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A new study suggests that El Ninos - the natural climatic chaos agent that pops up periodically and spikes global temperatures - are getting stronger because of human-caused climate change. El Ninos are more than 36% stronger than they were before the industrial age began in the mid 1800s, with a 16% jump in just the last 40 years showing that the increase is accelerating, according to a study in Thursday's journal Science. The findings come as a strong El Nino that formed a couple months ago is forecast to be the biggest on record in coming months. El Ninos, which are a temporary warming of parts of the equatorial Pacific, warp weather worldwide and increase extreme events, including heat waves, floods in some places and droughts in others. They can cost trillions in damage. "That's important because strong El Ninos have much stronger impacts on climate hazards and extremes worldwide. When we set out to answer the question of why this might be happening, we set our data up against
Earth's climate system is accumulating heat at an accelerating rate as human activity pushed global warming to 1.37 degrees Celsius last year, with the figure projected to surpass the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5 degrees in about four years, strong and consistent evidence shows, researchers have said. Record-high greenhouse gas (GHG) levels, combined with a continued drop in sulphur aerosols -- thereby unmasking a part of the GHGs' warming effect -- are driving human-induced warming, which remains at an all-time high of around 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade, an international team of more than 70 scientists from 56 institutions across 17 countries, including the UK, the US, India and in Europe, said. There is evidence that carbon dioxide emission growth is slowing, but society needs to massively increase decarbonisation efforts during this critical decade, the researchers said. They added that the rate at which heat is accumulating in the Earth system suggests high levels of ...
Hot and humid conditions prevailing during India's monsoon season could extend the duration of uncompensable heat stress of the summer season under a global warming of 2 degrees Celsius, a study has found. Findings published in the journal American Geophysical Union (AGU) Advances highlight a "surge of UHS (uncompensable heat stress) during the monsoon season (July-October) as the climate warms". Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar and the US' Stanford and Purdue universities said long-lasting uncompensable heat stress across both the seasons -- summer and monsoon -- could pose critical challenges to public health, labour productivity, and climate resilience in densely populated and vulnerable regions. Uncompensable heat stress occurs when one's body is unable to cool down through sweating or other mechanisms due to extreme heat and humidity. A sustained accumulation of heat can endanger human health, including causing heat-related illness, organ .
The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy - ideal to spark extreme wildfires - has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows. And more than half of that increase is caused by human-caused climate change, researchers calculated. What this means is that as the world warms, more places across the globe are prone to go up in flames at the same time because of increasingly synchronous fire weather, which is when multiple places have the right conditions to go up in smoke. Countries may not have enough resources to put out all the fires popping up and help won't be as likely to come from neighbours busy with their own flames, according to the authors of a study in Wednesday's Science Advances. In 1979 and for the next 15 years, the world averaged 22 synchronous fire weather days a year for flames that stayed within large global regions, the study found. In 2023 and 2024, it was up to mor