to address growing electricity demand, strain on the grid, or aging infrastructure. One of the only specific actions is to order the Secretary of Energy to consider allowing the year-round sale of E15 gasoline to meet nationwide fuel shortages. Huh? Did these guys just dust off some order from the 1970s energy crises and add new dates, or what?

Anyway, the good thing about this one is that it will probably have minimal on-the-ground effects, though it may give agencies some cover to ignore rules and regulations. As one energy analyst told RTO Insider, “They are press releases on fancier paper … directions to the agencies, but they’re not specific legal actions.”

Unleashing American Energy: Anyone who has been paying attention knows that if American energy is on a “leash,” it’s a very long and flimsy one. I really hate having to repeat this, but a lot of folks seem to be immune to facts: America is producing more oil and natural gas than ever before. Period. Eliminating environmental protections will not increase production, nor will it decrease prices. It will only increase profits for the petroleum corporation. This is not rocket science.

Among the “action” items in this order:

• “… eliminate the electric vehicle mandate.” That one’s pretty easy, since there is no federal electric vehicle mandate and there never was one. The administration will consider axing federal EV incentives, and looks to revoke California’s waiver allowing it to phase out gasoline-powered vehicle sales.
• “Safeguarding the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances.” Again, Trump’s tiny hands are swatting at straw men. Go into any Home Depot and you will find a virtually unlimited variety of washers, driers, lightbulbs, shower heads, ranges, and toilets. You may or may not be able to find efficient ones, but you can certainly find wasteful ones.
• Immediate review of all agency actions that potentially burden the development of domestic energy resources. This one’s funny because in another first-day order, Trump halts all offshore wind leasing and blocks the approval of the Lava Ridge wind facility in Idaho. Isn’t that burdening energy resources?
• Terminates the American Climate Corps.
• “Unleashing Energy Dominance through Efficient Permitting” and “to expedite and simplify the permitting process.”
• Gets rid of analyzing the social cost of carbon and other greenhouse gases.
• Terminates the “Green New Deal” (there is no such thing, by the way) and “immediately pauses the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” Again, Trump’s orders contradict one another, demonstrating their shoddiness: Billions upon billions of dollars in these acts were aimed at building up energy infrastructure and addressing grid and power shortfalls. And nearly $1 billion of it was just loaned to the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine in Nevada, which would advance Trump’s quest to increase domestic critical mineral production. This throws all of that into doubt.
• Restarts reviews of proposed LNG export projects. Again, the U.S. is currently exporting more LNG than ever before and if the volume continues to increase it will lead to higher natural gas prices in the U.S. That, in turn, will lead to higher electricity prices. Just saying.
• “Restoring America’s Mineral Dominance” by removing “undue burdens” on domestic mining. Are you kidding me?
• Orders the Interior and Agriculture secretaries to review any mineral withdrawals, which would include the Thompson Divide in Colorado and around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico.

Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential: Trump wants to “maximize the development and production of the natural resources” within Alaska by expediting oil and gas leasing and revoking restrictions on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve and to rescind protections on subsistence resource values. And he wants to reopen the Tongass National Forest’s roadless areas to logging. Basically, Trump wants Alaska to be corporations’ natural resource colony.

While this might conjure horrifying images of a battalion of drill rigs pummeling the Arctic tundra, it’s probably not worth worrying too much yet. The oil and gas industry hasn’t shown all that much interest in drilling in ANWR — a lease sale earlier this month drew zero bids — and petroleum company officials say they would prefer to focus on more accessible hot spots like the Permian Basin, which Biden basically offered up as a sacrifice zone.

The state’s elected officials mostly are bubbling with joy over the orders, but they aren’t all on board with Trump’s renaming of Denali, the nation’s highest peak. Trump has switched its title back to Mount McKinley, after the 25th U.S. president known for … well, not much, aside from implementing tariffs — one of Trump’s pet policies and a sure way to increase U.S. consumer prices.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, are against the name change.

