In an interview with Yale Environment 360, lead author Bjørn H. Samset of Norway’s Center for International Climate Research discusses the implications of this research. As countries like China make progress in reducing air pollution, regional planners should be prepared for the cleaner air to cause a jump in temperatures even above those expected under global warming scenarios. At the same time, Samset says, rising temperatures will likely lead to an increase in precipitation as more water evaporates from oceans, lakes, and rivers. 

In Samset’s view, the recent findings should not be taken as a green light to ramp up controversial geoengineering efforts to spray aerosols into the atmosphere, a prospect he likens to Russian roulette. “In Russian roulette, you know there’s a bullet in there,” Samset told Yale 360. In the case of geoengineering, “there might not be a bullet, you might be lucky. But would you count on it? The precautionary principle argues against it.” Yale Environment 360: With these aerosols, is particle size important? Bjørn Samset: Yes, it is. The thing that connects all aerosols is that they are all of a size that is relevant for interaction with sunlight. The reactions with sunlight — the scattering of sunlight which leads to a cooling effect — become stronger as the aerosols grow, at least up to a certain size. For the sulfate aerosols, for instance, they tend to grow in humid air as water molecules and droplets tack onto them. The longer they are in the atmosphere, the stronger their effect becomes. There is a time element with aerosols after they are emitted, and that is where some of the detailed science is going at the moment — into tracking the evolution of these particles in the air over time. e360: How does the presence of these particles impact climate? Samset: They act as mirrors or as miniature clouds, and they reflect the sunlight back into space. So if the earth was surrounded with these aerosols, a lot of the sunlight would reflect back out and you would get cooling. That is exactly what we see. We believe that the volume of human-created aerosols is so great that they have counteracted the effect of global warming to a certain extent. There is a kind of tug of war taking place between the warming greenhouse gases and the mainly cooling aerosols. e360: That is ironic — pollution is actually slowing down global warming. Samset: Yes, it turns out we have actually been helping ourselves — we’ve been polluting ourselves toward a slightly cooler climate, we’ve been mitigating climate change through pollution.   https://e360.yale.edu/features/air-pollutions-upside-a-brake-on-global-warming#:~:text=So%20if%20the%20earth%20was,warming%20to%20a%20certain%20extent.  

NOAA expands availability of new heat forecast tool ahead of summer. Collaboration with CDC provides health guidance for those most vulnerable to heat. NOAA is expanding the availability of a new experimental heat tool called HeatRisk ahead of the hot summer months. A collaboration with NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), HeatRisk provides information and guidance for those who are particularly vulnerable to heat and may need to take extra precautions for their health when the temperature rises. 

HeatRisk provides historical context for high temperature forecasts, identifying how unusual the heat will be for any given time of year across a spatial area with coverage across the contiguous U.S. It also identifies temperatures that are expected to bring increased heat impacts over a 24-hour period, up to seven days in advance. The tool takes into account cumulative impacts of heat by identifying the expected duration of the heat, including both daytime and nighttime temperatures. HeatRisk is divided into a number and color-coded scale — ranging from zero to four and minor to extreme  — that identifies the risk of heat-related impacts. NOAA and the CDC have a strong history of collaborating on heat health awareness and resilience. In 2015, the agencies founded the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS), which leads the federal interagency effort to develop community resilience to the impacts of extreme heat through societal understanding of heat risks, science-based solutions and improved capacity, communication and decision-making to reduce heat-related illness and death. “Climate change is causing more frequent and intense heat waves that are longer in duration, resulting in nearly 1,220 deaths each year in the U.S. alone,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. “Last year was the warmest year on record for the globe, and we just experienced the warmest winter on record. HeatRisk is arriving just in time to help everyone, including heat-sensitive populations, prepare and plan for the dangers of extreme heat.”“Heat can impact our health, but heat-related illness and death are preventable,” said CDC Director Mandy Cohen, M.D., M.P.H. “We are releasing new heat and health tools and guidance to help people take simple steps to stay safe in the heat.”               https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-expands-availability-of-new-heat-forecast-tool-ahead-of-summer

