By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey Claire Brown  and  Mira Rojanasakul , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking “ heat dome .” Alaska saw its  first-ever heat advisory  this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the  hottest calendar year  in recorded history. The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now  increasing by 0.27 degrees  Celsius per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, and has been growing since. ...For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of  warming in the atmosphere would speed up . But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people’s daily lives. “Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, ...

By Austyn Gaffney , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Earth is missing a lot of sea ice this year. Enough to cover the entire United States east of the Mississippi. That was announced by researchers at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center on Thursday, who said the amount of sea ice on the planet had reached the  lowest level ever recorded in March . The record comes days after the World Meteorological Organization reported that  the past 10 years have been the 10 hottest on record , with 2024 the hottest year. The global rise in temperatures is tied to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/climate/global-sea-ice-record-low.html . 

By Climate Central.  Excerpt: Climate Central analyzed 55 years of temperature data and found that meteorological spring (March - May) has warmed across the U.S. from 1970 to 2024.  The spring season has warmed in 234 (97%) of the 241 U.S. cities analyzed — by 2.4°F on average.  Unusually warm spring days now happen more often. Four out of every five cities now experience at least one more week of warmer-than-normal spring days than in the 1970s.  Spring has warmed the most across the southern tier of the country, particularly in the Southwest. Spring warming can prolong seasonal allergies, worsen wildfire risk, and limit snow-fed water supplies....  Full article at https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/2025-spring-package .

By Thomas R. Chudley et al, Nature Geoscience.  Summary: The Greenland Ice Sheet, which measures more than 3 kilometers at its thickest point and covers an area three times the size of Texas, is the world’s second largest body of ice. If all of it were to melt, the world’s oceans would rise a whopping seven meters. And while such a complete meltdown would likely take thousands of years, Greenland—already one of the largest contributors to sea level rise—is poised to add up to 30 centimeters by 2100. Now, new research published in  Nature Geoscience  has revealed that  this enormous mass of ice is breaking apart faster than expected ....  Full article at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01636-6 . 

By Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: More than 3 billion people experienced their hottest year ever in 2024 because of anthropogenic climate change. The world is speeding toward its 1.5°C warming target. ...“Even if we likely exceeded [1.5°C] this year, that doesn’t mean that we’ve exceeded it in the context of the Paris accord, which is over a longer time period,” Schmidt said. “But I will say that we anticipate future global warming as long as we are emitting greenhouse gases, and until we get to net zero, we will not get a leveling off of global mean temperature.”....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/exceptional-global-warming-spike-continued-in-2024 . 

By Laura Paddison , CNN.  Excerpt: It’s official: 2024 was the hottest year on record, breaking the  previous record  set in 2023 and pushing the world over a critical climate threshold, according to new data from Europe’s climate monitoring agency Copernicus [ https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2024-first-year-exceed-15degc-above-pre-industrial-level ]. Last year was 1.6 degrees hotter than the period before humans began burning large amounts of fossil fuels, Copernicus found. It makes 2024 the first calendar year to breach  the 1.5-degree limit  countries agreed to avoid under the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Scientists are much more concerned about breaches over decades, rather than single years — as above that threshold humans and ecosystems may struggle to adapt — but 2024’s   record   “does mean we’re getting dangerously close,” said Joeri Rogelj, a climate professor at Imperial College London....  Full article at https://www.cnn.c...

By Roberto González , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Rapid intensification of hurricanes is 50% more likely to occur during marine heat waves in the Gulf of Mexico and northwestern Caribbean Sea ...according to a  study  published in August in  Communications Earth and Environment . These types of hurricanes are more dangerous as they make landfall because their intensity is harder to predict....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/marine-heat-waves-make-tropical-storm-intensification-more-likely .  See also other Eos articles on heat waves - https://eos.org/tag/heat-waves . 

