Climatic Crisis strikes again. Heading to a global disaster

Extreme Heat Is Killing More Americans Than Ever

Jul 8, 2023

Eugene Gates Jr. was delivering mail on his route in Lakewood, Dallas, when he collapsed in a front yard on June 20, amid a stifling Texas heat wave. Temperatures on that day had reached an estimated 115 F in the Dallas area. A homeowner performed CPR, but Gates, a 66-year-old USPS carrier, died.

A day later, a 35-year-old utility lineman from West Virginia died “while working to restore power in Texas,” according to More Perfect Union, a news platform covering workers’ rights issues.

The two workers were among at least nine people who have died because of the extreme heat that hit Texas and several other southern states at the end of last month, which also caused a surge in emergency visits.

The tragedies have focused attention on an issue that is likely to become ever more urgent, with provisional figures obtained by Newsweek showing there were over 1,700 deaths in 2022 from heat-related causes—a new record. Even this is likely to be a huge underestimate, studies suggest.

Continue reading at www.newsweek.com

World Has Hottest Week On Record, Finds Study

Jul 11, 2023

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Monday that early data show the beginning of July saw the hottest week on record globally.

“The world just had the hottest week on record, according to preliminary data,” the WMO said in a statement after climate change and the early stages of the El Nino weather pattern drove the hottest June on record.

Temperatures are breaking records both on land and in the oceans, with “potentially devastating impacts on ecosystems and the environment,” the WMO warned.

“We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Nino develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024,” said Christopher Hewitt, WMO Director of Climate Services. “This is worrying news for the planet.”

According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the summer of 2022 was Europe’s hottest ever. Overall, last year was the world’s fifth warmest since at least 1850, with the previous eight years being the hottest on record.

Continue reading at countercurrents.org

In Just 15 Years Catastrophic Climate ‘Doom Loops’ Could Start, Warns Study

Jul 11, 2023

Earth’s ecosystems may be careering toward collapse much sooner than scientists thought, a new study of our planet’s warming climate has warned.

According to the study (Simon Willcock, Gregory S. Cooper, John Addy & John A. Dearing, Earlier collapse of Anthropocene ecosystems driven by multiple faster and noisier drivers, Nature Sustainability, Published: 22 June 2023), more than a fifth of the world’s potentially catastrophic tipping points — such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and the sudden transformation of the Amazon rainforest into savanna — could occur as soon as 2038.

In climatology, a “tipping point” is the threshold beyond which a localized climate system, or “tipping element,” irreversibly changes. For instance, if the Greenland ice sheet were to collapse, it would also reduce snowfall in the northern part of the island, making large parts of the sheet irretrievable.

Yet the science behind these dramatic transformations is poorly understood and often based on oversimplified models. Now, the new attempt to understand their inner workings has revealed that they may happen much sooner than we thought.

Continue reading at countercurrents.org

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