Heat and drought would rank high on this list. The Middle East is heating twice as fast as the global average. Egypt and Iraq are especially vulnerable to sea level rise. Some of the consequent threats can only be dealt with by inter-governmental cooperation. But that kind of cooperation is hard to come by as things now stand.

An example of a cross-border problem is the substantial reliance of numerous MENA nations on imported food, especially grains, which renders them vulnerable to global food price fluctuations caused by climate-related events (or wars) in other regions.

We saw this problem in the Russia-Ukraine War, which threatened Middle East wheat supplies. But climate-drive mega-droughts could have similar implications.

MENA countries are not well positioned to deal with climate change impacts, they point out, given that governments tend to be highly centralized, with power concentrated in the hands of oligarchs or juntas dependent directly or indirectly on oil and gas. The oligarchs are out for themselves, seeking “rents” from oil-rich countries where they don’t have such mineral wealth themselves. They exclude from decision-making grass-roots organizations, workers, the poor and women, who are often on the front lines of global heating and know better than the air-conditioned, petroleum-swigging elites how dangerous it is. All this is true for individual countries. Imagine getting them to cooperate on climate resilience or the green energy transition across borders.

The oligarchs of the region promote water-intensive crops like citrus fruits for export even in arid countries, because they can make money on the exports, and even though their countries have to import a lot of food. That is, they could put in staples like grain instead of citrus fruits, but then they wouldn’t make money from exports. Their people would, however, be less hungry.

For another example, they say, the elites in Tunisia concentrate on olive cultivation for the world market (it is the third largest producer). But there are so many olive orchards and so few of any other sort of crop that the country is making difficulties for itself. Monocultures are especially vulnerable to disease outbreaks or global price fluctuations. The olive orchards drink up the country’s agricultural water, making it hard for farmers to put in other crops.

Embed from Getty Images
An irrigation system is used in an olive grove located in Siliana, Tunisia, on May 10, 2024. Farmers face a major problem in keeping their fields productive due to water stress and drought. (Photo by Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

In Libya, the army controls much of the economy. The country is heavily dependent on oil exports, and suffers when petroleum prices plummet. The country imports 75% of its food, so if anything disrupts the global food supply chain, Libyans are in big trouble. Petroleum is mostly used to fuel vehicles, but as the world electrifies and goes to EVs, Libyans will be up the creek if they don’t find another source of wealth.

There are five big categories of cross-country threats, they say:

1.The Biophysical: “risks for trans-boundary ecosystems, such as international river basins, oceans and the atmosphere.” They give the example of Turkey’s dam-building at the headwaters of the Euphrates, which is threatening water flows in Iraq, which depends on two large rivers for survival. Climate change is also reducing flow. Iraq could be in big trouble over this trans-boundary problem.

2. Financial. Foreign direct investment in the region could fall substantially because of climate impacts, hampering infrastructure projects. Lack of infrastructural adaptation could hurt efforts to come to terms with climate change.

3. Trade: “Potential risks to international trade, such as the import and export of climate-sensitive crops and implications for food security.” MENA imports 50% of its food from the outside, and if there are droughts elsewhere in the world things could turn very dangerous.

4. People-Centered: They point to the millions of displaced people in the region. Half of Syrians had to move house during the Civil War, in which a major drought was probably implicated. Some 11 million Sudanese have been displaced by the current civil war, in a population of 48 million. They don’t say so, but the Nile Delta in Egypt is very populous (60 million people) and very low-lying, at risk from the rising waters of the Mediterranean. God knows where they will go.

5. Geopolitical. This term refers to regional conflict. We see this (this is me, not the report) in Lebanon, where Israel’s attacks have displaced 1.2 million people. There are only about 4.5 million Lebanese.

While Europe has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help MENA countries begin the transition to solar and wind energy, it has offered very little money to help Middle Eastern countries become more resilient in the face of climate change.

The authors note that the Middle East and North Africa is a diverse geographical area. It has its famous deserts but also mountain ranges, green valleys like Lebanon’s Biqa’ (now being bombed by Israel), long river valleys, mangrove stands along the seas, and swamps in southern Iraq.

The way contemporary analysts categorize the Middle East, it stretches from Iran in the east to Morocco in the far west, and from Syria in the north to Yemen in the south. Nearly 500 million people inhabit the area, and many states within it still have high birth rates, giving it millions of youths. The median age is something like 22 or 24, compared to 38.5 for the United States. Like India and Africa, it is young.

Some parts of the region are desperately poor, others are fabulously wealthy. Outside the petroleum states, they point out, parts of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Libya, are low-income, conflict-impacted societies facing severe challenges like human displacement and acute poverty. Simultaneously, middle-income nations like Morocco and Egypt are proactively exploring business opportunities within the global green transition.

