Ocean heat content reached a record high in the first quarter of this year:
The quarterly changes were mostly negative for the three quarters before this one, but this time increased by large amounts: 3.1 W/m2 for the 0-700 m region and 3.0 W/m2 for the 0-2000 m region.
Over four quarters the increases were 0.2 W/m2 and 07 W/m2, respectively.
Note 6/10 2:20 pm: Oops, this is the graph is for Mays. I've put the graph for all months down at the bottom. Sorry.
Here's a graph Berkeley Earth presented today:
That means the trend line will hit 1.5°C in about a decade. The 2023-2024 warming spike will then appear relatively cool from that perspective.
0.25°C/decade is a monstrous value. (Even 0.20°C/decade is.) It's hard to get one's head around it, it's such a rapid increase. It's changing the future incredibly fast. It's like the last ice age global maximum went to the Holocene in only 240 years, instead of the actual 12,000 years it actually took. Warming now is 50 times faster.
It's just worthless now to talk about limiting warming to 1.5°C. It will not happen, hard stop. At that point 2.0°C will be here by 2055-2060, looking also a done deal. It's tragic, and absolute failure of world leadership. The worst failure in human history.
Extremely discouraging.
==
Added, as noted at the beginning of the post: Average global temperatures for all months:
A 63-year-old coal-fired power plant was scheduled to permanently close its doors in Michigan on June 1. So was an oil- and gas-powered plant that was built in the 1960s in Pennsylvania.
But at the last minute, the Trump administration ordered both to stay open. The orders came as it pursues a far-reaching plan to boost fossil fuels, including coal, by declaring a national “energy emergency.”
The grid operators in Michigan and Pennsylvania said they hadn’t asked for the orders and hadn’t planned on using the plants this summer.
The costs to keep the plants open, which could total tens of millions of dollars, are expected to fall on consumers. Experts have said there’s little evidence of a national energy emergency, and 15 states have sued to challenge President Trump’s declaration, which was issued the day he took office.
Both Copernicus and Berkeley Earth reported today that May 2025 was the 2nd warmest May -- in BE's case, since 1850.
BE had a Monthly Press Briefing Zoom call this morning with more details:
Meteorological spring is March to May. (*In the Northern Hemisphere.)
The Hadley Central England Temperature (HadCET) just had the warmest meteorological spring in its 367-year history.
(OK, it's really only 303 years, because some of those early years had temperatures taken inside buildings, etc., not in a systematic fashion, but can you really blame them for trying?)
But still, 303 years. That's pretty impressive.
And this year's March-April-May average saw the warmest temperature anomaly in that little region, 2.26°C, which was the same as last year's value, exactly.
Baseline is 1901-2000.
Still, this year's year-to-date average only ranks 11th highest in all those years.
But things are cooking.
The 10-year moving average for HadCET is at a maximum, 0.52°C higher than 10 years (120 months) ago.
The 50-year linear trend is an impressive 0.31°C/decade.
But it's just a little region in England.
"To ensure I'm not spewing bollocks into the void I follow these golden rules:It's very engaging and has really open my eyes to world of anthropology (in a way a 6-9 pm college course never did) and the modern issues within it. One of the best channels I've found in awhile.
Use only academic sources for my videos Share those sources with the viewers Make it obvious when I'm just giving my personal opinion
No Atlantis, No Aliens, No Nonsense."
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."from the 2016 book The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen, which I'm reading now and gives a lot to think about.
E. B. White
Arctic Sea Ice is acting weird. Here's the volume as modeled by PIOMAS. {Really this is just an excuse for me to try datawrapper.de, because Excel charts have never looked good and by now look like something from the late 1900s.} But it is strange how the SIV has been basically flat for the last 15 years. (Arctic sea ice extent is just as unusual.)
I think this was from a Cliff Maas blog post or comment I read in 2017, but can't find it exactly. The screen capture looks like it's from a conference.