It’s not an executive order, yet, but Trump and some Republicans in Congress have threatened to withhold federal aid for victims of the Los Angeles fires unless California changes its water policies. And no, they’re not talking about the Imperial Valley alfalfa farmers guzzling up a monster’s share of the Colorado River. Truth is, they don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Basically, Trump has bought into his own lie that diverting water from the northern part of the state to SoCal would have enabled firefighters to easily extinguish the flames. And that Newsom’s environmental policies are to blame. This is patently false. And even if it were true, it’s inexcusable and morally wrong for a president to withhold aid based on a state’s political leanings. In his Los Angeles Times Boiling Point column, journalist Sammy Roth hits the nail on the head:

Heartless and cruel, indeed.

On that note, I’d urge all of you who have not yet done so to watch the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at the Washington National Cathedral as part of the inauguration ceremonies.

As one might expect a reverend to do, she calls for unity and asks the Trump administration to have mercy on those less fortunate than them. Basically, she’s asking the president to practice compassion and empathy, sort of like Jesus — or any other civil and decent human being — might do.

At no point did Budde condemn Trump, or call him a fascist, or burn him in effigy, or make fun of his orange makeup or small hands. She just asked him to show a bit of mercy. And yet, the reaction from Trump and his supporters has been rather ugly and angry. Trump demanded that she apologize to him, while others condemned Budde for uttering, well, Christian teachings. Silly me: I thought that was her job.

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

January 24, 2025

EVs and plug-in hybrids constitute 31.5% of all new-car sales during Q4

During the fourth quarter of 2024, electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids constituted 31.5% of all new car sales in Colorado, according to the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association.

As of mid-January, according to Atlas Public Policy, Colorado had 169,117 EVs and plug-in hybrids on the road. Colorado has a goal of 940,000 EVS by 2030.

Pueblo gets $11.5 million for 260 EV charging ports

Pueblo is getting $11.5 million in federal grants for installation of 260 EV charging ports near low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

Pueblo has plenty of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. It also has a new city administration that in December requested that the city scrap the resolution adopted in 2017 that called for 100% renewable energy by 2035. The ostensible reason given by the mayor was a dislike of the EV fleet for vehicles.

The grant was among 11 announced by the U.S. Department of Transportation totaling $112 million. The money is coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Denver, Greeley, and Commerce City are also getting transportation grants. The single biggest grant will go to southeastern Colorado, where 12 individual passing lanes are to be created between Pueblo and the Kansas state lane. Total aid: $40 million.

The Roaring Fork Transportation Authority is to get a little over $1 million to help create a new alignment for the VelociRFTA Bus Rapid Transit lane through Glenwood Springs to I-70.

Easier to get EV chargers in multifamily housing

Colorado is now allowing for property developers, managers and contractors seeking state grants to install EV charging stations to apply once for multiple locations.

The applications are due no later than Feb. 14. Eligible projects include multifamily housing, work places, tourist destinations and community charging. The standard grants are for up to $250,000, with up to six level-2 charging ports per application.

More information here.See the full list of grants here.

Click the link to access the article on the BioScience website (William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Jillian W Gregg, Johan Rockström, Michael E Mann, Naomi Oreskes, Timothy M Lenton, Stefan Rahmstorf, Thomas M Newsome, Chi Xu, Jens-Christian Svenning, Cássio Cardoso Pereira, Beverly E Law, Thomas W Crowther). Here’s the opening few paragraphs:

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change (Ripple et al. 2020). For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed—and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies (Supran et al. 2023). Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (Guterres 2024), and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100 (UNEP 2023). Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo (supplemental figure S1; CenCO2PIP Consortium et al. 2023).

Last year, we witnessed record-breaking sea surface temperatures (Cheng et al. 2024), the hottest Northern Hemisphere extratropical summer in 2000 years (Esper et al. 2024), and the breaking of many other climate records (Ripple et al. 2023a). Moreover, we will see much more extreme weather in the coming years (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2021). Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions, whereas land-use change, primarily deforestation, accounts for approximately 10% (supplemental figure S2).

Our aim in the present article is to communicate directly to researchers, policymakers, and the public. As scientists and academics, we feel it is our moral duty and that of our institutions to alert humanity to the growing threats that we face as clearly as possible and to show leadership in addressing them. In this report, we analyze the latest trends in a wide array of planetary vital signs. We also review notable recent climate-related disasters, spotlight important climate-related topics, and discuss needed policy interventions. This report is part of our series of concise annual updates on the state of the climate.

