latest National Climate Assessment reiterates the dangers of climate change, 2023 will be a record year for U.S. fossil-fuel extraction, global warming may be accelerating in this decade, electric school buses can stabilize the U.S. grid, California is drought free (for now)

The newest National Climate Assessment (NCA), a congressionally-mandated analysis of climate change produced every five years by the U.S. government, was released in mid-November. To nobody’s surprise, the Guardian reports that the NCA highlights “increasingly harmful impacts” striking the U.S. from Florida to Alaska. The Director of the NCA notes that “escalating dangers from wildfires, severe heat, flooding and other impacts mean that the US suffers a disaster costing at least $1bn in damages every three weeks now, on average, compared to once every four months in the 1980s.” The report documents impacts to human health, the economy and natural and agricultural ecosystems, noting that the costs of major emission reductions are dwarfed by the benefits.

The New York Times reports that the NCA, for the first time ever, contains a chapter on the economic impacts of climate change. This section notes that economic growth will be reduced because of climate change, but this is only part of the economic damage. Impacts on “non-market” goods — including human health, ecosystems, historic trades such as fishing and air quality (from wildfire smoke) — are real but hard to quantify. The lead author of this chapter noted that these “non-market effects of climate change in many cases are some of the largest.” Axios quotes the NCA: “Estimates of nationwide impacts indicate a net loss in the economic well-being of American society.”

Meanwhile, according to Grist, a new U.N. report concludes that 20 major fossil-fuel producing countries “plan to extract more than twice the amount of coal, oil, and gas by 2030 than what is needed to limit warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius, and around 70 percent more than would limit warming to 2 degrees C.” The report notes that, despite the current and growing danger of climate change caused by carbon pollution, humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an alarming rate. The New York Times points out that, “If current projections hold, the United States will drill for more oil and gas in 2030 than at any point in its history.” The Guardian reports that, in 2023, the U.S. is already on track to extract a record amount of oil and gas…

Antarctica’s threatened ice shelves, Phoenix heat deaths in 2023 set record, Biden Administration announces $3.5 billion of electrical grid upgrade, “bomb cyclone” hits western Europe, understanding barriers to expanding solar power

The Washington Post reports on a new study that concludes, “waters around some of West Antarctica’s glaciers are forecast to warm at a pace three times faster than they have in the past.” This increase is expected to occur regardless of how quickly we reduce carbon emissions, and it will destabilize the ice shelves that hold back the continent’s glaciers (the Post also notes that “more than 40 percent of Antarctica’s ice shelves have dwindled in the past 25 years,” and that every ice shelf in western Antarctica is shrinking). As the ice sheets disintegrate, the land-based ice will flow faster into the sea, which will accelerate sea level rise. Salon quotes from the study: “these results suggest that mitigation of greenhouse gases now has limited power to prevent ocean warming that could lead to the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet." The New York Times reports that, since 1978, ice shelves in Greenland have lost more than 35% of their volume. In addition, Greenland’s mountain glaciers (separate from the island’s ice sheet), have “retreated twice as fast between 2000 and 2021 as they did before the turn of the century.”

The Biden Administration has announced another major initiative that is aimed at halving the nation’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. Grist describes the “Affordable Home Energy Earth Shot,” which would cut the cost of decarbonizing homes by half and lower Americans’ utility bills by 20%. This is to be achieved by reducing the cost of retrofitting homes, with a focus on households that earn less than 80% of their area’s median income. Other “Earth shots” the Administration has undertaken to drive down costs are for hydrogen fuel, floating offshore-wind technology, geothermal energy and technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These efforts are modeled on the 2011 “SunShot Initiative,” which had the goal of reducing the cost of utility-scale solar to $1 per watt within a decade (prices hit that mark three years early in 2017). Meanwhile, The New York Times notes that the Republicans elected climate-science denier Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House.

Salon describes a very sobering study indicating that, if global temperatures increase by 1°C from present levels, billions of people will face heat so intense that their bodies will not be able to naturally cool themselves. At 2°C above pre-industrial levels, 4 billion people will encounter intolerable heat and humidity annually. Areas of particular concern include Pakistan, India, eastern China and sub-Saharan Africa. The impacts are summarized by Dr. Peter Reiners of the University of Arizona: “There is no universe in which this development will not lead to millions of deaths.” Wet-bulb temperatures of 95°F (35°C) are a fundamental physiological limit for human bodies. While air conditioning may save some people, increased demand leading to outages on already-strained power grids makes depending on air conditioning a risk. The only answer to this predicament is to drastically reduce fossil-fuel burning as quickly as possible…