Anyway it's very wrong. Actually the decline, linearly regressed, is about 1/1.5, now 1/6.
Lesson?: beware of making climate predictions unless it's about mean global surface temperature, and even then ENSOs mess you up.
--
So why is there a "pause" in Arctic melting? This paper on ESS Open Archive (?) goes into it. It's not peer reviewed, which is unfortunate. Given that, here's the abstract:
So, internal variability, which is nearly impossible to explain to deniers.
"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."
Kurt Vonnegut
Atmospheric carbon dioxide has cracked the 430 ppm level at the Mauna Loa Observatory in on Hawaii.
In fact, atmospheric CO2 at MLO peaked this year at 431.13 ppm on 27-April-2025. Last year it peaked at 428.59 ppm on 26-April-2024. That's only a 2.45 ppm increase, maybe a touch below the recent average, maybe due to the relative ENSO states. 2024 as a year (not a season) was somewhat on the La Nina-side, with this year slightly towards the El Nino-side. (I think.)
The fascists have decided to stop keeping track of the costs of climate change. Free link to NY Times story.
If you don't keep track of it, it's like it doesn't exist. This is hard for me to wrap my head around at the moment.
“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives…But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
A really great book.
If you need an update on the latest sea surface temperatures, this is from Zack Labe on Bluesky:
In 2024, CO2 emissions from fuel combustion grew by around 1% or 357 Mt CO2, while emissions from industrial processes declined by 2.3% or 62 Mt CO2. Emissions growth was lower than global GDP growth (+3.2%), restoring the decades-long trend of decoupling emissions growth from economic growth, which had been disrupted in 2021.
Natural gas emissions rose by around 2.5% (180 Mt CO₂) in 2024, making it the largest contributor to global carbon emissions growth. This increase was driven by higher consumption in China, the United States, the Middle East, and India.
Global coal emissions rose by 0.9% (135 Mt CO₂) in 2024. The increase was primarily fuelled by growing coal consumption in China, India and Southeast Asia, while demand declined in advanced economies, particularly in the United States and the European Union.
Here's a graph from Skinner 2012 that I've never seen before and I'm surprised I've never seen it before--the climate sensitivity from many climate events, warming and cooling, in the distant past:
Lake Winnipesaukee is the largest lake in New Hampshire, US, at 185 km2 (71.4 mi2) (8.4 mi)2. I still find it interesting because for about 6 years I lived high above it and close in a cozy mother-in-law apartment, with a screened porch, and the Lake spread out before me like...well, like a big lake. At least a good part of it.
Consequently, I can still spell "Winnipesaukee."
From CoPilot:
The name "Winnipesaukee" is derived from the Algonquian language and translates to "The Smile of the Great Spirit" or "Beautiful Water in a High Place".
The Lake freezes over in the winter, and people go out ice-fishing, etc. There's an airport runway on the ice over in Alton on the east end of the Lake--"the only FAA-certified, plowed ice runway in the continental United States." It doesn't (viz. can't) open every year, but it did open this year. Global warming is affecting the Lake.
A popular metric in that region is the Lake's "ice-out" date.
Ice-Out is declared when the cruise ship MS Mount Washington can make it to every one of its ports: Center Harbor, Wolfeboro, Alton, Weirs Beach and Meredith. It is also considered the unofficial start to the boating season as well as the end of winter in New Hampshire.
These day a local pilot flies over the Lake multiple times a day this time of year to declare Ice-Out. I wrote about him for Yale Climate Connections several years ago.
There is also an "ice-in" date, but it's not as popular because it means the start of a long, cold, dark winter and nobody gets too hyped for that. (In truth winter there sets in long before ice-in, which usually is announced in January or early February.) But ice-out is a ritual of spring, and soon your cabin fever will break. About mid-May, if you can just hang on.
Anyway...and please pardon me if I've written about all this before somewhere on this blog...this year's Ice-out was declared this morning at 7:02 am. (Seems suspiciously exact, but anyway.) The time series of Ice-Out dates is carried by Wikipedia. I had to look up the time in the local news, and I only have times since 2020. For earlier years there is ice-out data, but no time, so I took it as noon.
