Climate News On The Eve Of Denier Trump Taking Office

This morning my newspaper contained a front-page article stating that 2024 was the warmest year on record according to NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the not-for-profit climate modeller, Berkeley Earth. The article stated that the mean global rise of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) had been surpassed. The difference is calculated from what mean temperatures were in the late 19th century at the beginning of the modern Industrial Age. That number should be familiar to anyone who follows news about climate change since it is the lower target to which the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement aspired. A press briefing was scheduled today at noon Eastern Standard Time to discuss the findings.

Samantha Burgess, a climate scientist associated with Europe’s Copernicus Climate Service stated that this past decade has seen the 10 hottest years on record in the last 125,000 years. In July, the hottest day had a global mean of 17.16 Celsius (62.89 Fahrenheit).

The newspaper article quoted Jennifer Francis, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, as saying, “The alarms are getting louder.” She cited wildfires and the rising number of extreme weather events including drought and atmospheric rivers produced by record amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere. Hundreds of billions of dollars in damages have happened in recent weather disasters. Those numbers, states Munich RE, the reinsurance giant will continue to rise.

Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech climate scientist, noted, “In the 1980s, Americans experienced one billion-plus weather and climate disasters on average every four months. Now, there’s one every three weeks and we already have the first of 2025 even though we’re only 9 days into the year.” That extreme event Hayhoe is referring to is the outbreak of numerous wildfires that have devastated a large swath of Greater Los Angeles in Southern California.

Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist, says it is like watching “a dystopian sci-fi film…We are now reaping what we’ve sown.” What he is referring to is our fossil fuel addiction that is filling the atmosphere with warming greenhouse gasses and acidifying the ocean.

Climate change manifests itself in different ways across our planet. In Ecuador, what has been called an “extraordinary drought” is destroying the country’s transition to replace coal-fired thermal plants with hydroelectric power. The rivers are drying up across the country and elsewhere in South America including Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina.

The same is happening elsewhere across the planet with hydroelectric facilities at places like Lake Mead and Lake Powell in the United States, Lake Arenal in Costa Rica, and rivers in China, Norway, Turkey Canada, Zambia and many other countries all experiencing drought within their borders with reported record-low water levels at hydroelectric facilities. Of these, Ecuador represents an extreme case because it has gambled on generating 70% of its electricity from hydroelectric facilities which today are incapable of meeting demand. The drought has meant power cuts and blackouts setting back the country’s economy and impeding poverty reduction efforts through rural electrification.

If the climate changes we are observing aren’t enough, the road to ruin in 2025 begins with Donald Trump’s ascendancy to his second presidency in the United States. Described by Christian Figueres, the former United Nations climate spokesperson as “a major blow to global climate action,” Trump’s second term will see the United States led by a man who has called climate change a hoax and often noted he doesn’t believe it is real. He will likely once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement and pull the country out of participating in United Nations global reporting about climate change. Many of the climate initiatives undertaken by President Biden through the Inflation Reduction Act will be reversed or watered down.

Trump has committed to continue to ramp up oil and natural gas production, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, one of the environmental contradictions of the Biden presidency.

Trump continues to question the need for electric vehicles (EVs) even though his biggest political donor is Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla. He thinks wind turbines are wiping out birds. He believes climate scientists have exaggerated how greenhouse gas emissions from human sources negatively impact the planet with those around him claiming that climate change is being used to control Americans through fear. He takes advice from non-scientists or those who are scientists but not knowledgeable on climate change that advocate for more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere to create a greener Earth.

Meanwhile, at the Mauna Loa Global Monitoring Laboratory in Hawaii, atmospheric CO2 levels by the end of last December had reached 425.4 parts per million (ppm) up from 421.86 in December 2023. In 1958 when the first CO2 readings were taken at Mauna Loa, CO2 levels were at 313 ppm.