CLIMATE CHANGE

EcoWatch -  According to new data from Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2024 will be the planet’s warmest ever recorded, as well as the first above the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature threshold set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. The European Union’s climate monitor found that the planet’s average surface temperature for November was 1.62 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average. With 11 months of data for 2024 now available, scientists have said that the global average temperature for the year is projected to be 1.60 degrees Celsius, which would break the record of 1.48 degrees Celsius set last year, reported The Guardian.  

Axios - The news that the frigid Arctic tundra ringing the polar region has switched from being a net absorber, or "sink," of planet-warming greenhouse gases to a net emitter, or "source," indicates the Arctic is on the brink of further, sweeping changes.  Added emissions of greenhouse gases, which in this case are mainly carbon dioxide and methane, only serve to accelerate the rate and increase the magnitude of global warming, scientists warn.

The big picture: The Arctic's carbon balance is of intense interest to researchers.

• The permafrost in its soil has trapped carbon dioxide and methane for thousands of years.
• Now, as the Arctic climate warms at rates up to four times faster than the planet's average, snow is disappearing sooner in the spring, permafrost is melting, and massive wildfires are burning in areas that had previously not routinely supported them.
• Each of these developments is allowing microbes in the tundra to liberate long-trapped CO2 and methane, transitioning the region into a net source of greenhouse gases.
• Scientists made the discovery in an authoritative federal report after examining two decades of observations.

Circumpolar wildfire emissions have averaged 207 million tons of carbon per year since 2003, with 2024 coming in as the second-highest year during this period.

These are signs of a region undergoing rapid and transformative climate shifts, report authors said at a scientific meeting in Washington yesterday and in separate interviews with Axios.

• "The Arctic exists now within a new regime," said Brendan Rogers, a scientist with the Woodwell Climate Research Center who served as lead author on the report's section detailing the movement of carbon between the land, sea and air.
• Twila Moon, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and lead author of the overall report, told Axios: "The Arctic today looks vastly different than it did even just in recent past decades, and that rapid change is going to continue into the future."

Yes, but: Moon said the Arctic hasn't slipped into a new normal, stable state — its climate is now far more unstable and extreme, with many new records expected to be broken.

While a milestone, the tundra carbon emissions finding doesn't mean the planet has crossed a so-called "tipping point" that would indicate rapid and irreversible change, Rogers cautioned.

• Worries about a permafrost "methane bomb" — a rapid, huge emission of planet-warming methane as permafrost thaws — have not borne out, and this report doesn't validate them.

What's next: Rogers noted that the boreal forests combined with tundra ecosystems aren't clearly net emitters of more greenhouse gases than they take in, but that this transition may be coming. Read more

Time - Of the eight planets and 293 moons that call our solar system home, only Earth has a surface that sloshes with liquid water. Roughly 71% of the face of our world is covered in seas, lakes, rivers, and oceans, serving as the elixir for more than three billion years of global life. But parts of Earth are not as wet as they used to be, and that’s thanks mostly to the highest of those life forms—us. 

According to a just-released report by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), human-driven climate change is leading to a permanent state of increased dryness on 77.6% of the Earth’s land masses, a steady desiccation that has been playing out over the 30-year period from 1990 to 2020. During those three decades, drylands expanded worldwide by 4.3 million sq. km (1.66 million sq. mi.), an area nearly a third larger than the nation of India. And when the UNCCD says dry, they mean for keeps. “Unlike droughts—temporary periods of low rainfall—aridity represents a permanent, unrelenting transformation,” said UNCCD executive secretary Ibrahim Thiaw in a statement that accompanied the release of the report—published as nations gather in Saudi Arabia for the 16th U.N. conference of the parties to combat desertification. “Droughts end. When an area's climate becomes drier, however, the ability to return to previous conditions is lost. The drier climates now affecting vast lands across the globe will not return to how they were before and this is redefining life on Earth.”