The New York Times describes (with great visuals) how we may be pushing our climate to tipping points, where the climate then continues to change in ways outside of our control. “Once we warm the planet beyond certain levels, this balance might be lost, scientists say. The effects would be sweeping and hard to reverse. Not like the turning of a dial, but the flipping of a switch. One that wouldn’t be easily flipped back.” I reviewed this concept in Code Red: Time to Tip the Climate Odds in Our Favor. These tipping points include a loss of coral reefs, the collapse of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, an accelerated melting of permafrost, changes in the great monsoons and major ocean currents and the loss of the Amazon rainforest.

Another tipping point is carbon emissions from wildfires, which then generates more aridity that drives more fires. The New York Times reports that it has been estimated the Canadian wildfires in 2023 released more carbon than any other nation on Earth besides China, the U.S. and India. Forests currently absorb about 25% of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere, but larger and more frequent fires raise the question of how much carbon forests will absorb in the future. This is causing some to wonder if projections of future warming need to be adjusted. “Researchers are now measuring how the fires affected the forest’s ability to store carbon in an effort to improve the global models that forecast how climate change will affect the planet.”

While most people now understand that greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning are warming the planet, many do not realize that burning fossil fuels generates a cooling effect as well. The particulates created during combustion can reflect sunlight and cool the Earth (including by stimulating cloud formation). They also can get into our lungs and cause disease, and so — across the globe — countries have taken steps to reduce these emissions. This has lessened the cooling effect, and is likely responsible for an acceleration of warming in the last decade. The Washington Post reports that, “since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.” Particulates in the atmosphere are reducing global warming by 0.2 – 1°C but, as they are eliminated, will introduce warming on top of the effects of greenhouse gases .

The New York Times reports that ice loss from the massive Juneau Ice Field, which sprawls across the Coast Mountains of Alaska and British Columbia, accelerated between 2010 and 2020 when compared to previous decades. Scientists studying the ice field found that “every one of the ice field’s glaciers receded between 1770 and 2019, and more than 100 glaciers disappeared entirely.” Inside Climate News notes that tropical glaciers in the Andes are at their smallest extent in 12,000 years. The drastic reduction we are now measuring in the world’s ice is a predicted outcome of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The Atlantic reports that some professional glaciologists are now investigating ways to preserve glacial ice and slow ice-sheet contributions to sea level rise. One idea, based on observations of an Antarctic glacier that stopped flowing into the ocean, is to pump water from under the glacier to reduce the lubrication and allow the area to refreeze. (This idea will be tested this summer on the Juneau Ice Field.) However, the logistical challenges of conducting this type of project at scale in Antarctica likely make it impractical.

The New York Times notes: “Warm seas and warm air help make for stronger storms,” which is a key reason climate change is increasing the threat of storm damage and flooding. David Wallace-Wells examines the implications of a warmer ocean beyond storm strength, pointing out that we really don’t know what will happen as the oceans warm. What we do know is that the oceans are warming faster than was projected a few decades ago.

Hurricane Debby brought torrential rains to many parts of the United States. The New York Times states that the storm “exploded from a whisper of a tropical disturbance into a soaking, slow-moving hurricane in a matter of days. The result has been neighborhoods underwater in Sarasota, Fla., tornadoes in North Carolina and extensive floods in areas from the Florida Panhandle to central Virginia.” The article notes that hurricanes are just one of many climate stressors that affect the southeastern part of the U.S. Over the last century, the region has seen a 40% increase in precipitation during the fall. The impacts of the storms and other climate stressors are made more significant by urban sprawl and population growth in the region. Despite these growing threats, in Florida, “Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a law that prohibited the construction of offshore wind turbines in state waters and would repeal state grant programs that encourage energy conservation and renewable energy.”

The Guardian reports that wind and solar have “overtaken fossil fuels to generate 30% of the European Union’s electricity in the first half” of 2024. Strong winds in northern Europe for the first half of the year helped reach this milestone. Analysts noted that renewable-electricity production will still have to double to meet 2030 goals for cuts in carbon emissions by the power sector.

One of the basic principles of ecology is that, in essence, Earth contains a fixed amount of elements such as carbon and nitrogen. These chemicals cycle through different parts of the biosphere. Carbon, for example, can be found in the ocean, the atmosphere, living creatures, fossil deposits (such as coal and oil) and the soil. In this context, our climate problem is that we have perturbed the cycle, taking large amounts of fossil carbon and injecting it into the atmosphere. This has overwhelmed the components of the cycle that pull carbon out of the air, and so carbon gases are building up in the atmosphere and changing the climate.

As I noted in the last In Brief, “global modeling scenarios that keep the Earth’s future temperature at 1.5°C or 2°C above the pre-industrial baseline have to include a major carbon-removal effort in the second half of this century.” Accelerating the legs of the cycle that move carbon from the air into terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems is thus an area of intense research and development. One well-known effort in this regard is tree planting. The New York Times examines another, which is enhancing the uptake and storage of carbon by soils, in this case by stimulating the growth of fungi. “The carbon removal potential of soils is huge. Soils hold three times as much carbon as the atmosphere and they can potentially absorb more than 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, or one-seventh of all the carbon dioxide that human activity injects into the atmosphere.” As with all such efforts, how exactly to achieve these goals in practice is not yet clear. Soil carbon takes many chemical forms, only some of which can be considered “stored” for the long-term, and the exact farming practices to make this happen need to be developed and adopted by farmers.

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