• World Sees 10th Consecutive Hottest Month on Record as March Temperatures Soar to Unseen Levels VIABILITY OF LIFE ON EARTH BY MARTINA IGINIGLOBAL COMMONSAPR 11TH 2024 The average global surface temperature last month was 14.14C, 0.10C higher than 2016, the previous hottest March on record. Recent trends in global surface air and sea temperatures last month are becoming harder to predict and explain, leaving climate scientists worried. Atmospheric and ocean surface temperatures continued to rise in March, reaching unprecedented levels and marking the tenth consecutive month to break records, scientists have confirmed. .The average global surface temperature last month was 14.14C, 0.10C higher than 2016, the previous hottest March on record.  In a press release on Tuesday, the EU Earth observation agency Copernicus said the global average temperature for the past twelve months is the highest on record, 1.58C above pre-industrial levels and 0.7C above the 1991-2020 average. 
• Despite the gradual weakening of El Niño, a weather pattern associated with the unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean that last year brought unprecedented heat across the world, marine air temperatures remained “at an unusually high level,” the agency said. The average global sea surface temperature was 21.07C, the highest monthly value since records began. In an exclusive interview with Earth.Org, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Johan Rockström said recent trends in global temperatures are worrying climate scientists.  “We had seen El Niño conditions before, so we expected higher surface temperatures because the Pacific ocean releases heat. But what happened in 2023 was nothing close to 2016, the second-warmest year on record. It was beyond anything we expected and no climate models can reproduce what happened. And then 2024 starts, and it gets even warmer. We cannot explain these [trends] yet and it makes scientists that work on Earth resilience like myself very nervous.” Wednesday also marked the 400th consecutive day of record temperatures in the North Atlantic. “There has always been the assumption that the ocean can cope with this, that the ocean is able to absorb this heat in a predictable, linear way, without causing surprise or any sudden abrupt changes. Up until 2023. Because suddenly, temperatures [went] off the charts, and that’s what is so shocking,” Rockström told Earth.Org.....read on https://earth.org/world-sees-10th-consecutive-hottest-month-on-record-as-march-temperatures-soar-to-unseen-levels/             
• AND..................The mass coral bleaching event, the second in the past decade, comes amid relentlessly rising global sea temperatures. At least 53 countries have been experiencing mass bleaching of coral reefs since early 2023 in response to rising ocean temperatures, scientists have confirmed.  In a joint press release on Monday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) and the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) – a partnership of 101 international nations and countries to perverse reefs around the world – confirmed that the world is undergoing its fourth global coral bleaching event, the second in the past ten years. “From February 2023 to April 2024, significant coral bleaching has been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of each major ocean basin,” said Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch (CRW). Among the 53 regions where coral bleaching has been confirmed so far are Florida, Eastern Tropical Pacific nations including Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, and Australia.                                              Rising Temperatures......the event is directly related to rising sea surface temperatures, which last month reached a new record high of 21.07C, the highest monthly value since records began.    https://earth.org/breaking-news/is-breaking-news/

Global heating is accelerating, warns scientist who sounded climate alarm in the 80s. Study delivers dire warning although rate of increase is debated by some scientists amid a record-breaking year of heat. Guardian Oliver Milman 2 Nov-2023  Global heating is accelerating faster than is currently understood and will result in a key temperature threshold being breached as soon as this decade, according to research led by James Hansen, the US scientist who first alerted the world to the greenhouse effect.The Earth’s climate is more sensitive to human-caused changes than scientists have realized until now, meaning that a “dangerous” burst of heating will be unleashed that will push the world to be 1.5C hotter than it was, on average, in pre-industrial times within the 2020s and 2C hotter by 2050, the paper published on Thursday predicts. This alarming speed-up of global heating, which would mean the world breaches the internationally agreed 1.5C threshold set out in the Paris climate agreement far sooner than expected, risks a world “less tolerable to humanity, with greater climate extremes”, according to the study led by Hansen, the former Nasa scientist who issued a foundational warning about climate change to the US Congress back in the 1980s.                                                                                                                                                                    Hansen said there was a huge amount of global heating “in the pipeline” because of the continued burning of fossil fuels and Earth being “very sensitive” to the impacts of this – far more sensitive than the best estimates laid out by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “We would be damned fools and bad scientists if we didn’t expect an acceleration of global warming,” Hansen said. “We are beginning to suffer the effect of our Faustian bargain. That is why the rate of global warming is accelerating.” The question of whether the rate of global heating is accelerating has been keenly debated among scientists this year amid months of record-breaking temperatures. Hansen points to an imbalance between the energy coming in from the sun versus outgoing energy from the Earth that has “notably increased”, almost doubling over the past decade. This ramp-up, he cautioned, could result in disastrous sea level rise for the world’s coastal cities. The new research, comprising peer-reviewed work of Hansen and more than a dozen other scientists, argues that this imbalance, the Earth’s greater climate sensitivity and a reduction in pollution from shipping, which has cut the amount of airborne sulphur particles that reflect incoming sunlight, are causing an escalation in global heating.....and there's more read on.....      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/02/heating-faster-climate-change-greenhouse-james-hansen