The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or Main Topic: Biden Spells Out Climate Goals That Will Be Ignored by Trump temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Some Climate Optimism for Christmas
Dear Diary. Today as we unwrap presents, we celebrate new birth and hope. Some also celebrate this day because of the winter solstice. Indeed, after Christmas brighter days are to come into the new year. This Christmas it appears that we are about to enter a very dark anti-science period because of the reelection of Trump, though.
The year 2025 may present many terrors. However, there are a few climate scientists who remain positive regarding our future. For this Christmas, here is a column by Michael J. Coren:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/12/03/children-climate-change
Why I’m a climate optimist, for myself and my newborn daughter
The economic trends necessary to lower global temperatures are increasingly driven by economics, not politics.
December 3, 2024
Students and activists hold up a globe near the U.S. Capitol during the Global Climate Strike in September 2019. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Column by Michael J. Coren
My daughter was born yesterday.
There are many things I plan to share with her: taking her first steps into the cold Pacific Ocean; hooting back at the owls haunting our backyard; and strapping on a backpack for our first trip into the Sierra Nevada one day. Those, and a million other experiences, I’ll relive for the first time.
But there are as many things I’m afraid she will never know. The world my daughter will grow up in will have billions of fewer birds flying through its skies. Ninety percent of the big fish have vanished from the oceans. When she’s my age, the atmosphere may have warmed nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.2 degrees Celsius). Near our home, nearly snowless winters and summer temperatures above 107 degrees may feel routine.
The ultimate direction of her future, however, is not completely out of my hands — or yours.
For the last two years, I’ve been lucky enough to write a climate advice column at The Washington Post. Each week, I’ve been able to report on how we can all make our lives, neighborhood or world better. I’ve seen how individual actions can add up to more than the sum of their parts, complementing, not substituting, big changes. And you’ve shared your ideas with me. I’ve appreciated reading them all from your love of braised lentils to how you convinced family members to stop using their appliances like it’s 1970.
Climate Coach columnist Mike Coren hiking with his son on July 14, 2023. (Mike Coren/The Washington Post)
More than a hundred columns and newsletters later, I feel we’ve only scratched the surface. I have many more ideas in my notes — and thousands of your questions — waiting for me to dig into. Over the next few months, I’ll be spending time with my new little girl. In between changing diapers in the dawn hours, I’ll also be reading and recharging for the year ahead.
It promises to be a big one.
Not that many of the headlines or trend lines offer reassurance about the outlook for global warming. This year looks like it will be the hottest on record. The United States will almost certainly withdraw from the Paris agreement (again). Oil and gas are in vogue. As warming trends outpace scientists’ optimistic scenarios, the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) target has receded from view.
“I never expected the world to blow past the 1.5 C threshold so casually, as we’re doing today,” Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University and chairman of the Global Carbon Project, told my colleagues last month. “Two decades ago, no one believed that could happen.”
Yet it’s also true global carbon dioxide emissions from the energy and industrial sectors may peak as soon as next year. Solar, wind and batteries are now so cheap, they’re outcompeting fossil fuels on their own. As Shannon Osaka, Maxine Joselow and Sarah Kaplan wrote in The Post, we’re entering a “strange new climate era.” We’re on track for what the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls “dangerous and widespread disruption.” But the outlook is far brighter than the 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming predicted by 2100 when the Paris agreement was struck on Dec. 12, 2015.
My biggest reason for optimism is the nature of change itself.
Evolutionary biologists have long said that new species tend to evolve along two different, if related paths: gradually over time or in bursts of relatively rapid change, known as punctuated equilibrium.
We all know gradualism. Over time, a species accumulates small, random changes and mutations eventually branching off into new, wild evolutionary destinations (hello, hominids). Punctuated equilibrium may be equally, if not more, common. On this path, species may remain relatively unchanged over many millions of years. As environmental pressures build, species evolve in short, staccato bursts. Over the fossil record, a wide menagerie of creatures from elephants to horseshoe crabs have exhibited this pattern, embarking on mad dashes of diversity to meet their new environment.
Societies can undergo a similar process. As the environment shifts, policies and attitudes that have endured for decades or more undergo intense cycles of radical change. In the mid-1970s, for example, several policy areas in the United States underwent rapid, extensive change after long periods of relative stability including tobacco, pesticides, air and water pollution, airlines, and nuclear power.
“Punctuated equilibrium theory has become a foundational way of understanding the uneven nature of the policy process in the United States,” write Clare Brock and Daniel Mallinson in a peer-reviewed article last year in the journal Policy Studies. “It rests on the observation that ‘political processes are generally characterized by stability and incrementalism, but occasionally they produce large-scale departures from the past.’”
I believe we’re in for a period of punctuated equilibrium.
Opposition to climate action, once centered on climate skepticism or denial, has shifted dramatically toward the costs of addressing it, argues Aseem Prakash, a political science professor at the University of Washington and director of the Center for Environmental Politics, in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics.
Many of those costs, while significant, continue to fall.
Globally, cost estimates to eliminate net carbon emissions range from around $3 trillion to more than $10 trillion a year over the coming decades. That’s often seen as a massive obstacle to rapid decarbonization. But those fears are probably overstated. Most models have radically underestimated how fast the costs of low-carbon technologies such as solar power are falling, while not accounting for how much must already be spent on expanding energy production to meet projected demand. After accounting for these and other factors, reports the Economist, the incremental cost of cutting emissions falls to under $1 trillion a year, less than 1 percent of global GDP.
The economic trends necessary to lower global temperatures are now increasingly driven by economics, not politics. While the new Trump administration may slow the transition, energy analysts argue most of the trends — and goals of legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act — would be nearly impossible to stop or reverse.
I won’t make any predictions. But the falling costs are clearing away obstacles for politicians to address the demands of the two-thirds of U.S. adults who say large businesses and corporations are “doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change,” according to the Pew Research Center. As the painful effects of climate change are felt, and pressure for action builds like water behind a dam, it may wash away some of the old order, and something new will be built in its place.
That’s not without enormous risk. But it also carries enormous potential.
See you in April.
My last installment of Climate Coach: Real Estate Edition will come out later this month to help you navigate the U.S. home insurance market as risks from extreme weather mount. Write me with your stories and questions at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails.
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)
Lead column by Mr Cohen is the first writer who understands.
He didn’t call solar “clean energy” as that is false, it is not clean energy. He called it “low carbon” solar. Even that statement is questionable as he never states what is high carbon as comparison, but one could assume he is comparing solar to fossil fuels. Now if other climate scientists could follow this lead and use accurate adjectives then they will appear to be wise rather than hysterical.