Morocco and Turkey are virtually the only countries in the area that have had some success transitioning their grids to sustainable sources of energy, though much poorer Morocco is more advanced in wind and solar, while Turkey depends more heavily on hydroelectricity.

(The Conversation) – Two years ago, when the curtain fell on the COP27 summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, developing nations on the frontline of climate change had something meaningful to celebrate.

The creation of a new fund for responding to loss and damage was agreed after a hard-fought diplomatic effort, spearheaded by a group of small island developing states (sometimes known as the Sids). The fund would provide much needed support for climate-vulnerable nations faced with a spiralling human and financial toll from sea-level rise, extreme temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and intensifying floods and storms.

Yet two years on, the world’s wealthiest nations – also the largest carbon emitters – are still dragging their feet. They’ve not followed up their pledges with anywhere near the finance required.

Some nations, particularly the 39 Sids, which include places like Barbados, Grenada, Fiji and Vanuatu, are uniquely vulnerable to climate change and are already paying the price.

Sky-high ocean temperatures created the conditions for Hurricane Beryl to develop in July this year, as the earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane on record in the Caribbean. As oceans warm up, climate science tells us that this rapid intensification is becoming more common.

The island nation of Fiji, best known as a tropical paradise, has experienced a frightening series of storms over recent years, linked to climate change. Cyclone Winston in 2016, one of the most intense on record, caused widespread flooding and lead to the loss of 44 lives.

This episode reduced Fiji’s GDP growth by 1.4 percentage points. According to the Asian Development Bank, ongoing losses from climate change could reach 4% of Fiji’s annual GDP by 2100, as higher temperatures and more extreme weather hold back growth.

This isn’t an isolated problem. Tropical cyclones and hurricanes have long battered small islands, but what is new is how often the most extreme storms and floods are happening, as well as our improved ability to measure their economic effects.

Direct and indirect impacts

Our latest research looked at extreme weather events affecting 35 small island developing nations. We first collected information about the direct consequences of these extreme weather events: the damaged homes, the injured people, and the bridges that must be rebuilt.

We then looked at how these events have affected GDP growth and public finances. These changes are not felt immediately, but rather as the economy stalls, tourism dries up, and expensive recovery plans inhibit spending in other areas.

In all, from 2000 to 2020, these direct and indirect impacts may have cost small island states a total of US$141 billion. That works out to around US$2,000 per person on average, although this figure underplays just how bad things can get in some places. Hurricane Maria in 2017 caused damage to the Caribbean island of Dominica worth more than double its entire GDP. That amounted to around US$20,000 per person, overnight. Almost a decade later, the country is still struggling with one of the largest debt burdens on earth at over 150% of GDP.

Of these huge aggregate losses across all the small island development states, around 38% are attributable to climate change. That’s according to calculations we made based on “extreme event attribution” studies, which estimate the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions influenced extreme weather events.

“Fiji Superstorm,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

What is clear is that small island economies are among the worst affected by severe weather. These island states have three to five times more climate-related loss and damage than other states, as a percentage of government revenues. That’s true even for wealthier small island states, like the Bahamas and Barbados, where loss and damage is four times greater than other high-income countries. For all small island nations, the economic impacts will increase, with “attributable” losses from extreme weather reaching US$75 billion by 2050 if global temperatures hit 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Our research helps us to see how far short the richer nations driving climate change are falling in their efforts to both curb emissions and to compensate the nations harmed by their failure to prevent climate change.

Developed countries need to pay up

One of the key discussions at the forthcoming COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, will be the “new collective quantified goal”. This is the technical name to describe how much money wealthy countries will need to contribute to help vulnerable nations to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

That overall goal must also include a target to finance small islands and other vulnerable countries, with billions more needed per year in the new loss and damage fund. Given the extent of actual and likely losses, nothing less than ambition on the scale of a “modern Marshall Plan” for these states will do.

In addition to this extra financing, the fund will need to work effectively to support the most climate vulnerable nations and populations when severe weather occurs. This can be done in a few ways.

The fund could create a budget support mechanism that can help small island states and other vulnerable countries deal with loss of income and the negative effects on growth. It could make sure loss and damage funds can be released quickly, and ensure support is channelled to those who need it the most. It could also make more concessional finance available for recovery, especially for the most adversely affected sectors like agriculture and tourism.

The world has a troubling history of missing self-imposed targets on climate finance and emissions reduction. But the stakes are ever higher now, and any target for loss and damage finance will need to be sufficient to deal with the challenges posed already by climate change, and in the years to come.

Emily Wilkinson, Principal Research Fellow, ODI Global; Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington; Matt Bishop, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Sheffield, and Vikrant Panwar, Senior Climate and Disaster Risk Finance Specialist, ODI Global

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

(The Conversation) – Hurricane Helene caused deadly and destructive flooding when it swept through the Southeast on Sept. 26-29, 2024. Across a broad swath of western North Carolina, where the worst flooding occurred, the amount of rainfall exceeded levels that would be expected on average only once every 1,000 years.

