“2024 was the hottest year in the instrumental record. How hot? Last year the global average temperature rose more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 19th century pre-industrial mean, according to most of the scientific organizations that track global temperature trends. This exceeds, for the first time, the aspirational goal set forth by the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement to limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Each of the 10 hottest years have come over the past decade.”
“EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Tuesday evening he had terminated $20 billion in climate change grants issued by the Biden administration under the Inflation Reduction Act, escalating a legal conflict over whether the Trump administration was encroaching on the authority of Congress.
Zeldin has spent the past month criticizing the spending and contending without evidence the program was rife with fraud. His latest move comes just one day before a federal judge will hold a hearing in a lawsuit brought by one of the grant recipients seeking access to the funds held in a Citibank account that the Trump administration had frozen while it probed the program.”
“The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act stands as the single largest piece of legislation to address climate change in United States history.
The IRA contains nearly $370 billion for programs like tax credits for more efficient appliances, building new battery plants, and subsidies for renewable energy. And it triggered a boom in new construction and manufacturing for things like solar panels. It also created hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
But two years later, much of that money remains unspent.
The largest investment — ever — for the clean energy transition has yet to materialize into actual hardware like heat pumps or wind turbines. Despite more than $7.5 billion allocated to building electric vehicle chargers, for example, only a handful have been built. About 40 percent of big IRA projects hit delays, according to the Financial Times.”
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“Now President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to claw back the unspent money and congressional Democrats are getting antsy. In a recent letter, dozens of senators and representatives wrote to the White House asking Biden to get more money out the door, from the IRA as well as other legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”
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“One of the big challenges with spending most federal funds in programs like the IRA is that the money doesn’t go straight to suppliers for construction materials, EV chargers, batteries, or home insulation. Rather, the funds are sent to state and local authorities who then distribute the money.
That added step creates a lot of complications. First, a lot of local officials simply are not set up to receive a lot of cash all at once. It requires rigorous accounting and record-keeping, so before they can use the money, recipients have to invest in the personnel and tools to track it. Then when money hits bank accounts, local officials have to decide where to spend it. That means seeking out proposals, soliciting competitive bids, and giving enough time for communities to weigh in. Even for “shovel-ready” projects, they often have to contend with last-minute hurdles like rising financing costs from inflation, supply chain snarls, and litigation that can halt ground-breaking.
Local governments also have their own incentives. While Biden’s White House wanted to juice the clean energy economy as fast as possible, often state and local governments want to stretch out the funds. “There’s always a sense that if money is spent too quickly, people might get used to the money, maybe even addicted to it, and then officials would have to raise taxes to make up the difference” when it runs out, said Donald Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy who studies government spending.
Delays also result from how the funding is leveraged, whether it’s a grant, a loan, a loan guarantee, or a tax credit. Tax credits add an inherent lag because you don’t receive the cash benefit until you file your taxes.”
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“There are also factors beyond Biden’s direct control at play. Changes in global demand and uncertainty about the outcome of the presidential election led some companies to hold off on executing IRA-funded projects. And those that do want to get rolling often have to go through a tedious, sometimes years-long permitting process before they can break ground.”
“The big reason is that fossil fuel consumption is up. Oil and gas account for the bulk of this increase in emissions, with coal a distant third. While greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are rising, their output is level or falling from some of the largest historical emitters. The European Union’s emissions are declining. US emissions are holding steady. China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, is on track to see its output grow by just 0.2 percent this year, one of the tiniest increases in years.
Bucking this trend are many developing countries like India, currently the world’s third-largest emitter. India has seen a huge increase in renewable energy deployment, but its still developing energy from all sources, including fossil fuels. The Global Carbon Budget found India’s fossil fuel emissions are on track to increase 4.6 percent this year.
There are a few additional factors that drove up emissions this year. The lingering effects of El Niño helped push global temperatures to record highs. Extraordinary heat waves in India and China pushed up energy demand for cooling, and that meant burning more fossil fuels. “We’re beginning to see some of those negative feedback loops where the climate crisis itself is impacting on the energy system and making it harder to reduce emissions,” Grant said.
Still, there are glimmers of good news. More than 30 countries have already managed to grow their economies while cutting carbon dioxide pollution, a clear sign that coal, oil, and natural gas are not the only paths to prosperity. These countries have already summited their emissions peaks and are now on the descent, breaking a pattern that has held for nearly two centuries.”
“global warming is now taking a backseat to economic woes and the war in Ukraine. Governments seem not to be in a hurry to start a discussion on new climate targets. While a handful of EU countries, Denmark among them, have endorsed a 90 percent target for 2040, others, including Poland, aren’t yet ready to do so.”
