Living through the onset of rapid global warming involves learning to roll with the punches. Increasingly, those are quite real and painful—this year saw, again, an accelerating toll of flood and drought. But, even for climate scientists sequestered in the lab, life increasingly seems like a series of bewildering blows. .New YorkerBill McKibben12-13-2024As 2024 began, we’d just finished the most remarkable year in the planet’s modern climate history—2023 had shattered every global record for temperature, with researchers firm in the conviction that our planet had seen its hottest average temperatures in at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. But, even as they watched the mercury soar, they weren’t completely sure why: temperatures seemed to be rising even before an El Niño warming in the Pacific fully kicked in. In a remarkably candid essay this March in Nature, NASA’s chief climatologist, Gavin Schmidt, said, “The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system.” If temperatures hadn’t settled back to something more like a consistent rise by late summer 2024, he noted, that would imply “that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.” In the event, this August was the warmest August on record, and most of the other months of 2024 also broke records; it now seems certain that, when meteorological officials announce their results early in January, this will again have been the hottest year ever measured. Scientists still can’t explain what’s causing the spike, which sits atop the steady ramp in temperature over the past few decades. As Schmidt said in an October interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, “it’s still pretty much, I would say, amateur hour in terms of assessing” what’s going on. The proffered explanations—the eruption of a submarine volcano in the South Pacific that put a lot of heat-trapping water vapor into the air, the phase-out of high-sulfur fuels in oceangoing ships that reduced heat-reflecting pollution—don’t seem large enough to account for what the thermometers are measuring; it’s possible that we may have tripped some switches we don’t understand in the global climate system. What we do understand is bad enough. In September, Hurricane Helene swept across the Gulf of Mexico, turning from a tropical storm into a Category 4 hurricane in barely more than a day—the kind of “rapid intensification” that researchers increasingly see as a hallmark of a warming ocean. It moved so fast that it carried the freight of rain that it picked up over the record-hot waters of the Gulf far inland; in the mountains just north of Asheville, radar estimates suggested rainfall totals of up to forty inches. That water inundated the cricks and hollows of southern Appalachia—the death toll from the storm sits at two hundred and forty-one (making it the deadliest to hit the U.S. since Maria devastated Puerto Rico, in 2017), and the economic damage is nearing a hundred billion dollars, making it one of the costliest storms since Katrina. But the pictures from a ravaged North Carolina looked an awful lot like pictures from devastated parts of southern Europe or northern Africa or Brazil or Southeast Asia—if you look on YouTube, you can find a near-daily flood of flood pictures, with floating cars careening down the streets of mountain towns. There seems to be just one way left to even start to slow down that torrent, and that’s to rapidly replace coal, gas, and oil with sun, wind, and batteries—and if you’re trying to avoid existential despair, there are stories and numbers this year worth focussing on. Solar power expanded so rapidly in 2023 (eighty-six per cent up on 2022 worldwide) that some wondered whether the charge could continue this year; it did, with the best guess being we will see a further growth of nearly thirty per cent this year. We’ve clearly moved into the steep part of the S-curve of clean-energy expansion, where even the most optimistic forecasts are consistently surpassed, and at the moment we appear to be installing a gigawatt’s worth of photovoltaic panels (roughly the size of a nuclear power plant) every eighteen hours or so. In California, which has been working on this transition more vigorously than most states, the combination of solar arrays and batteries reached some kind of tipping point this year: beginning in March, for up to ten hours a day over more than four months, the Golden State produced more than a hundred per cent of its electricity from renewable energy; when night fell, enormous new batteries, which had soaked up excess power all afternoon, often became the largest source of power supply on the state’s grid. Despite all the (warranted) concern about new data centers and artificial intelligence soaking up power, Stanford’s Mark Jacobson said a few weeks ago that his home state would use twenty-five per cent less natural gas to generate power this year than last. That’s a big number, big enough that if it were replicated in a lot of places, it would make a dent in the estimates of future warming.