Click the link to read the article on The Conversation website (Annalisa Bracco):

January 9, 2025

The oceans are heating up as the planet warms.

This past year, 2024, was the warmest ever measured for the global ocean, following a record-breaking 2023. In fact, every decade since 1984, when satellite recordkeeping of ocean temperatures started, has been warmer than the previous one.

A warmer ocean means increased evaporation, which in turn results in heavier rains in some areas and droughts in others. It can power hurricanes and downpours. It can also harm the health of coastal marine areas and sea life – coral reefs suffered their most extensive bleaching event on record in 2024, with damage in many parts of the world.

Warming ocean water also affects temperatures on land by changing weather patterns. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced on Jan. 10 that data showed 2024 had also broken the record for the warmest year globally, with global temperatures about 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.6 Celsius) above pre-industrial times. That would mark the first full calendar year with average warming above 1.5 C, a level countries had agreed to try to avoid passing long-term.

Climate change, by and large, takes the blame. Greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere trap heat, and about 90% of the excess heat caused by emissions from burning fossil fuels and other human activities is absorbed by the ocean.

But while it’s clear that the ocean has been warming for quite some time, its temperatures over the past two years have been far above the previous decades. That leaves two mysteries for scientists.

It’s not just El Niño

The cyclic climate pattern of the El Niño Southern Oscillation can explain part of the warmth over the past two years.

During El Niño periods, warm waters that usually accumulate in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean move eastward toward the coastlines of Peru and Chile, leaving the Earth slightly warmer overall. The latest El Niño began in 2023 and caused global average temperatures to rise well into early 2024.

But the oceans have been even warmer than scientists expected. For example, global temperatures in 2023-2024 followed a similar growth and decline pattern across the seasons as the previous El Niño event, in 2015-2016, but they were about 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 Celsius) higher at all times in 2023-2024.

Scientists are puzzled and left with two problems to solve. They must figure out whether something else contributed to the unexpected warming and whether the past two years have been a sign of a sudden acceleration in global warming.

The role of aerosols

An intriguing idea, tested using climate models, is that a swift reduction in aerosols over the past decade may be one of the culprits.

Aerosols are solid and liquid particles emitted by human and natural sources into the atmosphere. Some of them have been shown to partially counteract the impact of greenhouse gases by reflecting solar radiation back into space. However, they also are responsible for poor air quality and air pollution.

Many of these particles with cooling properties are generated in the process of burning fossil fuels. For example, sulfur aerosols are emitted by ship engines and power plants. In 2020, the shipping industry implemented a nearly 80% cut in sulfur emissions, and many companies shifted to low-sulfur fuels. But the larger impact has come from power plants reducing their emissions, including a big shift in this direction in China. So, while technologies have cut these harmful emissions, that means a brake slowing the pace of warming is weakened.

Is this a warming surge?

The second puzzle is whether the planet is seeing a warming surge or not.

Temperatures are clearly rising, but the past two years have not been warm enough to support the notion that we may be seeing an acceleration in the rate of global warming.

Analysis of four temperature datasets covering the 1850-2023 period has shown that the rate of warming has not shown a significant change since around the 1970s. The same authors, however, noted that only a rate increase of at least 55% – about half a degree Celsius and nearly a full degree Fahrenheit over one year – would make the warming acceleration detectable in a statistical sense.

From a statistical standpoint, then, scientists cannot exclude the possibility that the 2023-2024 record ocean warming resulted simply from the “usual” warming trend that humans have set the planet on for the past 50 years. A very strong El Niño contributed some natural variability.

From a practical standpoint, however, the extraordinary impacts the planet has witnessed – including extreme weather, heat waves, wildfires, coral bleaching and ecosystem destruction – point to a need to swiftly reduce carbon dioxide emissions to limit ocean warming, regardless of whether this is a continuation of an ongoing trend or an acceleration.

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Bob Berwyn):

January 9, 2024

Nearly all major global climate datasets agree that, in 2024, human-caused global warming for the first time pushed Earth’s average surface temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for a full calendar year, a level that countries around the world had agreed to do all they could to avoid.

