CC8C. Staying Current—What Are the Consequences of Global Warming?

Articles from 2025

2025-01-16. Climate change may be driving spread of a deadly fungus from U.S. Southwest. By Meredith Wadman, Science. Excerpt: …The disease [Coccidioides fungus] causes …Valley fever is familiar in the Southwest, where it has infected wildland firefighters; carrot, beet, and radish pickers; solar power farm builders; and cast and crew members on a Ventura County film set. …the fungal spores, nourished in the warm, wet confines of the lung, morph into structures called spherules that burst to release boatloads of tiny endospores that become new spherules, continuing the cycle. Most of these people have a flulike illness lasting weeks or months. But 5% to 10% of cases result in lifelong lung infections, sometimes forcing people to be on powerful antifungal medications permanently. …cases are escalating fast. Diagnoses …have ballooned from about 2800 annually at the turn of the century to about 20,000 in 2023, with at least 200 people dying each year. Arizona and California, where roughly 97% of U.S. cases are reported, have seen dramatic increases recently: Incidence in Arizona has grown by 73% in the past 10 years—to 146 cases per 100,000 people. In California, incidence quadrupled between 2014 and 2023 to 23.2 cases per 100,000 people. …One likely contributor is a warming climate. The fungus thrives in hot, dry soil where it can get the best of competitors by going dormant during drought, then rebounding after rain returns. Valley fever cases tend to spike after wet winters that follow droughts, says Tom Chiller, chief of the mycotic diseases branch at CDC…. Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/climate-change-may-be-driving-spread-deadly-fungus-u-s-southwest.

2025-01-12. Rising tides could wipe out Pacifica, but residents can’t agree on how to respond. By Connor Letourneau, San Francisco Chronicle. Excerpt: “When people fight the ocean,” [Pacifica, City Council member Christine] Boles said, “the ocean always wins.” …Pacifica, a picturesque surf town of roughly 35,000 just south of San Francisco, has become an important case study for the increasingly urgent questions climate change raises for many coastal communities. Should residents stay to defend their homes from rising tides that grow fiercer by the year? Or, should they admit defeat and cede the land back to nature? …“Managed retreat” — a term coined by geologists to describe the process of removing people, homes and businesses from at-risk areas — is at the root of the debate. …“We can’t build seawalls high enough to protect us forever,” said Gary Griggs, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. “So, in the long run, it’s either going to be managed retreat or unmanaged retreat. It’s up to each community to decide.”… Full article at https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/pacifica-climate-change-rising-oceans-20007281.php.

2025-01-10. “Exceptional” Global Warming Spike Continued in 2024. By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: More than 3 billion people experienced their hottest year ever in 2024 because of anthropogenic climate change. The world is speeding toward its 1.5°C warming target. …“Even if we likely exceeded [1.5°C] this year, that doesn’t mean that we’ve exceeded it in the context of the Paris accord, which is over a longer time period,” Schmidt said. “But I will say that we anticipate future global warming as long as we are emitting greenhouse gases, and until we get to net zero, we will not get a leveling off of global mean temperature.”…. Full article at https://eos.org/articles/exceptional-global-warming-spike-continued-in-2024.

2025-01-08. Warm Seawater Encroaches on Major Antarctic Ice Shelf. By Sarah Stanley, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The vast Antarctic Ice Sheet holds more than half of Earth’s freshwater. In several places around the continent, the ice extends over the ocean, where it forms large floating shelves. Observations suggest many of these ice shelves are thinning as they melt from below, with implications for ocean dynamics, global sea level, and Earth’s climate. For now, the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf—one of Antarctica’s biggest, extending over the Weddell Sea—appears to be relatively stable, thanks to near-freezing currents circulating over the continental shelf beneath it. However, climate models predict that shifting ocean currents may bring warmer water to the continental shelf in the future. To gain a clearer picture of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf’s future, Steiger et al. analyzed water temperature and velocity data from 2017 to 2021. …In this study, researchers found that the summertime flow of warm water occurs not just along the Filchner Trough but also along a second, smaller trough to the east and that the relative importance of each path varies from year to year. During warmer-than-average years, the warm water flows more rapidly across the continental shelf…. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JC020700, 2024). Full article at https://eos.org/research-spotlights/warm-seawater-encroaches-on-major-antarctic-ice-shelf.