But this wasn’t the first 1,000-year rainstorm in North Carolina this year. In mid-September, an unnamed slow-moving storm produced more than a foot of rainfall closer to the Atlantic coast. This storm inundated areas that had already been drenched by Tropical Storm Debby in August.

As atmospheric scientists and state climatologists, we believe it’s important for the public to understand the risk that extreme events may occur. That’s especially true as climate change alters the conditions that create and feed storms. Here’s how scientists calculate storm probabilities, and why events like a 1,000-year storm can happen much more frequently in some places than that term suggests.

Forecasting the future based on the past

Estimates of rainfall return periods – how long it will be, on average, between storms of a given size – come from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the home of the National Weather Service. NOAA publishes these projections in a series of reports called Atlas 14. Architects and engineers use them to design buildings, dams, bridges and other facilities to withstand heavy rainfall.

The estimates use past rainfall data to calculate how frequently rainstorms of various sizes occur at given locations. In places where historical rainfall observations have been collected for decades, it’s possible to calculate the amount of rain that is exceeded, on average, one or two times per year with very high confidence.

Experts then use statistical methods to estimate how frequently larger rain amounts would occur. As the amounts get bigger, the calculations become less precise. But it’s still possible to make reasonable estimates of very rare rain events.

The results are average probabilities that a certain amount of rain will fall in a given location in any given year. If a storm that produces 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rain within 24 hours has a 1% chance of occurring in any year, then we would expect such a storm to happen once in 100 years, so its return period is said to be 100 years. An event with a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year could be expected to occur once in 1,000 years on average, so it is referred to as a 1,000-year event.

It’s not ‘one and done’

The problem with terms like 100-year event or 1,000-year event is that many people hear them and assume they mean another storm of that size shouldn’t occur for another 99 or 999 years. That’s a reasonable conclusion, but it’s incorrect. Each storm is an individual event, so just because one becomes unusually large doesn’t mean that another storm a year later can’t exceed the odds as well.

Imagine you’re rolling a pair of dice. The odds of throwing a pair of sixes is small – just 1 in 36, or slightly less than 3%. But if you roll the dice again, the odds don’t change – they are the same for that roll as the one before.

A more accurate way to communicate storm odds is to think about the annual exceedance probability – the chance that a rainstorm of a given size could occur in any single year. A 1,000-year storm has a 0.1% chance of occurring in any year, and the same probability of occurring again the next year, and the year after.

Since the U.S. is a big country, we should expect to see a bunch of 0.1% probability rainstorms every year. The chance of such a storm occurring at any specific location is extremely low, but the chance of one occurring somewhere becomes quite a bit higher.

Put another way, even if you are unlikely to experience a 1,000-year storm at your location, there likely will be 1,000-year storms somewhere in the country every year.

Different areas see different kinds of storms

In the real world, actual rainstorms aren’t randomly distributed; they are a result of atmospheric processes like thunderstorms and hurricanes, which are produced by local and regional climate patterns. So a map of actual 1,000-year rainstorms would show clusters reflecting hurricanes along the East Coast, atmospheric rivers along the West Coast, and thunderstorm complexes in the Great Plains, where thunderstorm systems form.

Storm types matter because they have different durations. Almost all rare 1-hour extreme rainfall events are associated with thunderstorms, while those that last 48 or 72 hours often are caused by hurricanes or their remnants.

North Carolina and South Carolina, which are frequently affected by hurricanes and tropical storms, have seen numerous extreme rainfall events in recent years. They include record-setting rainstorms in October 2015 in South Carolina; Hurricane Matthew in 2016; Hurricane Florence in 2018; the aforementioned nameless storm in September 2024; and now, Hurricane Helene.

In fact, since 2002, the three U.S. storms that have dropped 1,000-year magnitude rainfall on the largest areas have all hit the Carolinas: the October 2015 storm, Florence and Helene.

Loading the weather dice

Why have so many storms that, historically and statistically, should be exceedingly rare, struck the Carolinas in just a few years? There are two main reasons, which are related.

“Cyclone,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

First, estimating the probability of rare events requires increasingly large amounts of data. NOAA’s Atlas 14 was last updated for the Carolinas in 2006, and those calculations only used data through 2000.

As more storms occur and more data is collected, the estimates get more robust. Given that reliable rainfall measurements only extend back about 100 years, the true probability of this much rain in the Carolinas may have been underestimated up until now.

Second, these statistics assume the climate isn’t changing, but we know that it is. Especially in regions near the coasts, the frequency of heavy rainfall has increased as a result of human-caused climate change. Warmer air can hold more moisture, and warmer oceans provide that moisture as the fuel for heavy rainfall.