And when last year is averaged with 2023, both years together also exceed that level of warming, which was noted as a red line marking dangerous climate change by 196 countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement. A 2018 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that warming beyond that limit threatens to irreversibly change major parts of the physical and biological systems that sustain life on Earth, including forests, coral reefs and rainforests, as well as oceans and their major currents.

The temperature figures were seen as so significant that the new annual climate data for 2024 was presented Thursday night as part of the first-ever internationally coordinated release by several institutions that track global temperatures, in part to mark the “exceptional conditions experienced in 2024,” according to a report published today by Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change service. 

On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the World Meteorological Organization will follow up with similar reports, all of which will emphasize not only the record global temperatures, but also the record amount of water vapor in the atmosphere that contributed to severe and record flooding in some parts of the world last year, and also helped supercharge tropical cyclones and hurricanes.

Rather than being fatigued by the barrage of news about heat records and other climate extremes, people should see the information as an opportunity to be thankful that we are not flying blind into dangerous climate change, said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. 

Thanks to international science, “We do know something about what’s happening,” he said. “We can make some predictions about what’s coming in the future. So rather than being overwhelmed … we should also take this as an opportunity to do something about it, to react to and to inform our decisions in the best possible way with facts and evidence.”

Even with those facts, he added, “We are facing a very new climate and new challenges that our society is not prepared for. … This is a monumental challenge for society.”

According to the Copernicus data, 2024 didn’t just edge past the previous record-warm year, 2023, but surged more than a tenth of 1 degree Celsius all the way to 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.8F) above the pre-industrial level. That was one of the biggest year-on-year jumps on record, said Samantha Burgess, co-director of Copernicus. 

She said some of the other global datasets may actually still show the 2024 warming relative to the pre-industrial 1850-1900 average at just below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F), but that the global synthesis of six major datasets by the World Meteorological Organization will also come out to more than 1.5.

Still, she said, that doesn’t mean the limit set by the Paris Agreement has been broken, because it refers to a long-term average over 10 to 30 years. 

If the 1.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the pre-industrial average doesn’t seem like a huge deal to some people, she said human bodies provide a good analogy.

“The temperature of the human body is around 37 [degrees Celsius],” she said. “If we have a fever at 39 degrees, it doesn’t sound like much, but the body responds in very negative ways, and we feel terrible. We’re feverish, and the body is doing everything possible to fight that infection.

“The reality is that at a global average change of 1.5 degrees, the frequency and the intensity of extreme events gets more likely,” she said. “Extreme events like wildfires, heat waves, severe storms, droughts, are likely to get more frequent, and they’re likely to be more intense. This is why, when you’ve got this small number but over a very large global average, it’s incredibly important.”

The Copernicus scientists said that the world’s oceans, in particular, were one of the biggest factors driving Earth’s overall annual temperature to a new record. That ocean warmth also had direct impacts like a global wave of coral bleaching and reef die-offs, as well as mass die-offs of marine mammals and seabirds. 

On land, the persistently high global fever of the last few years led to deadly heat waves, with more than 47,000 heat-related deaths in Europe alone during 2023. Final figures for the number of such deaths in 2024 are yet to be calculated.

The new data on record warmth comes at a time when some governments and companies are already rolling back previous climate action pledges. The internationally coordinated release of global climate data could also be seen as an acknowledgment that global warming isn’t going to slow down and wait for humanity to solve other vexing social, political and economic problems.

Asked if those rollbacks in the face of record heat are worrying to him as a climate scientist, Buontempo said that, “From a physical point of view, the mechanism is well explained. What drives this warming temperature is, to a very large extent, increasing greenhouse gases.”

If the goal is to stabilize the global temperature, then governments need to move toward reducing emissions to zero “in the most rapid possible way,” he said.

Click the link to access the report on the World Weather Attribution website:

December 27, 2024

When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024 is our annual report, published this year for the first time.

Every December, people ask us how severe the year’s extreme weather events were. To answer this question, we’ve partnered with Climate Central to produce a report that reviews some of the most significant events and highlights findings from our attribution studies. It also includes new analysis looking at the number of dangerous heat days added by climate change in 2024 and global resolutions for 2025 to work toward a safer, more sustainable world.