Here's the time-series of ice-out dates on Winnipesaukee since 1887. The red line is the 30-year moving average.
BTW, there was a year without an ice-out date--2001, when I was living there--because there never was an ice-in--the Lake didn't freeze over that year. This was before smartphones so I don't have pictures of it. I did take a lousy picture with a digital camera, but can't find it now. Any more it's kind of like life started only when smartphones became ubiquitous.
Ice fisherman lost some trucks.
Addendum: Once up there I saw a section of the lake surface freeze over in real time--a rolling edge of freezing, maybe traveling over a half-mile. Maybe a mile. Took about 10-15 seconds. I wasn't sure if I really saw that or not--I thought I did, but it seemed impossible--so I contacted a few limnologists--scientists who study lakes--and more than one told me they'd heard of such a phenomenon, but had never seen it, and called me lucky or fortunate or some such word.
So, spring is coming even to New England. There's hope. Here in Oregon it's getting into the 70s. (Fahrenheit. About 20 degrees Celsius.)
Have a nice day.
Gizmodo: "Elon Musk Is Annoying, Unfunny, and Should Probably Take a Drug Test, Trump Officials Reportedly Say: A senior official describes the billionaire as an awkward and obnoxious asshole."
“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light. He was still lanky, with big hands, protruding ears, and angular joints, but in the perfect health and strength of eariy manhood he was very beautiful. His dun-colored hair, like the others', was fine and straight, worn at its full length and kept off the forehead with a band. Only one of them wore her hair differently, a girl with high cheekbones and a flat nose; she had cut her dark hair to a shiny cap all round. She was watching Shevek with a steady, serious gaze. Her lips were greasy from eating fried cakes, and there was a crumb on her chin.
“It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It's real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can't pretend that it doesn't exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we'll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we'll die. That's the condition we're born on. I'm afraid of life! There are times I — I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding — this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain . . . . If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could . . . get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self — ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality — the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness — that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.'"
“'The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,' said a tall, soft-eyed girl. 'Love is the true condition of human life.'
“Bedap shook his head. ‘No. Shev's right,’ he said. ‘Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will whether we want to or not.”
-- The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
On March 22, Arctic sea ice likely reached its maximum extent for the year, at 14.33 Mkm2..., the lowest in the 47-year satellite record. This year’s maximum extent is 1.31 Mkm2...below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum of 15.64 Mkm2...and 80,000 km2...below the previous lowest maximum that occurred on March 7, 2017.
This warmth is especially apparent in the oceans, where key indicators of climate change are now accelerating.
Roy Spencer continues to make some very sad, desperate arguments in the name of climate denial. Arguments are that beneath him as a professional scientist. Arguments that show why he has no respect at all in the climate science community.
In a recent post he wrote:
"The regulation of CO2 emissions (and some other chemicals) by the EPA has also mystified me. However many of the EPA’s ~185 lawyers worked on the 2009 Endangerment Finding, they must have known that regulating CO2 emissions from U.S. cars and light-duty trucks would have no measurable impact on global climate, including sea level rise (which was a major argument in Massachusetts v. EPA).Of course, by this argument no one should do ever do anything about CO2 emissions because, individually, all regulations are "too small" to solve the global problem.None."
"Their reason for existence is to regulate pollutants (and it doesn’t matter if Nature produces far more of a “pollutant” than people produce)."Another extremely, obviously vapid argument. Yes, Nature emits more CO2 than do humans. But Nature absorbs that amount of CO2 and even more, which is why only half (about) of anthropogenic emissions reside in the atmosphere.
Musk said he believed A.I. would be smarter than any individual human in the next year or two, and predicted that A.I. would be smarter than all humans combined by 2029 or 2030. He said he thought there was an 80 percent chance that A.I. would have a “good outcome,” and that there was a 20 percent chance of “annihilation.”