2025-01-03. A New Tornado Database Helps Researchers Worldwide. By Andrew J. Wight, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: In the past 70 years, more than 75,000 tornadoes have been recorded in the United States. Recordkeeping of these phenomena outside this region has been largely fragmented, sitting isolated in books, government databases, and research archives. But a new effort to scour as many publicly accessible records as possible is highlighting the scale of this hazard around the world. In a new study, Malcolm Maas, an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a team of tornado researchers compiled a tornado database that they hope will boost tornado research globally. …The United States accounts for 21,548 of the recorded fatalities in the database published by Maas and his collaborators. But tornadoes in other countries wreak havoc as well: Bangladesh accounts for 8,325 fatalities in the database, India has seen 1,473, and the rest of the world combined accounts for 3,824…. Full article at https://eos.org/articles/a-new-tornado-database-helps-researchers-worldwide.

2025-01-02. Disentangling the drivers of wildfires. By Jianbang Gan, Science. Excerpt: Wildfire occurrence and scale worldwide have risen over recent decades, with the most destructive wildfires in North America taking place in the past decade (1, 2). …On page 91 of this issue, Wang et al. (3) report the key drivers of burn severity…. …These studies led to the development of predictive models that are used to project wildfire effects under different scenarios over time in locations where no historical fires have been recorded. However, the drivers of wildfire effects are complex and involve multiple interlinked factors, such as climate, vegetation, topography, and human activity. …Among all the factors, fuel aridity, which reflects the abundance and moisture content of flammable vegetative fuels, was determined to be the primary driver for most Canadian forest fires between 1981 and 2020. …Wang et al. found a large increase in burn severity in northern Canada compared with other regions in Canada. …Whereas weather condition was the dominant driver of the effect of wildfires in northern Canada, fuel aridity and vegetation type were key drivers of wildfires in southern areas. …From an ecological perspective, the increase in fire activity in boreal forests, especially in the northern regions of the world, has raised grave concerns about the health and function of biomes that act as important carbon sinks (11). …Cooperation between the US, Canada, and Russia, which share 93% of the global boreal forest, is needed to effectively manage fire while preserving this valuable ecosystem of the northern hemisphere (12)…. Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu5463.

2025-01-01. The Panama Canal Has a Big Problem, but It’s Not China or Trump. By Dennis M. Hogan, Guest Essay for The New York Times. Excerpt: In 2023, …July, the middle of Panama’s rainy season. But the rains had been sparse, and water levels in the canal had sunk to troubling lows. Without freshwater from rain, our guide explained, the locks on the canal could not operate. …the true threat to U.S. commerce through Panama. If the goal is securing affordable access to the transit point over the long term, it is climate change, not Chinese influence, that U.S. policymakers should worry about. …Sending a single ship through the canal’s locks can use around 50 million gallons of water, mainly freshwater collected from Lake Gatún. Though the canal is, for the moment, operating at full capacity, a drier climate and greater demand for drinking water have in recent years reduced the volume of available water. That has forced the state-run Panama Canal Authority at times to limit the number of daily passages through the canal, at one point by as much as 40 percent. …With less rain, the reservoirs fill up more slowly, which means less water available to operate the locks, which means fewer ships can pass. Hence, the 2023-24 drought, among the worst on record, slowed transits and drove up transit prices, causing long delays, more expensive consumer goods and greater instability in shipping routes. …The limited number of passages has led to auctions for passage rights that further inflated the growing cost of shipping goods through the canal. (The canal authority increased tolls just before the 2023 drought began.) … Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/opinion/panama-canal-trump-china-drought.html.

See articles from {2022}-{2021}-{2020}-{2013–2019}-{2006–2012}