“Several factors converged to make 2024 so fertile for tropical storms. Hurricanes feed on warm water, and the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico provided ample nourishment as they reached record-high temperatures. Wind shear — where air currents change speed and direction with altitude — tends to rip apart tropical storms before they can form hurricanes, but there was little of that this year due in part to the ripple effects of the shift to La Niña in the Pacific Ocean.”
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“The world has already heated up by about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. There’s some evidence of this warming playing out in various hurricane traits, but there are also places where it’s absent.”
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“scientists need more observations and more time to confirm whether climate change is having any influence on the number of hurricanes.”
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“the IPCC report does show hurricanes changing in ways beyond their overall numbers. One is that hurricanes in recent decades have likely been shifting toward the poles, farther away from their normal habitat in the tropics. That makes sense knowing that hurricanes need warm water, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, so hotter oceans mean these storms can have a greater range.
Another changing trait is that hurricanes appear to be moving slower. That means the storms that make landfall spend more time parked over a given region, forcing the area to endure more wind and rainfall. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was an exemplar of this as it sauntered along the Texas coast at 5 miles per hour and drenched Houston.
Rapid intensification is a climate change hallmark as well. This is where a tropical storm gains 35 miles per hour or more in windspeed in 24 hours. Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 180 miles per hour in just one day. The IPCC found that the global frequency of rapid intensification in tropical cyclones has likely increased over the past 40 years to an extent that can’t be explained by natural variability alone.
One of the strongest signals of climate change in hurricanes is rain. The average and maximum rainfall rates from hurricanes are increasing, largely a function of rising water and air temperatures. More recently, some researchers have begun to connect the increase in rainfall from individual hurricanes to climate change. The World Weather Attribution research group analyzed the rain from Hurricane Helene. They found the precipitation from the storm was 10 percent heavier due to climate change and that such extreme rain is now 40 to 70 percent more likely because of warming. Looking at Hurricane Milton, the researchers reported that heavy one-day rain events like those spawned from the storm are at least 20 to 30 percent more probable.”
“This record ocean heat is a clear reason why Hurricane Helene — which has been traveling through the Gulf on its way to Florida — has intensified so quickly. Put simply, hotter water evaporates more readily, and rising columns of warm, moist air from that evaporation are ultimately what drive hurricanes and their rapid intensification.”
“This October heat is largely the result of a phenomenon currently happening in the West known as a “heat dome” — which involves a high-pressure system trapping heat closer to the Earth’s surface.
Long-term climate change, however, is likely exacerbating the heat dome’s effects. Greenhouse gasses that fuel climate change also trap heat, leading to higher temperatures that can make an already hot heat dome even hotter.
According to a study from the climate nonprofit Climate Central, 91 million people in the US experienced 30 or more “risky heat days” this summer, and those were made twice as likely because of climate change. The organization describes “risky heat” days as ones warmer than “90 percent of temperatures observed in a local area over the 1991-2020 period.”
Climate change has also led to higher temperatures around the world throughout this past year, including a particularly hot summer in states across the US. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this was the country’s fourth-hottest summer on record, when looking at temperatures from June through August 2024. During those months, the average temperature in the contiguous United States was 73.8 degrees Fahrenheit — 2.5 degrees above the average from 1991-2020.
That was noticeable in multiple places, including Phoenix, which experienced more than 100 consecutive days of 100-degree heat or higher this year. Globally, the world could also be on track to hit its hottest year on record.
In addition to getting warmer, summers are getting longer, with Drexel University researchers noting that seasonal temperatures are lasting 30 days longer than they have in the past, meaning well into October for some in the northern hemisphere.
That means fall doesn’t bring the same relief from heat it once did. As a September Climate Central report, which looked at 242 US cities, found, fall temperatures went up 2.5 degrees, on average, between 1970 and 2023.
The warmer fall days could have major implications for natural disasters, especially for wildfires in places like Southern California, where heat amplifies the risk of potential blazes on drier landscapes that have also seen decades of fire suppression. While wildfire season has typically run from early summer into the fall, it has the potential to go longer as higher temperatures persist.
More days with higher temperatures can also translate to increased cases of heat stroke, cardiovascular problems caused by stress on the heart, and respiratory challenges. They can extend, too, the window when people experience seasonal allergies.
Additionally, warmer falls could affect plant and animal preparations for hibernation, severely shortening the time they usually take to prepare for winter, and delaying processes like changes in foliage and leaf dropping. Farmers may increasingly need to shift planting and harvesting schedules for different crops as temperatures continue to fluctuate as well.
Short of major changes needed to curb human contributions to global warming, this year’s October heat waves aren’t likely to be a fluke. As Mann told Vox, “The warming will continue until we bring carbon emissions to zero.””