Climate News

Biden’s Legacy on the Line 

The prospect of future climate legislation by the U.S. Congress is not looking good as President Trump takes office. Trump, who has appointed a cabinet that is not particularly climate friendly, has called climate change “a hoax” and has made it known that the answer to the country’s energy woes rest with continued drilling to extract more oil and gas while erasing environmental rules within the confines of the 50 states. Scientists firmly believe such a platform would only exacerbate global warming. 

In a presidential race that was hotly contested until its final hours,  polls showed that climate change took a back seat to issues such as immigration and the cost of living. The environmental issue apparently still sits at the back of people’s minds as the controversy that surrounds its legitimacy is mired in questions and doubts from both sides of the aisle.

Such a drastic change in direction would no doubt leave President Biden’s signature climate law - the Inflation Reduction Act - the nation’s largest single investment in reducing climate-warming pollution - on newly uncertain ground, let alone tampering with President Biden’s main thrust for a lasting legacy on the issue. While in office, Biden applied a “whole government approach” to climate change, directing each of his cabinet secretaries to prioritize the issue.

Decline of Cloud Cover Could Account for Surge in Temps

The Earth has often been described by astronauts as a glistening marble floating in a black void. But some scientists believe the Earth has lost some of its luster in recent decades, particularly with the well-documented decline of ice and snow in its polar and mountain regions. Newly published research shows the planet is also dulling from a steady decline of low-elevation clouds over certain ocean regions. 

“A duller planet absorbs more incoming solar radiation,” warned Helge Gossling, a climate researcher at the Alfred Wegener Center and lead author of The Science Paper, which linked the overall decline of the planet’s reflectivity in 2023 with a simultaneous surge of the global average temperature.

“The findings suggest that the sharp drop of low-elevation cloud cover over some ocean regions could account for most of the sudden spike of global temperatures in 2023,” stated Mr. Wegener. 

In 2023, the Earth’s fever jumped an alarming 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit above the previous record temperature set in 2016.

Scientist in 1896 Predicted Global Warming    

In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius published two articles (one in the Supplement to the Proceedings of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the other in the Philosophical Magazine) which presented the first model of the influence that predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels could substantially alter the surface temperature on Earth through the Greenhouse Effect. 

In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming.

2024 to be the Hottest

The data from the European Union’s (EU’s) Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) states that 2024 will be the hottest since records began, and the first in which average global temperatures exceed 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period. The extraordinarily high temperatures are expected to persist into at least the first few months of 2025. 

The shocking C3S numbers come out just weeks after the United Nations (U.N.) climate talks yielded a $300 billion deal to tackle climate change, a package poorer countries blasted as insufficient to cover the soaring cost of climate-related disasters.

Extreme weather has swept around the world in 2024, with severe drought hitting Italy and South America along with the northeast U.S. Fatal flooding occurred in Nepal, Sudan and Europe. Heatwaves lasting for months in Mexico, Mali and Saudi Arabia that killed thousands. Disastrous hurricanes and cyclones in the U.S. and the Philippines cost billions. Scientific studies have confirmed the fingerprints of human-caused climate change on all of these disasters.