Summaries (mostly by the Press)

The Great Decoupling - How Ocean Stratification is Boosting Global Warming 0326.rtf

     "As we look toward a potential 2026 El Niño, the “pre-conditioning” is unprecedented.

     "Despite 2025 being a neutral to weak La Niña year, ocean heat content set new records by a substantial margin.  Such a jump should have only been possible during an extreme La Niña, since colder equatorial surface water accelerates ocean heat uptake while the system loses less energy to space.  In the past, ocean heat uptake to greater depths slowed down surface warming.  This process appears to be stalling.  The ocean surface layers now absorb so much energy that is increasingly being trapped within the upper 300 [meters], accelerating surface warming and, through its connection with the atmosphere, air warming.

     "When the El Niño begins to return, part of the stored energy will start to be released into the atmosphere.  Potentially in late 2026, with peak values over the winter months.  We are likely to see global temperatures jump to +1.6°C or even +1.7°C during 2027.

     "A deadly principle seems to be emerging.  With each [0.1°] of warming, extreme events increase disproportionally.  Persistence of each jump in temperature - with no La Niña cooling phases - create a very worrying prognosis.  We have not experienced these temperatures before. [We] can only guess at the weather extremes, fire season, floods, droughts and crop disturbances that will now emerge.  Whatever does emerge is then unlikely to retreat, it's just the next step in the escalation of climate damage.

     "If an El Niño fails to develop in 2026, then unfortunately that won’t let us off the hook.  It would just mean that the oceans will increasingly accumulate even more heat (aided by the neutral to La Nina conditions), to produce an even larger temperature jump in a following year when a strong El Niño does eventually emerge.  The longer it takes, the stronger the force and worse the impacts.  Until then, stratification and MHWs will likely further intensify.

     "It happened during 2014-2016, then in 2023/24, so it will happen again...

     "A warning seems warranted.  We are in the process of triggering an ocean-atmosphere feedback that may well never have happened before in Earth’s history.  This is because it depends on the warming rate, rather than the pure temperature.  Previous spikes in emissions and warming, such as the PETM, have occurred over millennia rather than a century, allowing systems some time to gain balance.  This is not the case today.

"Conclusion: The End of the Buffer

"We can no longer afford to prepare for “averages.”  The 2024 Valencia floods and the North Pacific’s “Super Heatwave” are not outliers; they are the early tremors of a system reaching a thermal breaking point.  Our global infrastructure—from drainage systems to food supply chains—was built for a linear world that no longer exists.

     "As the ocean surface continues to decouple from the deep, we are losing our greatest climate buffer, disrupting the “safe” storage of almost unimaginable amounts of energy.  The upcoming 2026/2027 El Niño will not simply be a repeat of the past; it will be a global ventilation event, dumping years of “trapped” energy into a fragile atmosphere.  We must monitor the ocean’s “pulse” with the same urgency we monitor the air.  The lid is popping and the climate no longer resets, it only moves forward.

     "Ocean stratification is emerging as a vitally important aspect of the changing climate with major global implications.  It is driven by a complex network of feedbacks but has the potential to disrupt the planet’s energy flows in hugely significant ways.  Over half of the energy accumulating as a result of our emissions is being stored in the top 700 [meters] of the oceans compared to just 2% in the atmosphere."

     Below, see that most of the ocean's heat gain, especially in recent years, has been going into the top layer.  This can be viewed as thermal stratification.  This top layer may interface more with the air than with the lower ocean.  It turn, this can be an important driver of accelerating atmospheirc warming.

Earth’s Energy Imbalance - a Quarter-Century Update 0226.rtf

     "The paleoclimatology work that has been carried out shows the contrast between ECS [Earth Climate Sensitivity] and ESS [Earth System Sensitivity] very well.  The PETM shows us the violent, fast response Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity, driven by feedbacks and triggered tipping points.  We are seeing these changes today in the form of changes in cloud properties, both extent and structure.  These are significantly reducing Earth’s albedo, or reflectiveness, increasing the amount of energy the Earth absorbs from the Sun and is accelerating warming.  We are seeing extinction levels far higher than background and migration of plants and animals chasing suitable climates into higher latitudes.

     "The Miocene shows us the power of the slow response Earth System Sensitivity and is the long-game running on millennia timescales.  It shows us that CO2 levels of 500 ppm eventually led to massive sea-level rise and a nearly ice-free world.  This is where we are driving the climate long term. By 2100, our CO2 will match the Miocene, but our temperatures likely won’t—yet. The Miocene reminds us that there is committed warming in the system. Even if we stop emissions by 2100, the Earth may continue to drift toward a Miocene-like state of much higher sea levels over the following centuries. Today there is much more warming in the pipeline than has emerged so far.