- Elon Musk, interview with Joe Rogan, covered by the New York Times March 3, 2025. (free link)
If no one is researching climate, climate change doesn't exist.
Notifications of mass firings of NOAA employees were sent out Thursday afternoon, to mostly "probationary employees," recent new hires. 800 firings out of 13,000 employees (6%). New York Times (free link):
As is the case at other agencies, the Trump administration appears to be firing probationary employees at NOAA not because their work is necessarily less valuable than that of other staff members, but because they’re easier to dismiss.
More cuts are coming. This isn't about cutting the federal budget deficit or debt as federal employee salaries and benefits are only 3% of the federal budget. It gets even more ridiculous:
The General Services Administration, which manages government facilities, has begun canceling some of the contracts for buildings that NOAA uses, according to a person familiar with the matter. The agency has frozen credit cards used to pay for travel and sharply restricted the amount of money employees are able to put on those cards for other purchases.
The cuts are purely political:
NOAA has been singled out for especially deep cuts by members of the Trump administration. Project 2025, the policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation that is reflected in many of the actions taken by the Trump administration so far, calls the agency “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” The document urges that NOAA be dismantled and some of its programs be terminated.
Every billion saved is another billion for billionaires.... I can't tell if Trump is trying to destroy America or if he thinks he's saving it (and for whom). He's not much of a thinker, but the people around him know what they're doing. Disgusting.
I haven't written anything about the fires in Los Angeles, particularly with respect to climate change, because, well, the causes and problems of the fires are highly complex and not due to any one thing. It's clear that the fires were not caused/exacerbated by (a) the mayor being abroad, (b) the state's desire to protect smelt, a fish, (c) water and reservoir shortages. The nearby reservoirs have ample water. What I've read says that there was a water shortage in places like Pacific Palisades because there was massive demand that ran the water system there dry. Not surprising when fighting a major wildfire in major suburbs. (d) it's not due to cuts in any fire department budgets, which were on the order of $20 million out of about $900 million. 2%. Fire departments don't live and die on such budget changes. They don't suddenly collapse because women have some very high positions in the department, or because of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs. The right-wing in this country, who can no longer be called "conservatives," now uses trolling as a significant political weapon, without regard for the truth, and it's really ruining the country. Trump is, needless to say, useless, calling the California governor juvenile names and expressing little-to-no interest in what's happening to people and their homes. And so on. A large group in this country is far more interested in assigning blame than in understanding and empathizing with those who lost their homes and possessions and everything. It's almost unbelievable the things "they" say.
The latest number of deaths I've seen is 24. The fires are still raging. Sometimes it looks like all of Los Angeles is going to burn down completely. As of this morning the Palisades fire was only 17% contained. Police are arresting drone pilots. It's now possible (!!!) to place bets on Polymarket on parameters of the fires--how many acres will the Palisades fire burn in total, when will the Palisades fire be contained, etc. There is something really sick about that. Only in America (I suppose. I hope.).
As for how climate change is affecting the fires, I trust this blog post by Andrew Dessler on The Climate Brink. The whole thing is worth reading. Here's part:
Climate change does not “cause” extreme events, but it can amplify them. In fact, it is certain that climate change affects every weather event by altering the baseline conditions in which they occur.The entire post is well worth reading.
Thus, the real scientific question is not whether climate change influenced the fire — of course it did. Rather, the real question is quantifying the impact: how much did climate change increase this specific event’s intensity or likelihood? We don’t know the answer yet, but I’m sure scientists are already working on it.
According to Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, supported by multiple data sets, the overall trend in Earth's temperature is actually decreasing — debunking a claim by CTV, posted to social media by federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault — that 2024 was the "hottest year ever."That's what this hypocrite denier has been reduced to: a deceiver by any means possible, a clown, a fool, a mummer. The worst of the worst.