As a result, climate change is making rainstorms that had been extremely rare now somewhat more likely. While the Carolinas may have been especially unlucky in recent years, the dice are also becoming loaded toward heavier rain – a trend that poses major challenges for emergency preparedness and recovery.

NOAA is currently developing Atlas 15, which will update current estimates with more recent data and will incorporate the effects of climate change. The agency also plans to modernize its estimates of a related quantity known as probable maximum precipitation, which is an estimate of the worst-case rainfall that could occur in a location.

Engineers use these estimates to design large critical facilities, such as dams, that can withstand the flood that would occur with the worst-case scenario rainfall at their sites. North Carolina has developed its own version of Atlas 15, due to the pressing need to plan transportation infrastructure to handle more events like Florence and Helene.

These updates will provide information that can be used for better planning and decision-making. Even so, extreme rainfall will still be a major hazard, with significant impacts on many U.S. communities.

Russ Schumacher, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Colorado State Climatologist, Colorado State University and Kathie Dello, Director, North Carolina State Climate Office, North Carolina State University

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

( Michigan Advance ) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday released a sweeping set of rules aimed at cutting air, water and land pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants.

Environmental and clean energy groups celebrated the announcement as long overdue, particularly for coal-burning power plants, which have saddled hundreds of communities across the country with dirty air and hundreds of millions of tons of toxic coal ash waste. The ash has leached a host of toxins – including arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, radium and other pollutants – into ground and surface water.

“Today is the culmination of years of advocacy for common-sense safeguards that will have a direct impact on communities long forced to suffer in the shadow of the dirtiest power plants in the country,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s oldest and largest environmental organizations. “It is also a major step forward in our movement’s fight to decarbonize the electric sector and help avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

But some electric industry and pro-coal organizations blasted the rules as a threat to jobs and electric reliability at a time when power demands are surging. They also criticized the rule’s reliance on largely unproven carbon capture technologies.

America’s Power, a trade organization for the nation’s fleet of about 400 coal power plants across 42 states, called the number of new rules “unprecedented,” singling out the new emissions standards that will force existing coal plants to cut their carbon emissions by 90% by the 2032 if they intend to keep running past 2039.  Michelle Bloodworth, the group’s president and CEO, called the rule “an extreme and unlawful overreach that endangers America’s supply of dependable and affordable electricity.”

‘This forces that’

Many experts expect the regulations to be litigated, particularly the carbon rule, since the last time the EPA tried to restrict carbon emissions from power plants, a group of states led by West Virginia mounted a successful legal challenge that went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But Julie McNamara, deputy policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the agency took great pains to conform the rule to the legal constraints outlined by the court.

“This rule is specifically responsive to that Supreme Court decision,” she said. “Which doesn’t mean that it won’t go to the courts but this is so carefully hewn to that decision that it should be robust.”

The four rules EPA released Thursday mainly target coal-fired power plants.

“By developing these standards in a clear, transparent, inclusive manner, EPA is cutting pollution while ensuring that power companies can make smart investments and continue to deliver reliable electricity for all Americans,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said.

In some ways, they attach a framework to a sea change in electric generation that is already well under way, McNamara said.

Coal accounted for just 16% of U.S. electric generation in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 1990, by comparison, it comprised more than 54% of power generation. However, some states are more reliant on coal power than others.

In 2021, the most coal-dependent states were West Virginia, Missouri, Wyoming and Kentucky, per a 2022 report by  the EIA.

AES Indiana’s Petersburg Generating Station in Petersburg, Indiana, has been burning coal since the 1960s but will shutter all of its coal-firing units over the next few years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday released a sweeping set of rules aimed at cutting air, water and land pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants. (Robert Zullo/States Newsroom)

“This rulemaking adds structure to that transition,” McNamara said. “For those who have chosen not to assess the future use of their coal plants, this forces that.”

Heather O’Neill, president and CEO of the clean energy trade group Advanced Energy United, said the new regulations are a chance for utilities to embrace cheaper, cleaner and more reliable options for the electric grid.

“Instead of looking to build new gas plants or prolong the life of old coal plants, utilities should be taking advantage of the cheaper, cleaner, and more trusty tools in the toolbox,” she said.

The carbon rule 

In 2009, the EPA concluded that greenhouse gas emissions “endanger our nation’s public health and welfare,” the agency wrote, adding that since that time, “the evidence of the harms posed by GHG emissions has only grown and Americans experience the destructive and worsening effects of climate change every day.”

The new carbon emissions regulation will apply to existing coal plants and new natural gas plants. Coal plants that plan to operate beyond 2039 will have to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. New gas plants are split into three categories based on their capacity factor, a measure of how much electricity is generated over a period of time relative to the maximum amount it could have produced. The plants that run the most (more than 40% capacity factor) will have to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. Existing gas plants will be regulated under a forthcoming rule that “more comprehensively addresses GHG emissions from this portion of the fleet,” the agency said.