    " Paleoclimate research turns the ‘uncertainty’ of climate models into ‘certainty’ from Earth’s history. The Miocene proves that 400-500 ppm of CO2 is enough to melt most of the world’s ice; the PETM proves that carbon spikes lead to mass extinctions and oceanic collapse. We aren’t guessing what will happen; we are reading the transcript of what has already occurred."

     Below, Earth's annual energy imbalance, left, translates to cumulative energy imbalance, right, which leads to surface and atmospheric warming.

Earth's current energy imbalance is probably driven most of all by its albedo loss.

How Paleoclimate Science is Narrowing the Gap in Climate Projections 0226.rtf

     This article goes through how the temperature and time scales are compiled, with cross-validation across time intervals and methods of using temperature proxies, from tree rings to boron isotope ratios.  Error bars tend to increase the farther back in time one goes, from wave action in shallow seas to very slow sedimentation in the deep ocean, where not much photosynthesis takes place (due to low amounts of trace elements available mostly from land sources).

     Earth’s landmasses are drying.

     As the climate warms, new data show huge swaths of land across the globe are quickly drying, threatening humanity’s supply of fresh water.  3/4 of humanity lives in nations where net groundwater is declining.

     In most places, there is less precipitation, even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster.  Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent.

     In the far north, the detected loss is due largely to glaciers melting and sub-Arctic lakes drying.  But farther south — where most people live — it is largely the race to suck groundwater from aquifers that is removing the water from the continents.

     Many of the aquifers underlying almost half of Earth’s continents, took millions of years to form and might take 1,000s of years to refill.

The groundwater loss is even a bigger factor in sea level rise than melting glaciers.

     Uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water in lower latitudes.

     Dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water between 2014 and 2024 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.  One stretches from Central America through most of Mexico, up the US Great Plains to south central Canada.  Another covers almost all of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, into Pakistan and northern India.

     28 major cities in the US are sinking.  So are Jakarta, Venice, Shanghai, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Lagos, Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Alexandria Egypt.  Some of the world’s most productive farmland is sinking with them.  So is California’s Central Valley, which grows the bulk of US fruit and vegetables.

     This drying underlies a future later this century when most people have very little fresh water.

Source: Acturaries Planetary Solvency Report 0125.PDF

West’s ‘Dust Bowl’ Future Now ‘Locked In’, as World Risks Imminent Food Crisis 1219.rtf

     Past climate emissions mean the US and Europe will experience devastating drought in 80 years, and a global food crisis could be triggered in the 2020s — yet it’s not too late to build resilience and avert the worst.

Research sponsored by global credit ratings agency Moody’s concludes that, by the end of century, parts of the US and Europe are now bound to experience severe reductions in rainfall equivalent to the American ‘dust bowl’ of the 1930s, which devastated Midwest farming for a decade.  These consequences are now ‘locked in’, as a result of carbon emissions which we have already accumulated into the atmosphere.

But that’s not all.  A spate of new scientific research released through 2019 has thrown light on nearer-term risks of a global food crisis in coming decades, such as a multi-breadbasket failure — due not just to climate change, but a combination of factors including population growth, industrial soil degradation, rising energy costs, and groundwater depletion, among other trends.

Taken in context with a number of climate change models produced over the last decade, the heightened risk of droughts in the 2020s means that a global food crisis could be imminent.  Over 1,700 published climate models examined by the University of Leeds point to the risk of a global food crisis after 2030; 12 models point to this risk emerging and amplifying in just 3 years.

None of this research shows that the destructive impacts on human societies are unavoidable.  With foresight, planning, mitigation, adaptation and cooperation, it’s possible for us to not simply build resilience to coming crises by minimizing disruptions and protecting the vulnerable; but to pave the way for a sustainable food system that can operate as a solution to climate catastrophe.

The ‘locked in’ impacts of climate change are bound to produce “severe” impacts on societies over the next decades, according to new research sponsored by one of the world’s biggest financial agencies.  Among those impacts, the degradation of global freshwater supplies in particular threatens to destabilize the global food system.  Historic carbon emissions appear to have made it inevitable that, by the end of this century, some of the world’s most important agricultural producers will experience conditions similar to the ‘dust bowl’, the worst human-induced ecological disaster in American history.

     and so on, in great detail

Section Map: Overviews