Key messages

• Extreme weather reached dangerous new heights in 2024. This year’s record-breaking temperatures fueled unrelenting heatwaves, drought, wildfire, storms and floods that killed thousands of people and forced millions from their homes. This exceptional year of extreme weather shows how dangerous life has already become with 1.3°C of human-induced warming, and highlights the urgency of moving away from planet-heating fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
• Climate change contributed to the deaths of at least 3,700 people and the displacement of millions in 26 weather events we studied in 2024. These were just a small fraction of the 219 events that met our trigger criteria, used to identify the most impactful weather events. It’s likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change this year is in the tens, or hundreds of thousands. 
• Globally, climate change added on average 41 additional days of dangerous heat in 2024 that threatened people’s health, according to new analysis by Climate Central. The countries that experienced the highest number of dangerous heat days are overwhelmingly small island and developing states, who are highly vulnerable and considered to be on the frontlines of climate change. The analysis highlights the wide reaching impacts of extreme heat that are underreported and not well understood.  
• Many extreme events that took place in the beginning of 2024 were influenced by El Niño. However, most of our studies found that climate change played a bigger role than El Niño in fueling these events, including the historic drought in the Amazon. This is consistent with the fact that, as the planet warms, the influence of climate change increasingly overrides other natural phenomena affecting the weather.  [ed. emphasis mine]
• Record-breaking global temperatures in 2024 translated to record-breaking downpours. From Kathmandu, to Dubai, to Rio Grande do Sul, to the Southern Appalachians, the last 12 months have been marked by a large number of devastating floods. Of the 16 floods we studied, 15 were driven by climate change-amplified rainfall. The result reflects the basic physics of climate change — a warmer atmosphere tends to hold more moisture, leading to heavier downpours. Shortfalls in early warning and evacuation plans likely contributed to huge death tolls, while floods in Sudan and Brazil highlighted the importance of maintaining and upgrading flood defences. 
• The Amazon rainforest and Pantanal Wetland were hit hard by climate change in 2024, with severe droughts and wildfires leading to huge biodiversity loss. The Amazon is the world’s most important land-based carbon sink, making it crucial for the stability of the global climate. Ending deforestation will protect both ecosystems from drought and wildfire, as dense vegetation is able to absorb and retain moisture. 
• Hot seas and warmer air fueled more destructive storms, including Hurricane Helene and Typhoon Gaemi. Individual attribution studies have shown how these storms have stronger winds and are dropping more rain. Research by Climate Central found that climate change increased the intensity of most Atlantic hurricanes between 2019 and 2023 – of the 38 hurricanes analysed, 30 had wind speeds that were one category higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale than they would have been without human-caused warming, while our analysis found that the risk of multiple Category 3-5 typhoons hitting the Philippines in a given year is increasing as the climate warms. 

Resolutions for 2025

• A faster shift away from fossil fuels – The burning of oil, gas and coal are the cause of warming and the primary reason extreme weather is becoming more severe. Last year at COP28, the world finally agreed to ‘transition away from fossil fuels,’ but new oil and gas fields continue to be opened around the world, despite warnings that doing so will result in a long term commitment to more than 1.5°C and therefore costs to people around the world. Extremes will continue to worsen with every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming. A rapid move to renewable energy will help make the world a safer, healthier, wealthier and more stable place. 
• Improvements in early warning – Weather disasters in 2024 highlighted the importance of early warning systems, which are one of the cheapest and most effective ways to minimise fatalities. Warnings need to be targeted, given days ahead of a dangerous weather event, and outline clear instructions on what people need to do. Most extreme weather is well forecast, even in developing nations. Every country needs to implement, test and continually improve early warning systems to ensure people are not in harm’s way.
• Real-time reporting of heat deaths – Heatwaves are the deadliest type of extreme weather. However, the dangers of high temperatures are underappreciated and underreported. In April, a hospital in Mali reported a surge in excess deaths as temperatures climbed to nearly 50°C. Reported by local media, the announcement was a rare example of health professionals raising the alarm about the dangers of extreme heat in real-time. Health systems worldwide are stretched, but informing local journalists when emergency departments are overwhelmed is a simple way to alert the public that extreme heat can be deadly.
• Finance for developing countries – COP29 recently discussed ways to increase finance for poor countries to help them cope with the impacts of extreme weather. Developing countries are responsible for a small amount of historic carbon emissions, but as our research has highlighted this year, are being hit the hardest by extreme weather. Back-to-back disasters, like the Philippines typhoons, or devastating floods that followed a multi-year drought in East Africa, are cancelling out developmental gains and forcing governments to reach deeper and deeper into their pockets to respond and recover from extreme weather. Ensuring developing countries have the means to invest in adaptation will protect lives and livelihoods, and create a stabler and more equitable world. 