Michelle Solomon, a senior policy analyst for Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy think tank, predicts that most coal plants will close rather than install the costly technology to capture carbon emissions.

“Climate goals aside, the public health impacts of the rules in securing the retirement of coal fired power plants is so important,” she said. Coal power in the U.S. has been increasingly pressured by cheaper gas and renewable generation and mounting environmental restrictions, but some grid operators have still been caught flat-footed by the pace of coal plant closures.

“I think the role of this rule, to provide that certainty about where we’re going, is so crucial to get the entities that have control over the rate of the transition to start to take action here,” she said. But the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s CEO, Jim Matheson, called the rules “unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable” noting that it relies on technology “that is not ready for prime time.”

And Todd Snitchler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, a trade group for competitive power suppliers, called the rule “a painful example of aspirational policy outpacing physical and operational realities” because of its reliance on unproven carbon capture and hydrogen blending technologies to cut emissions.

A beefed up Mercury and Air Toxic Standards rule

The EPA called the revision to the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards  “the most significant update since MATS was first issued in February 2012.” It predicted the rule would cut emissions of mercury and other air pollutants like nickel, arsenic, lead, soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and others. It cuts the mercury limit by 70% for power plants fired by lignite coal, which is the lowest grade of coal and one of the dirtiest to burn for power generation.

For all coal plants, the emissions limit for toxic metals is reduced by 67%. The EPA says the rule will result in major cuts in releases of mercury and other hazardous metals, fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide.  The agency projects “$300 million in health benefits,” including reducing risks of heart attacks, cancer and developmental delays in children and $130 million in climate benefits.

Stronger wastewater discharge limits for power plants

Coal fired power plants use huge volumes of water, and when the wastewater is returned to lakes, rivers and streams it can be laden with mercury, arsenic and other metals as well as bromide, chloride and other pollution and contaminate drinking water and harm aquatic life.

The new rule is projected to cut about 670 million pounds of pollutants discharged in wastewater from coal plants per year. Plants that will cease coal combustion over the next decade can abide by less stringent rules.

“Power plants for far too long have been able to get away with treating our waterways like an open sewer,” said Thomas Cmar, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, during a briefing on the new rules earlier this week.

Closing a coal ash loophole

Coal ash, what’s left after coal has been burned for power generation, is one the nation’s largest waste streams. The 2015 EPA Coal Combustion Residuals rule were the first federal regulations for coal ash. But that rule left about half of the ash sitting at power plant sites and other locations – much of it in unlined disposal pits – unregulated because it did not apply to so-called “legacy impoundments” that were not being used to accept new ash.

“We’re going to see a long-awaited crackdown on coal ash pollution from America’s coal plants, and it’ll be a huge win for America’s health and water resources,” said Lisa Evans, a senior attorney with Earthjustice. “They are all likely leaking toxic chemicals like arsenic into groundwater and most contain levels of radioactivity that can be dangerous to human health.”

Groundwater monitoring data shows that the vast majority of ash ponds at coal plants are contaminating groundwater, said Abel Russ, a senior attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project. Butunder the old rule, Russ said, facilities could dodge cleanup requirements by blaming contamination on older ash dumps not covered by the regulation.

“This is a huge loophole,” Russ said. “You can’t restore groundwater quality if you’re only addressing half of the coal ash sources on site.”

However, several attorneys on the Earthjustice briefing said the new rules, which will require monitoring at clean up and hundreds of more ash sites, will only be as good as the enforcement.

“It’s meaningful only if these utilities obey the law. Unfortunately to date, many of them have not,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Robert Zullo

Robert Zullo is a national energy reporter based in southern Illinois focusing on renewable power and the electric grid. Robert joined States Newsroom in 2018 as the founding editor of the Virginia Mercury. Before that, he spent 13 years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana. He has a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. He grew up in Miami, Fla., and central New Jersey.

 

Published under under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 

Via Michigan Advance

Clean Energy Wire ) – The damaging effects of climate change are set to hit economic growth severely across most countries, said researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

With the climate change that is already locked-in through past and “plausible” future emissions, income will be 19 percent lower on average globally over the next 26 years than in a scenario without climate change, they said in an article in Nature.

This corresponds to global annual damages in 2049 of 38 trillion dollars (in 2005 dollars), said the researchers. They also compared these damages to the mitigation costs required to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement goals and said that climate damages are larger than the mitigation costs in 2050 by a factor of approximately six.

Maximilian Kotz et al. wrote,

“Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity.”