By Carolyn Gramling , Science News.  Excerpt: One of the widest hurricanes on record slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast on September 26 as a powerful Category 4 storm, inundating Florida’s coast with meters-high storm surge and sending tropical storm–force winds as far as 500 kilometers from its eye. ...Just three days earlier, it was a disorganized cluster of thunderstorms off the eastern coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. A mere “tropical disturbance,” it was dubbed PTC9 for tracking purposes. ...Within just 60 hours...PTC9 would intensify...from winds less than 35 knots (about 65 kilometers per hour) to hurricane-force winds of at least 100 knots (185 kilometers per hour). It was the fastest predicted spin-up from disturbance to major hurricane in the NHC’s history. ...Rapid intensification is becoming a new normal for hurricanes. NHC  defines rapid intensification  as when a storm’s maximum sustained winds jump by at least 56 kph (35 miles per hour) in less than a da...

By Graham Readfearn , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Australia’s winter runs from June to August, but swathes of the country have felt like summer the past week with temperatures topping 40C and records tumbling....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/31/australia-heatwave-weather-sydney-melbourne-august-heat-record-temperatures . 

By Ronda Kaysen  and  Aatish Bhatia , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Each year, heat  kills far more Americans  than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or the cold. When it’s hot, our hearts work hard to cool us, redirecting blood to the surface of our skin. But when  nights  are hot, our hearts don’t get a break, working on overdrive and depriving other organs of blood. In July, Las Vegas recorded its hottest ever temperature at 120 degrees. Even more alarming: For three straight nights, the mercury never dipped below 94 degrees. “Everybody looks at the high temperatures, but the overnight lows kind of sneak up on you,” said Matt Woods, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Las Vegas. This June and July, nights in Las Vegas stayed above 79 degrees for all but seven days. ...hot nights are something more people are experiencing: No American major metro area has grown as much as Las Vegas has over the last three decades. ...That growth has trans...

By WENXIA ZHANG et al, Science.  Summary: As climate change continues, warming of the atmosphere allows it to hold more water and thus produce more precipitation. A corollary to more rain is the amplification of precipitation variability, a behavior easier to predict than to observe. Zhang  et al . used global records of daily precipitation to show that this expected increase in precipitation variability is in fact detectable in the data over the past century. This trend, which is most prominent over Europe, Australia, and eastern North America, will make adaptation more difficult for societies and ecosystems. —Jesse Smith.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp0212 . 

By Copernicus Climate Change Service.  Excerpt: The Earth has just experienced its warmest day in recent history, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) data. On 22 July 2024, the daily global average temperature reached a new record high in the ERA5 dataset*, at 17.16°C. This exceeds the previous records of 17.09°C, set just one day before on 21 July 2024, and 17.08°C, set a year earlier on 6 July 2023. ...  Full article at https://climate.copernicus.eu/new-record-daily-global-average-temperature-reached-july-2024 . 

By PAUL VOOSEN , Science.  Excerpt: When it comes to understanding the medieval climate of Europe, scientists face a daunting issue: Europeans loved to chop down their oldest and biggest trees. ...[making] it difficult for researchers to obtain records of tree rings, a standard paleoclimate tool, leaving gaps where most Europeans actually lived. ...climate scientists are now turning to a far more abundant historical resource: wine. Records of grape harvests found in the cellars and monasteries of Europe stretch back to the 1400s and can provide a powerful resource for teasing out past temperatures. “Compared with the average tree ring, it’s really excellent,” says Stefan Brönnimann, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Bern. ...Several years ago, Brönnimann and co-authors  showed  that the date of grape harvests was an excellent indicator of past temperature in the growing season. Now, in a new study  published last month  in Climate of the Past, t...

By Jan Esper ,  Max Torbenson  &  Ulf Büntgen , Nature.  Abstract: Including an exceptionally warm Northern Hemisphere (NH) summer, 2023 has been reported as the hottest year on record. Contextualizing recent anthropogenic warming against past natural variability is nontrivial, however, because the sparse 19 th  century meteorological records tend to be too warm. Here, we combine observed and reconstructed June-August (JJA) surface air temperatures to show that 2023 was the warmest NH extra-tropical summer over the past 2000 years exceeding the 95% confidence range of natural climate variability by more than half a degree Celsius. ...Although 2023 is consistent with a greenhouse gases-induced warming trend that is amplified by an unfolding El Niño event, this extreme emphasizes the urgency to implement international agreements for carbon emission reduction.  Full article at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07512-y . 