February 9, 2024

René van Westen, Utrecht University; Henk A. Dijkstra, Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, Utrecht University

Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences.

While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes, how abrupt and severe would the climate changes be?

Twenty years after the movie’s release, we know a lot more about the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation. Instruments deployed in the ocean starting in 2004 show that the Atlantic Ocean circulation has observably slowed over the past two decades, possibly to its weakest state in almost a millennium. Studies also suggest that the circulation has reached a dangerous tipping point in the past that sent it into a precipitous, unstoppable decline, and that it could hit that tipping point again as the planet warms and glaciers and ice sheets melt.

In a new study using the latest generation of Earth’s climate models, we simulated the flow of fresh water until the ocean circulation reached that tipping point.

The results showed that the circulation could fully shut down within a century of hitting the tipping point, and that it’s headed in that direction. If that happened, average temperatures would drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see severe and cascading consequences around the world.

We also discovered a physics-based early warning signal that can alert the world when the Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing its tipping point.

The ocean’s conveyor belt

Ocean currents are driven by winds, tides and water density differences.

In the Atlantic Ocean circulation, the relatively warm and salty surface water near the equator flows toward Greenland. During its journey it crosses the Caribbean Sea, loops up into the Gulf of Mexico, and then flows along the U.S. East Coast before crossing the Atlantic.

This current, also known as the Gulf Stream, brings heat to Europe. As it flows northward and cools, the water mass becomes heavier. By the time it reaches Greenland, it starts to sink and flow southward. The sinking of water near Greenland pulls water from elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and the cycle repeats, like a conveyor belt.

Too much fresh water from melting glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet can dilute the saltiness of the water, preventing it from sinking, and weaken this ocean conveyor belt. A weaker conveyor belt transports less heat northward and also enables less heavy water to reach Greenland, which further weakens the conveyor belt’s strength. Once it reaches the tipping point, it shuts down quickly.

What happens to the climate at the tipping point?

The existence of a tipping point was first noticed in an overly simplified model of the Atlantic Ocean circulation in the early 1960s. Today’s more detailed climate models indicate a continued slowing of the conveyor belt’s strength under climate change. However, an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation appeared to be absent in these climate models. https://www.youtube.com/embed/p4pWafuvdrY?wmode=transparent&start=0 How the ocean conveyor belt works.

This is where our study comes in. We performed an experiment with a detailed climate model to find the tipping point for an abrupt shutdown by slowly increasing the input of fresh water.

We found that once it reaches the tipping point, the conveyor belt shuts down within 100 years. The heat transport toward the north is strongly reduced, leading to abrupt climate shifts.

The result: Dangerous cold in the North

Regions that are influenced by the Gulf Stream receive substantially less heat when the circulation stops. This cools the North American and European continents by a few degrees.

The European climate is much more influenced by the Gulf Stream than other regions. In our experiment, that meant parts of the continent changed at more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) per decade – far faster than today’s global warming of about 0.36 F (0.2 C) per decade. We found that parts of Norway would experience temperature drops of more than 36 F (20 C). On the other hand, regions in the Southern Hemisphere would warm by a few degrees.

These temperature changes develop over about 100 years. That might seem like a long time, but on typical climate time scales, it is abrupt.

The conveyor belt shutting down would also affect sea level and precipitation patterns, which can push other ecosystems closer to their tipping points. For example, the Amazon rainforest is vulnerable to declining precipitation. If its forest ecosystem turned to grassland, the transition would release carbon to the atmosphere and result in the loss of a valuable carbon sink, further accelerating climate change.

The Atlantic circulation has slowed significantly in the distant past. During glacial periods when ice sheets that covered large parts of the planet were melting, the influx of fresh water slowed the Atlantic circulation, triggering huge climate fluctuations.