The red shows decreases in income, the blue increases, caused by climate change. H/t Nature

Climate advocates and policymakers often emphasise that the cost of inaction on climate change is set to be much larger than the cost of efforts to mitigate the worst effects by introducing ambitious climate policy.

German government representatives have also said that climate mitigation is of the highest priority, because the less intense the impacts of climate change are, the less money needs to be spent adapting to them.

Published under a “ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)”. The text has been augmented by quotes from the original Nature article.

Dubai’s famous Palm Jumeirah is not the only man-made island to have emerged from the sea this century. Over the past 20 years, many islands have been built to accommodate both tourists and well-heeled residents – especially in the Arabian Gulf states and China.

In an era of sea-level rise and increased storm activity, new islands may seem a risky venture. Yet the desire for a sea view and to put blue water between yourself and the noise, traffic and crime of the mainland is keeping the market buoyant.

Residential artificial islands cater for the rich and have serious environmental consequences. But they ride high on big promises. How else to explain the continuing expansion of Eko Atlantic, a complex of islands sprouting off coastal Lagos in Nigeria?

Digital. “Artificial Islands.” Dream / Dreamland v. 3, 2024.

Construction firms broke ground on Eko Atlantic’s boulevards and high-rise apartments in 2009. The city government has recently announced five more artificial islands “to open up the city”, and claims that the new islands generate and attract wealth and have already created “30,000 direct new jobs”, mostly in construction and maintenance.

The fashion for island-building shows no signs of abating. But instead of an answer to the desperate need for new housing among people who are set to be displaced by rising seas, new islands are offering yet another distraction for the wealthy.

How to build an island

As research for my book The Age of Islands, I visited all sorts of new enclaves that have been reclaimed from the sea. I was amazed at how quickly they can be built. In shallow water, creating an island is not technically complex: usually, the sea bed across a wide area is hoovered up and ground down, then sprayed and pummelled into a stable base.

In Lagos, the Gulf states and other island-building hotspots like the shores of the Chinese island province of Hainan, developers know their creations must be defended from the sea. Nigeria has the Great Wall of Lagos, a sea barrier containing about 100,000 concrete blocks and rising nine metres above the sea, to protect Eko Atlantic. More modest structures are favoured elsewhere, usually in the form of artificial reefs that are dragged and dropped into place, creating a shield against surging seas.

Will any of this be enough? Such barriers provide enough protection long enough to make island-building an economic proposition. But this calculation misses something important: all these islands rely on the mainland – that’s where they get their energy, water and food. Lagos is a low-lying city and large parts are in danger of flooding. The boulevards of Eko Atlantic won’t look so chic if they are marooned.

Critics of new islands point to the havoc they cause to coastal and river systems, changing patterns of sediment deposition and erosion and creating silty, warm lagoons that turn living marine environments into dead zones.

This is one of the reasons the Chinese government intervened to halt island-building around Hainan. From its shores you can see 11 projects, some in full swing, most paused.

The world’s biggest and most spectacular new island, Ocean Flower, is found here. It is shaped like a lotus with scrolling leaves and is already crowded with apartment blocks and outlandish architecture, including European-style castles, grandiose hotels and amusement parks. The plan was to have 28 museums, 58 hotels and the world’s largest conference centre.

Even in the hyperbolic world of island building, it sounds extreme. The developer, Evergrande, is now in financial trouble and 39 residential towers on Ocean Flower have been deemed to have flouted environmental and planning regulations and ordered to be demolished.

Boom-and-bust cycles would appear to plague new islands. But these tales shouldn’t mislead us into thinking this is an ailing industry. The financial incentives remain enormous and island makers are an adaptive breed.

Floating for a few

Floating islands have come to the fore recently: anchored platforms whose construction does not involve scraping away the seabed, making them less disruptive to the marine environment.

Plans for floating cities keep bubbling up. One prospect, Green Float, led by the Japanese company Shimz, would be a floating Pacific city designed to float on the equator “just like a lily pad” and house 40,000 people.

Building on the high seas will always be challenging, so it’s no surprise that ventures closer to shore, such as the Floating City in the Maldives, have been the first to materialise. Floating City is slated as a 500-acre development with 5,000 low-rise homes for 20,000 people arranged in a coral-like scatter of closely connected islets. The first islands have already been towed into place.

The Dutch architect of the scheme, Koen Olthuis, hopes that the Floating City will not be the preserve of the rich (unlike the others I’ve mentioned). His vision is of ordinary Maldivians, having lost homes and livelihoods to rising seas, finding a safe anchorage in the Floating City.

But from what I’ve seen, the world of artificial islands caters to the few not the many. Island-building is led by private developers, not environmentalists – or even states. Foreigners are already being induced to buy into Floating City and told this will be their ticket to a Maldivian residence permit. The bond between wealth and island building will not be easily broken.