By WARREN CORNWALL , Science.  Excerpt: Starting in late 2013, the first in a handful of  record-shattering heat waves  struck the north Pacific Ocean near Alaska. Temperatures in these warm “blobs,” which have occurred four times in the past decade, sometimes reach more than 2°C above normal. ...Research has implicated climate change, which can supercharge natural fluctuations in ocean heat. But now, scientists are pointing to another surprising contributor: China’s success in stemming air pollution. A steep decline in aerosols—tiny airborne particles such as sulfates—emitted by Chinese factories and power plants in the 2010s appears to have amplified a string of extreme heat waves on the other side of the Pacific,  driving up to 30% of the temperature increase during these heat waves , scientists report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...Aerosols can act like tiny mirrors, reflecting sunlight back into space and reducing the ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/climate/ocean-heat-records.html By Delger Erdenesanaa , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The ocean has now broken temperature records every day for more than a year. And so far, 2024 has continued 2023’s trend of beating previous records by wide margins.... 

https://eos.org/articles/oceans-may-have-already-seen-1-7c-of-warming By Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Sponges from the Caribbean retain a record of ocean temperatures stretching back hundreds of years. These newly revealed paleoclimate records suggest that sea surface temperatures (SSTs) began rising in response to industrial era fossil fuel burning around 1860. That’s 80 years earlier than SST measurements became common and predates the global warming start date used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On the basis of these new sponge records, scientists think that temperatures are currently 1.7°C warmer than preindustrial levels. The study’s researchers argue that the world has already surpassed the goal of the 2015  Paris Agreement  to limit atmospheric warming to less than 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures and that we could reach 2°C of warming before 2030. ...These results were  published  in  Nature Climate Cha...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/climate/california-floods-chile-wildfires-global-warming.html By Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Two far-flung corners of the world, known for their temperate climates, are being buffeted by deadly disasters. Wildfires have killed more than 120 people as they swept the forested hillsides of Chile, and record-breaking rains have swelled rivers and triggered mudslides in Southern California. Behind these risks are two powerful forces: Climate change, which can intensify both rain and drought, and the natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño, which can also supersize extreme weather. In California, ...rains began over the weekend and several counties were under a state of emergency. By Monday, officials warned that the Los Angeles area could be deluged by the equivalent of a year’s rainfall in a single day. In the southern hemisphere, Chile has been reeling from drought for the better part of a decade. That set the stage for a hell...

https://www.science.org/content/article/world-1-3%C2%B0c-or-1-5%C2%B0c-warmer-historical-ship-logs-hold-answers By PAUL VOOSEN , Science.  Excerpt: Last month’s announcement that 2023 was the  hottest year in history  was no surprise. But it came with one: No one knows exactly how much the world has warmed. One group of climate scientists found the planet has warmed 1.34°C over the 1850–1900 average, whereas  another found temperatures  had risen 1.54°C. ...the current disagreement is not over present temperatures, but rather the past. The warmth of the ocean in the late 19th century is a key part of the baseline against which the warming of the planet is measured—and figures are at odds. ...No estimate of global temperature is possible without including the oceans, which cover 70% of the planet’s surface. ...But ocean temperature records in the 19th century were few and far between. A global record  began in the 1850s  thanks to a controvers...

https://eos.org/articles/scientists-astonished-at-2023-temperature-record By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: NASA’s and NOAA’s  analyses , as well as  a report  from climate research nonprofit Berkeley Earth, all released Friday, concur that 2023 was a scorcher. NASA and NOAA scientists found that average temperatures were 0.15°C–0.16°C (0.27°F–0.29°F) warmer than temperatures in 2016, the previous hottest year ever recorded. That’s a huge jump, because most records are set on the order of hundredths of degrees Celsius, said  Russell Vose , a climate scientist at NOAA and an author on the agency’s analysis, at a press conference. ...“We’re still continuing to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” Schmidt said. “As long as we continue to do that, temperatures will rise.”....