Globally, so far, we haven’t quite hit the peak of fossil-fuel combustion—the latest data from early November predict that the world will burn a little less than one per cent more than last year. But California isn’t the only place demonstrating that another world is possible. Early this year, analysts started noticing something unusual in Pakistan: demand for electricity from the national grid was dropping sharply. Some sleuthing—including looking down from the sky via Google Earth—revealed the cause. Local businesspeople and farmers, annoyed by an expensive and unreliable electricity supply and lured by cheap Chinese solar panels, were covering the roofs of homes, factories, and stores with photovoltaic arrays. By the middle of the year, as the energy analysts Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren wrote, this silent solar revolution had seen Pakistanis erect the equivalent of thirty per cent of the national grid in six months. Farmers who depend on tube wells, which pull water from aquifers for irrigation and are often diesel-powered, were putting up panels, too; diesel sales in the country dropped thirty per cent. And something of the same magnitude, again driven by the incredibly inexpensive Chinese panels, seemed to be happening across much of southern Africa. In sunny Germany, meanwhile, where solar panels are now cheaper than wood fencing, at least half a million apartment dwellers hung them from their balconies......read on      https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2024-in-review/hotter-and-hotter?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_Paid_121324&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tny_daily_digest&bxid=5e2bb2c62a077c05ea0a9723&cndid=59734366&hasha=284acdf0ea1b080a3966b6c47b8c38c0&hashb=a4ccd8de508e6a2ad52eb405268d00c48cb0e5a6&hashc=7a51910293749398eff22b8bf795b4f5ed4d3ebff046adf7c9ebf33811a9eca8&esrc=MARTECH_ORDERFORM&mbid=CRMNYR062419

GOOD-BAD NEWS Climate disasters risk pulling society apart. To survive we need solidarity – and only one ticket in the US election offers that! Our dystopian climate isn’t just about fires and floods. It’s about society fracturing.Guardian Bill McKibbon Wed 9 Oct 2024  Even as the good people of Florida’s west coast pulled the soggy mattresses from Helene out to the curb, Milton appeared on the horizon this week – a double blast of destruction from the Gulf of Mexico that’s a reminder that physics takes no time off, not even in the weeks before a crucial election. My sense is that those storms will help turn the voting on 5 November into a climate election of sorts, even if – as is likely – neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump spend much time in the next 25 days talking about CO2 or solar power. That’s because these storms show not only the power of global heating (Helene’s record rains, and Milton’s almost unprecedented intensification, were reminders of what it means to have extremely hot ocean temperatures). Moreover, they show what we’re going to need to survive the now inevitable train of such disasters. Which is solidarity. Which is something only one ticket offers. I confess that I’ve been all in to beat Trump for any number of reasons – Third Act, the group I founded to organize Americans over age 60 for action on climate and democracy, has been flooding the swing states with hundreds of thousands of postcards, and our silver wave door-knocking tour hits Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada in the days ahead But if there was one way to sum up what this election means to me, it would be: solidarity. In the 40 years since Ronald Reagan’s election, we’ve gone a long way down the path of hyper-individuality, everyone for themselves. Joe Biden has tried to wrench the wheel back towards the FDR America-as-group-project model with tools like the spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s a work in progress. The climate crisis, above all, requires the return of that solidarity. 

That’s because there’s no way to keep it from getting worse without joint public action: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us we have five years left to cut emissions in half, which means it will not be accomplished one Tesla at a time; it requires aggressive public action of the kind the current White House is coordinating, as it sets up battery factories and shepherds new transmission lines through various regulatory fences. But there’s also no way to survive it, even in its current form, without intense cooperation. To give one example: Florida’s insurance system is clearly breaking down, as one storm after another drives private insurers out of the state.As the Tampa newspaper put it in June: “As the crisis escalates, state leaders are desperately trying to convince insurance companies to stick around. States are offering them more flexibility to raise premiums or drop certain homes from coverage, fast-tracking rate revisions and making it harder for residents to sue their insurance company.” But as that seawall begins to fail, “a flood of new policyholders are joining state-backed insurance ‘plans of last resort’, leaving states to assume more of the risk on behalf of residents who can’t find coverage in the private sector.” Indeed, so many people are swamping the “state-backed insurance plans” they’re becoming overloaded with risk. Ten months ago, the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse and his budget committee colleagues wrote to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to ask for proof that Florida’s public Citizens Insurance could survive disasters like the one now bearing down on Tampa. DeSantis may have given his most eloquent response in May, when he signed a bill essentially outlawing the phrase “climate change” in Florida statutes. “I’m not a global warming person,” he explained.read on                 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/09/climate-crisis-hurricane-election