Climate Change

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When the state’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the nation’s most successful youth climate suit, it sparked a Republican backlash that could lead to fundamental changes in Montana’s courts and environmental laws.

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• Farmers in a cacao-producing region of southwestern Côte d’Ivoire have seen their yields decline so much that they’re abandoning their plantations and considering switching to other crops.
• They say cacao, long a mainstay of the agricultural economy of this region and the country, is no longer profitable due to changing weather patterns and an increase in plant diseases like swollen shoot.
• An agronomist says the changing weather is partly due to deforestation caused by the expansion of cacao production in recent decades, and recommends agroforestry and reforestation as a remedy.

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The high growth rate of atmospheric CO2 in 2023 was found to be caused by a severe reduction of the global net land carbon sink. Here we update the global CO2 budget from January 1st to July 1st 2024, during which El Niño drought conditions continued to prevail in the Tropics but ceased by March 2024. We used three dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs), machine learning emulators of ocean models, three atmospheric inversions driven by observations from the second Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite, and near-real-time fossil CO2 emissions estimates. In a one-year period from July 2023 to July 2024 covering the El Niño 2023/24 event, we found a record-high CO2 growth rate of 3.66~±~0.09 ppm~yr−1 (±~1 standard deviation) since 1979. Yet, the CO2 growth rate anomaly obtained after removing the long term trend is 1.1 ppm~yr−1, which is marginally smaller than the July--July growth rate anomalies of the two major previous El Niño events in 1997/98 and 2015/16. The atmospheric CO2 growth rate anomaly was primarily driven by a 2.24 GtC~yr−1 reduction in the net land sink including 0.3 GtC~yr−1 of fire emissions, partly offset by a 0.38 GtC~yr−1 increase in the ocean sink relative to the 2015--2022 July--July mean. The tropics accounted for 97.5% of the land CO2 flux anomaly, led by the Amazon (50.6%), central Africa (34%), and Southeast Asia (8.2%), with extra-tropical sources in South Africa and southern Brazil during April--July 2024. Our three DGVMs suggest greater tropical CO2 losses in 2023/2024 than during the two previous large El Niño in 1997/98 and 2015/16, whereas inversions indicate losses more comparable to 2015/16. Overall, this update of the low latency budget highlights the impact of recent El Niño droughts in explaining the high CO2 growth rate until July 2024.

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• webpage and PDF

A new study finds that presenting the same continuous climate data, such as incremental changes in temperature, in binary form -- such as whether a lake did or did not freeze in the winter -- significantly increases people's ability to see the impact of climate change.

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Archived (Wayback Machine):

• earth.com article
• full study in Science

Tropical deforestation was found to cause large reductions in precipitation using a range of observation-based datasets1. However, the limitations of satellite-based space-for-time statistical analysis have hindered understanding of the roles of reshaped mesoscale atmospheric circulation and regional precipitation recycling at different scales. These effects are considered nonlocal effects, which are distinct from the local effects governed by deforestation-induced reductions in evapotranspiration (ET). Here we show reversed precipitation responses to Amazon deforestation across wet and dry seasons. During the wet season, deforested grids experienced a noteworthy increase in precipitation (0.96 mm per month per percentage point forest loss), primarily attributed to enhanced mesoscale atmospheric circulation (that is, nonlocal effect). These nonlocal increases weaken with distance from deforested grids, leading to significant precipitation reductions in buffers beyond 60 km. Conversely, during the dry season, precipitation decreases in deforested grids and throughout all analysis buffers, with local effects from reduced ET dominating. Our findings highlight the intricate balance between local effects and nonlocal effects in driving deforestation-precipitation responses across different seasons and scales and emphasize the urgent need to address the rapid and extensive loss of forest in the Amazon region.

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research cited (Wayback Machine)

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record annual jump cited (Wayback Machine)

Please note that this article contains questionable arithmetic:

That brings the annual mean global concentration close to 430 ppm, about 40 percent more than the pre-industrial level, and enough to heat the planet by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius).

The actual figure from NOAA is 428.15 ppm (last updated 2025-04-14). If we use the more precise pre-industrial estimate of 278 ppm, then we get an increase of 54%, which is indeed "about 40%" if we round to the nearest multiple of 40%.

Climate models tend to underestimate the cooling effect of aerosol pollution, and the climate sensitivity is actually about 50% greater than previously thought, so a more realistic estimate of the warming caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration over the pre-industrial level is 4.5°C. If we assume that the relationship is linear, this means that the current level of 428.15 ppm is "enough to heat the planet" by 4.5°C * 54% = 2.43°C, which is... more than 1.5°C.

the 2023-2024 spike of the global average surface temperature, which has also not been fully explained

Yes it has.

Carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers have likely caused trillions of dollars in economic damages due to intensifying heatwaves over the last 30 years, according to new peer-reviewed research.

The top five emitters – Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia), Gazprom (Russia), Chevron (US), ExxonMobil (US), and BP (British), respectively – are responsible for about $9 trillion in heat-related damages, according to the study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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archived (Wayback Machine)

Global temperatures in the first quarter of 2025 were the second warmest on record, extending a remarkable run of exceptional warmth that began in July 2023.

This is despite weak La Niña conditions during the first two months of the year – which typically result in cooler temperatures.

With temperature data for the first three months of the year now available, Carbon Brief finds that 2025 is very likely to be one of the three warmest years on record.

However, it currently remains unlikely that temperatures in 2025 will set a new annual record.

In addition to near-record warmth, the start of 2025 has seen record-low sea ice cover in the Arctic between January and March – and the second-lowest minimum sea ice extent on record for Antarctica.

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• Indonesia added 1.9 gigawatts of new coal capacity in 2024, the third-highest globally, mainly to power metal smelters supporting the electric vehicle industry — despite global efforts to phase out coal.
• Captive coal plants built for industry have tripled in capacity since 2019, exploiting a loophole in Indonesia’s coal moratorium and undermining its climate pledges under the Paris Agreement and Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP).
• Indonesia now has the fifth-largest coal fleet in the world and plans to expand by another 26.7 GW by 2030, with serious concerns about economic viability, environmental damage, and public health in regions like Sulawesi and North Maluku.
• Government-backed alternatives like biomass cofiring and carbon capture are criticized as costly and ineffective, while experts urge Indonesia to shift meaningfully toward renewables to align with global energy and climate trends.

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archived (Wayback Machine)