2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #30

Posted on 28 July 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 21, 2024 thru Sat, July 27, 2024.

Story of the week

In a week crammed with news of the Paris Olympics and another passing of an entirely different torch in Washington, D.C., USA— on top of the usual high noise level— came an inflection point, and our Story of the Week.

Earlier this month the Copernicus Climate Change Service alerted the world that as of June we’d seen 12 contiguous months of Earth surface temperature exceeding 1.5 °C over the pre-industrial reference period. Only a month later (this past week) came more news of temperature excursions. On July 21st the average temperature of the entire globe exceeded any previous measurement reaching back to 1940.  This new record did not stand long; the very next day brought a new high. 

This comes on top of global ocean temperature continuing to run at record highs, with the ocean’s heat capacity dwarfing that of the atmosphere.

This toasty situation is as entirely expected as it is thoroughly undesirable. Thanks to our accidental (at first) tampering with our atmosphere we’re now accumulating a lot excess energy that otherwise would find an easier path back into the cold dark of space. With the atmosphere now effectively acting as a more efficient insulator, the Earth needs to heat up in order to radiate that energy back into space. It would be best if we slowed down our rate of warming, because heating up enough to dump excess energy accumulated thanks to our accident means the planet needs to become too warm too fast.

Given Skeptical Science’s mission, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that getting this situation under control will be easier to accomplish without interested parties concertedly engaging in deceit so as to prolong their outmoded and increasingly lethal business plans.

As a technical matter it shouldn’t be necessary to suffer through an object lesson of planetary scale but here we are, living exactly that tutelage. Decades of deception leading to prevarication and procrastination find us living in an undesirable future we could easily see long ago. Our climate is changing in accordance with projections we’ve had to hand for many years, with upward wiggles trumping downward bumps. It’s obviously high time to retire doubt and dismissal of our influence on Earth’s climate.

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before July 21

• Kentucky lawmakers hear climate-science skepticism from attorney general’s office, Kentucky Lantern, Liam Niemeyer.
• How J.D. Vance Went From Green Tech Investor to Climate Change Doubter, The Heat 2024, Capital & Main, Marcus Baram. “Trump’s VP pick flip-flopped on global warming as he rose in GOP politics, earning a zero score on climate from a leading environmental group.”
• Earth’s Disastrous 10th Tipping Point Has Been Identified, Science Popular Mechanics, Darren Orf. “New potential climate crisis just dropped.”
• Beyond Tomorrow: Earth’s distant climate future, ClimateAdam on Youtube, Adam Levy.
• 123 House and Senate Republicans deny climate science: Analysis, Energy & Environment, The Hill, Rachel Frazin.
• Louisiana’s ‘business-friendly’ climate response: canceled home insurance plansLouisiana’s ‘business-friendly’ climate response: canceled home insurance plans, Floodlight, Terry L Jones. “Under a new state law, residents will no longer be protected from homeowners’ policy cancellations, higher deductibles or big rate increases.”
• ‘It affects everything’: why is Hollywood so scared to tackle the climate crisis?, The Guardian, David Smith. “Twisters is the latest in a long line of movies that fail to address the environmental emergency – experts say it’s a missed opportunity”
• What to Know about Project 2025’s Dangers to Science, Politics, Scientific American, Ben Guarino, Andrea Thompson, Tanya Lewis & Lauren J. Young.