Alastair Bonnett, Professor of Geography, Newcastle University

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

A heat wave in Greenland and a storm in Antarctica. These kinds of individual weather “events” are increasingly being supercharged by a warming climate. But despite being short-term events they can also have a much longer-term effect on the world’s largest ice sheets, and may even lead to tipping points being crossed in the polar regions.

We have just published research looking at these sudden changes in the ice sheets and how they may impact what we know about sea level rise. One reason this is so important is that the global sea level is predicted to rise by anywhere between 28 cm and 100cm by the year 2100, according to the IPCC. This is a huge range – 70 cm extra sea-level rise would affect many millions more people.

Partly this uncertainty is because we simply don’t know whether we’ll curb our emissions or continue with business as usual. But while possible social and economic changes are at least factored in to the above numbers, the IPCC acknowledges its estimate does not take into account deeply uncertain ice-sheet processes.

Sudden accelerations

The sea is rising for two main reasons. First, the water itself is very slightly expanding as it warms, with this process responsible for about a third of the total expected sea-level rise.

Second, the world’s largest ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are melting or sliding into the sea. As the ice sheets and glaciers respond relatively slowly, the sea will also continue to rise for centuries.

Photo by Cassie Matias on Unsplash

Scientists have long known that there is a potential for sudden accelerations in the rate at which ice is lost from Greenland and Antarctica which could cause considerably more sea-level rise: perhaps a metre or more in a century. Once started, this would be impossible to stop.

Although there is a lot of uncertainty over how likely this is, there is some evidence that it happened about 130,000 years ago, the last time global temperatures were anything close to the present day. We cannot discount the risk.

To improve predictions of rises in sea level we therefore need a clearer understanding of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. In particular, we need to review if there are weather or climate changes that we can already identify that might lead to abrupt increases in the speed of mass loss.

Weather can have long-term effects

Our new study, involving an international team of 29 ice-sheet experts and published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, reviews evidence gained from observational data, geological records, and computer model simulations.

We found several examples from the past few decades where weather “events” – a single storm, a heatwave – have led to important long-term changes.

The ice sheets are built from millennia of snowfall that gradually compresses and starts to flow towards the ocean. The ice sheets, like any glacier, respond to changes in the atmosphere and the ocean when the ice is in contact with sea water.

These changes could take place over a matter of hours or days or they may be long-term changes from months to years or thousands of years. And processes may interact with each other on different timescales, so that a glacier may gradually thin and weaken but remain stable until an abrupt short-term event pushes it over the edge and it rapidly collapses.

Because of these different timescales, we need to coordinate collecting and using more diverse types of data and knowledge.

Historically, we thought of ice sheets as slow-moving and delayed in their response to climate change. In contrast, our research found that these huge glacial ice masses respond in far quicker and more unexpected ways as the climate warms, similarly to the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and heatwaves responding to changes with the climate.

Ground and satellite observations show that sudden heatwaves and large storms can have long-lasting effects on ice sheets. For example a heatwave in July 2023 meant at one point 67% of the Greenland ice sheet surface was melting, compared with around 20% for average July conditions. In 2022 unusually warm rain fell on the Conger ice shelf in Antarctica, causing it to disappear almost overnight.

These weather-driven events have long “tails”. Ice sheets don’t follow a simple uniform response to climate warming when they melt or slide into the sea. Instead their changes are punctuated by short-term extremes.

For example, brief periods of melting in Greenland can melt far more ice and snow than is replaced the following winter. Or the catastrophic break-up of ice shelves along the Antarctic coast can rapidly unplug much larger amounts of ice from further inland.

Failing to adequately account for this short-term variability might mean we underestimate how much ice will be lost in future.

What happens next

Scientists must prioritise research on ice-sheet variability. This means better ice-sheet and ocean monitoring systems that can capture the effects of short but extreme weather events.

This will come from new satellites as well as field data. We’ll also need better computer models of how ice sheets will respond to climate change. Fortunately there are already some promising global collaborative initiatives.

We don’t know exactly how much the global sea level is going to rise some decades in advance, but understanding more about the ice sheets will help to refine our predictions.

Edward Hanna, Professor of Climate Science and Meteorology, University of Lincoln and Ruth Mottram, Climate Scientist, National Centre for Climate Research, Danish Meteorological Institute

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

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.

Ted-Ed Video: “How do ocean currents work? – Jennifer Verduin”

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.

The year 2023 was marked by extraordinary heat, wildfires and weather disasters.

In the U.S., an unprecedented heat wave gripped much of Texas and the Southwest with highs well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius) for the entire month of July.

Historic rainfall in April flooded Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with 25 inches of rain in 24 hours. A wave of severe storms in July sent water pouring into cities across Vermont and New York. Another powerful system in December swept up the Atlantic coast with hurricane-like storm surge and heavy rainfall. California faced flooding and mudslides from a series of atmospheric rivers early in the year, then was hit in August by a tropical storm – an extremely rare event there.