"Here is the record of global temperatures going back 5 million years, as the Earth sank into the Pleistocene Ice Age which began 2.6 million years ago," said Moore in a statement.
"Note that it is still getting colder over the long term."
Paul Dirac's comment on Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry:
"The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."P.A.M Dirac developed an equation that made quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity (at least for spin ½ particles like the electron).
From Nature magazine. (Might be paywalled, I get free access so I'm not sure what permissions are set for me.)
"Earth shattered heat records in 2023 and 2024, with temperatures rising further than expected on the basis of previous trends and modelling. A mysterious reduction in cloud cover, combined with an El Niño weather pattern, could be responsible for temperature increases in 2023. However, scientists expected temperatures would decrease again in June 2024 when the El Niño subsided, which didn’t happen. Now they are racing to work out whether this sudden spike is just a blip in the climate data, or an early indicator that the planet is heating up at a faster pace than they thought.2025 will be interesting. But then all years are interesting now.
"...Some scientists argue that the spike can be mostly explained by two factors. One is the El Niño event that began in mid-2023 — a natural weather pattern in which warm water pools in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, often leading to hotter temperatures and more-turbulent weather. The other is a reduction over the past few years in air pollution, which can cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space and seeding low-lying clouds. Yet neither explanation fully accounts for the temperature surge, other researchers say.
"Clouds clearly played a part, according to a study published in Science in December, just before the AGU meeting1. A research team identified a reduction in low-lying cloud cover across parts of the Northern Hemisphere and the tropics that, combined with El Niño, was large enough to explain the temperature spike in 2023. But the cause of this decrease — and whether it can be chalked up to normal climate variations — remains a mystery, the authors say. Decreased air pollution alone doesn’t seem to explain it. They suggest that global warming itself could be causing some reduction in cloud coverage, creating a feedback loop that could accelerate the rate of climate change for decades to come.
"'I would be very careful about saying this is clear evidence [of acceleration], but there might be something going on,' says co-author Helge Goessling, a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany.
"Another reason is that last year was also much warmer than expected. Scientists projected that early 2024 would be hot owing to El Niño. But they also anticipated that temperatures would fall after the weather pattern subsided and conditions in the equatorial Pacific returned to normal last June.
"'That didn’t happen,' says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit organization in California that tracks global temperatures. Instead, global temperatures remained elevated, shattering more records and probably making last year the warmest on record by a sizeable margin. “All of us who made projections at the start of the year underestimated just how warm 2024 would be.'"There's more, including about a possible decrease in shipping aerosol emissions."
Here's NOAA's 12-month average temperature as a function of the ENSO category of that season:
Land subsidence in Florida has been in the news lately, as a study from the University of Miami came out last month. From El Futbolero:
The southern coast of Florida, a paradise of sunny beaches and imposing skyscrapers, hides a secret that worries engineers and geologists: subsidence. This phenomenon, a slow but constant sinking of the land, is affecting numerous buildings along the coast, from Miami Beach to Sunny Isles Beach. A recent study by the University of Miami has revealed that at least 35 buildings are experiencing this gradual settling, raising questions about the long-term safety of these structures and, in particular about the well-being of their most famous residents.
"Drama": Lionel Messi's Florida residence may be in danger!
Among the celebrities who reside in these buildings is Lionel Messi, the star of Argentinian football, along with his family. The news that his home could be affected by subsidence has generated a wave of concern among his fans and the community in general. The idea that such a beloved figure could be living in a building with structural problems raises serious questions about the safety measures and construction control in the area.
I guess if worry about Messi's building gets the message across a little bit better, that's a good thing.
The concern for the Messi family and the rest of the residents affected by subsidence should serve as a catalyst for action. It is crucial that concrete measures are taken to protect people and preserve the future of the Miami coast. The safety and well-being of everyone must be the top priority.Here is Messi's residence in Florida; he bought it 2023 for $10.75 M. (Note: that's about when he started playing for a Florida team in the US Major Soccer League, where all global superstars are put out to pasture.)