So, when will we see this tipping point?

The big question – when will the Atlantic circulation reach a tipping point – remains unanswered. Observations don’t go back far enough to provide a clear result. While a recent study suggested that the conveyor belt is rapidly approaching its tipping point, possibly within a few years, these statistical analyses made several assumptions that give rise to uncertainty.

Instead, we were able to develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal involving the salinity transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic Ocean. Once a threshold is reached, the tipping point is likely to follow in one to four decades.

The climate impacts from our study underline the severity of such an abrupt conveyor belt collapse. The temperature, sea level and precipitation changes will severely affect society, and the climate shifts are unstoppable on human time scales.

It might seem counterintuitive to worry about extreme cold as the planet warms, but if the main Atlantic Ocean circulation shuts down from too much meltwater pouring in, that’s the risk ahead.

This article was updated on Feb. 11, 2024, to fix a typo: The experiment found temperatures in parts of Europe changed by more than 5 F per decade.

René van Westen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Climate Physics, Utrecht University; Henk A. Dijkstra, Professor of Physics, Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, Climate Model Specialist, Utrecht University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Click the link to read the newsletter on The Crucial Years website (Bill McKibben). Here’s an excerpt:

October 9, 2024

Since I couldn’t sleep, I figured I might as well write. I couldn’t sleep because of the picture in my mind—that tightly coiled ball of physics we’re calling Hurricane Milton as it tracks mercilessly across the Gulf of Mexico, headed toward a landfall tonight along the west coast of Florida. It scares me, for two reasons.

The first is the unrivaled speed with which it spun up, from tropical storm to Category 5 monster inside a day. This “rapid intensification” has become an increasingly common feature of hurricanes, because the heat content in the ocean is so high that the old models no longer suffice. We live, more and more, in a world of instant chaos: where wildfires can “blow up” in a matter of minutes because the fuels that feed them are so desiccated, where “flash” floods can, in minutes, turn a record rain into a street clogged with bobbing cars. These things have always been possible, but now they are common: we have in our minds the idea that the world changes at a geologic pace, moving in stately fashion through epochs and eras. But right now—as carbon dioxide accumulates more quickly in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 500 million years—”geologic pace” is measured in months. Hell, glaciers—our metaphor for moving slowly—disappear from one winter to the next.

And the second reason is: this speeded up physics is increasingly crashing into the heart of the civilizations that we’ve built. Given the size of the planet, it’s more likely than not that a disaster will happen in somewhere sparsely populated—the boreal forests of Canada burned last summer, displacing Indigenous people of the north but mostly avoiding cities. Even Hurricane Helene last week came ashore in the Big Bend country north of Cedar Key, where people are thin on the ground. But just as California’s wildfires eventually and inevitably started taking out whole towns, Milton is aimed at one of the most built-up and vulnerable landscapes on earth. I think—from this morning’s bearings—that the very worst outcome may be dodged: if the hurricane comes in just south of Tampa Bay, its counterclockwise winds will work to drive the storm surge off that body of water. But if so it will mean sheer agony for somewhere further south, somewhere almost as overbuilt. Sarasota? Port Charlotte? And in very short order that will mean deep trouble for the insurance industry, already tottering in Florida

(It’s worth noting, if only in passing, that the two places Americans of my age thought of as refuges, idylls, dreams of the easy life were California and Florida. No longer).

We’ve spent some time in recent years worrying that there was too much fear-mongering and doom-saying in the way we talked about climate change—that it was wearing people out. And indeed there’s truth there—if we’re going to do what we must, the story in the years ahead needs to be as much about the adventure of turning our planet solar as the dread that we’ll turn our planet Venus.

But there are important moments when fear is a crucial resource. A week ago, in the wake of Helene, the veteran climate activist and North Carolina native Anna Jane Joyner wrote this dispatch from New York’s “Climate Week”

And yesterday, on air, the veteran Florida weatherman John Morales let his fear show through. As Cara Buckley recounted in the Times,

This kind of fear is entirely useful—there are, I have no doubt, people who left their homes and drove north towards Georgia after hearing the break in Morales’ voice. He saved lives. And he did it entirely honestly. “You know what’s driving that,” he said to viewers. “I don’t need to tell you. Global warming. Climate change.” It’s honest fear, driven by deep understanding.

Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Kate Yoder):

October 7, 2024

Gore has been talking about carbon emissions for more than 40 years. Now he includes a “hope budget.”

At a congressional hearing on the greenhouse effect in 1981, Al Gore, then a member of the House of Representatives from Tennessee, remarked that it was hard to come to terms with the fact that rising carbon dioxide emissions could radically alter our world. “Quite frankly, my first reaction to it several years ago was one of disbelief,” he said. “Since then, I have been waiting patiently for it to go away, but it has not gone away.”

Gore’s hearings didn’t spark the epiphany he’d hoped among his fellow members of Congress. More than four decades later, the problem still hasn’t resonated with many of them, even as the devastating weather changes scientists warned about have become reality. Wildfires have turned towns to ash, and the rains unleashed by storms like Hurricane Helene have left even so-called climate havens like Asheville, North Carolina, in a post-apocalyptic state, with power lines tossed around like spaghetti. 

“I’ll have to admit to you that I’ve been surprised at how difficult it’s been to implement the kinds of policies that will solve the climate crisis,” Gore said in an interview with Grist.

So he isn’t exactly surprised that the issue is on the back burner this election season. When asked about their plans to fight climate change in the presidential debate last month, Vice President Kamala Harris assured voters she wasn’t against fracking for natural gas, while former President Donald Trump went on a tangent about domestic vehicle manufacturing. The subject took on a more prominent role in the vice presidential debate last Tuesday, when the Republican, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, hedged by calling global warming “weird science” while not actually dismissing it, and the Democrat, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, envisioned America “becoming an energy superpower for the future.” And that was about it.

“Since the struggle for votes is almost always focused on undecided voters, most of them in the center of the political spectrum, it’s not at all unusual to see immediate, visceral issues like jobs and the economy take the foreground,” Gore said.

As told in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s interest in climate change was first sparked at Harvard University, where Gore took a population studies class taught by the Roger Revelle, a climate scientist who had played a pivotal role in setting up experiments to measure rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It was the 1960s, a decade in which the American public first started learning about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. Gore was stunned by the evidence Revelle presented, but “never imagined for a second that it would take over my life.”

He’s spent the decades since advocating for climate action. As vice president under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, he unsuccessfully pushed to pass the Kyoto Protocol, the first international attempt to push countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Six years after he lost the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that turned his traveling climate change slideshow into a hit, launched the issue into the national conversation. Today, he leads the educational nonprofit The Climate Reality Project, which trains people how to mobilize their neighbors to elect climate champions, counter greenwashing, and advance green solutions. 

As a prominent Democrat, Gore’s impassioned advocacy has been blamed for making climate change seem like a liberal thing to care about. To Gore, that’s an example of attacking the messenger without looking at the deeper reasons why climate change is politically contentious in the first place. “Even when Pope Francis, for goodness’ sake, speaks out on it, they attack him and say that he’s meddling in partisanship.” If there’s anyone to blame for polarization, he said, it’s the fossil fuel industry, which has tried to take control of the conversation about climate change. 

“This is the most powerful and wealthiest business lobby in the history of the world, and they spare no effort and no expense to try to block any progress,” Gore said. “Whoever sticks his or her head up above the parapet draws fire from fossil fuel polluters, and they use their legacy networks of economic and political power to try to block any solutions of any sort that might reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.”

In his decades of talking to the public about climate change, he says he’s learned a few things. You have to keep in mind a “time budget” that people will give you to speak with them, as well as a “complexity budget” so that you avoid dumping facts and numbers onto people. Finally, he says, you need to allot a “hope budget” so they don’t get too overwhelmed and depressed.

Even while progress has been slower than he’d hoped, Gore sees signs that things are moving in the right direction. Last year, 86 percent of new electricity generation installed worldwide came from renewables, for example. Not to mention that Congress, where climate legislation had long gone to die, finally managed to pass a landmark climate law in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to drastically trim U.S. emissions through green incentives and rebates. 

“It’s the kind of challenge that is so compelling — once you pick it up, you can’t put it back down again — because it really requires any person of conscience, I think, to keep working on it until we get the kind of progress that’s needed.”