Wildfires ravaged Hawaii, Louisiana and several other states. And Canada’s worst fire season on record sent thick smoke across large parts of North America.

“Photo by Saikiran Kesari on Unsplash

Globally, 2023 was the warmest year on record, and it wreaked havoc around the world. El Niño played a role, but global warming is at the root of the world’s increasing extreme weather.

So, how exactly is global warming linked to fires, storms and other disasters? I am an atmospheric scientist who studies the changing climate. Here’s what you need to know.

Dangerous heat waves and devastating wildfires

When greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from vehicles and power plants, accumulate in the atmosphere, they act like a thermal blanket that warms the planet.

These gases let in high-energy solar radiation while absorbing outgoing low-energy radiation in the form of heat from the Earth. The energy imbalance at the Earth’s surface gradually increases the surface temperature of the land and oceans.

NASA: “What Is the Greenhouse Effect?”

The most direct consequence of this warming is more days with abnormally high temperatures, as many countries saw in 2023.

Extreme heat waves hit large areas of North America, Europe and China, breaking many local high temperature records. Phoenix went 30 days with daily high temperatures at 110 F (43.3 C) or higher and recorded its highest minimum nighttime temperature, with temperatures on July 19 never falling below 97 F (36.1 C).

Although heat waves result from weather fluctuations, global warming has raised the baseline, making heat waves more frequent, more intense and longer-lasting.

That heat also fuels wildfires.

Increased evaporation removes more moisture from the ground, drying out soil, grasses and other organic material, which creates favorable conditions for wildfires. All it takes is a lightning strike or spark from a power line to start a blaze.

Canada lost much of its snow cover early in 2023, which allowed the ground to dry and vast fires to burn through the summer. The ground was also extremely dry in Maui in August when the city of Lahaina, Hawaii, caught fire during a windstorm and burned.

How global warming fuels extreme storms

As more heat is stored as energy in the atmosphere and oceans, it doesn’t just increase the temperature – it can also increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.

When that water vapor condenses to liquid and falls as rain, it releases a large amount of energy. This is called latent heat, and it is the main fuel for all storm systems.

When temperatures are higher and the atmosphere has more moisture, that additional energy can fuel stronger, longer-lasting storms. This is the main reason for 2023’s record-breaking storms. Nineteen of the 25 weather and climate disasters that caused over US$1 billion in damage each through early December 2023 were severe storms, and two more were flooding that resulted from severe storms.

Tropical storms are similarly fueled by latent heat coming from warm ocean water. That is why they only form when the sea surface temperature reaches a critical level of around 80 F (27 C).

With 90% of the excess heat from global warming being absorbed by the ocean, there has been a significant increase in the global sea surface temperature, including record-breaking levels in 2023.

Higher sea surface temperatures can lead to stronger hurricanes and longer hurricane seasons. They can also lead to the faster intensification of hurricanes.

Hurricane Otis, which hit Acapulco, Mexico, in October 2023, was a devastating example. It exploded in strength, rapidly intensifying from a tropical storm to a destructive Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours. With little time to evacuate and buildings not designed to withstand a storm that powerful, more than 50 people died. The hurricane’s intensification was the second-fastest ever recorded, exceeded only by Hurricane Patricia in 2015.

A recent study found that North Atlantic tropical cyclones’ maximum intensification rates increased 28.7% between the 1971-1990 average and the 2001-2020 average. The number of storms that spun up from a Category 1 storm or weaker to a major hurricane within 36 hours more than doubled.

The Mediterranean also experienced a rare tropical-like cyclone in September 2023 that offers a warning of the magnitude of the risks ahead – and a reminder that many communities are unprepared. Storm Daniel became one of the deadliest storms of its kind when it hit Libya. Its heavy rainfall overwhelmed two dams, causing them to collapse, killing thousands of people. The heat and increased moisture over the Mediterranean made the storm possible.

Cold snaps have global warming connections, too

It might seem counterintuitive, but global warming can also contribute to cold snaps in the U.S. That’s because it alters the general circulation of Earth’s atmosphere.

The Earth’s atmosphere is constantly moving in large-scale circulation patterns in the forms of near-surface wind belts, such as the trade winds, and upper-level jet streams. These patterns are caused by the temperature difference between the polar and equatorial regions.

As the Earth warms, the polar regions are heating up more than twice as fast as the equator. This can shift weather patterns, leading to extreme events in unexpected places. Anyone who has experienced a “polar vortex event” knows how it feels when the jet stream dips southward, bringing frigid Arctic air and winter storms, despite the generally warmer winters.

In sum, a warmer world is a more violent world, with the additional heat fueling increasingly more extreme weather events.

Shuang-Ye Wu, Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences, University of Dayton

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