Connect with us

Science

2024 was the hottest year on record, NASA and NOAA confirm

Published

on

2024 was the hottest year on record, NASA and NOAA confirm

Amid a week of horrifying wildfires in Los Angeles, government agencies in the U.S. and around the world confirmed Friday that 2024 was the planet’s hottest year since recordkeeping began in 1880.

It’s the 11th consecutive year in which a new heat record has been set, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said.

“Between record-breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet,” Nelson said.

Firefighters on Friday were battling to protect NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge from the Eaton fire, which has burned 13,690 acres and roughly 5,000 buildings thus far.

Research has shown that global warming is contributing significantly to larger and more intense wildfires in the western U.S. in recent years, and to longer fire seasons.

Advertisement

The devastating fires in Southern California erupted after an abrupt shift from wet weather to extremely dry weather, a bout of climate “whiplash” that scientists say increased wildfire risks. Research has shown that these rapid wet-to-dry and dry-to-wet swings, which can worsen wildfires, flooding and other hazards, are growing more frequent and intense because of rising global temperatures.

Extreme weather events in 2024 included Hurricane Helene in the southeastern U.S., devastating floods in Valencia, Spain, and a deadly heat wave in Mexico so intense that monkeys dropped dead from the trees, noted Russell Vose, chief of the monitoring and assessment branch of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

“We aren’t saying any of these things were caused by changes in Earth’s climate,” Vose said. But since warmer air holds more moisture, the higher temperatures “could have exacerbated some events this year.”

Last year’s data also notes a step toward a major climate threshold. Keeping the average global surface temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels has long been seen as necessary to avoid many of the most harrowing climate impacts.

NOAA pegged 2024’s global average surface temperature at 1.46 degrees C above its preindustrial baseline, and NASA’s measurements put the increase at 1.47 degrees C. In 2023, NASA said the temperature was 1.36 degrees C higher than the baseline.

Advertisement

Considering the margin of error in their measurements, “that puts the NOAA and NASA models comfortably within the possibility that the real number is 1.5 degrees,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Calculations from other organizations passed the 1.5-degree mark more clearly.

Berkeley Earth and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service both said the planet warmed to slightly more than 1.6 degrees C above pre-industrial times in 2024. The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization said the increase was 1.55 degrees C and the U.K. Met Office, the country’s weather service, measured an increase of 1.53 degrees C.

Although 2024 probably marks the first calendar year in which the average temperature exceeded the 1.5-degree threshold, it doesn’t mean Earth has passed the crucial target set in the Paris Agreement, Vose said.

That describes “a sustained, multi-decade increase of 1.5 degrees,” something that’s not expected to occur until the 2030s or 2040s, the scientists noted.

Advertisement

“For a long time, the global mean temperature changes were a bit of an esoteric thing — nobody lives in the global mean,” Schmidt said. “But the signal is now so large that you’re not only seeing it at the global scale … you’re seeing it at the local level.”

“This is now quite personal,” he said.

The oceans, which store 90% of the planet’s excess heat, also recorded their highest average temperature since records began in 1955.

The Arctic has seen the most warming, which is concerning because the region is home to vast quantities of ice that stands to melt and raise sea levels, Schmidt said.

Temperatures there are rising 3 to 3.5 times faster than the overall global average, he added.

Advertisement

The only place where average surface temperatures have cooled is the area immediately around Antarctica, and that’s probably due to meltwater from shrinking ice sheets, Schmidt said.

A year ago, NOAA predicted there was only a 1 in 3 chance that 2024 would break the record set in 2023, Vose said. Then every month from January to July set a new high, and August was a tie. As a result, Friday’s declaration came as little surprise.

The longer-term trends are no better.

“We anticipate future global warming as long as we are emitting greenhouse gases,” Schmidt said. “That’s something that brings us no joy to tell people, but unfortunately that’s the case.”

Times staff writer Ian James contributed to this report.

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Science

Bird flu infections in dairy cows are more widespread than we thought, according to a new CDC study

Published

on

Bird flu infections in dairy cows are more widespread than we thought, according to a new CDC study

A new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the H5N1 bird flu virus is probably circulating undetected in livestock in many parts of the country and may be infecting unaware veterinarians.

In the health agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a group of researchers from the CDC, the Ohio Department of Health and the American Assn. of Bovine Practitioners, reported the results of an analysis they conducted on 150 bovine, or cow, veterinarians from 46 states and Canada.

They found that three of them had antibodies for the H5N1 bird flu virus in their blood. However, none of the infected vets recalled having any symptoms — including conjunctivitis, or pink eye, the most commonly reported symptom in human cases.

The three vets also reported to investigators that they had not worked with cattle or poultry known to be infected with the virus. In one case, a vet reported having practiced only in Georgia (on dairy cows) and South Carolina (on poultry) — two states that have not reported H5N1 infections in dairy cows.

Advertisement

Seema Lakdawala, a microbiologist at Emory University in Atlanta — who was not involved in the research — said she was surprised that only 2% of the veterinarians surveyed tested positive for the antibodies, considering another CDC study showed that 17% of dairy workers sampled had been infected. But she said she was even more surprised that none of them had known they were infected or that they had worked with infected animals.

“These surprising results indicate that serum surveillance studies are important to inform risk of infections that are going undiagnosed,” she said. “Veterinarians are on the front line of the outbreak, and increased biosafety practices like respiratory and eye protection should reduce their exposure risk.”

Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, described the study as a “good and bad news story.”

“On one hand, we see concerning evidence that there may be more H5N1 outbreaks on farms than are being reported,” she said. “On the other hand, I’m reassured that there isn’t evidence that infections among vets have been widespread. This means there’s more work that can and should be done to prevent the virus from spreading to more farms and sickening workers.”

The analysis was conducted in September 2024. At that time, there had been only four human cases reported, and the infection was believed to be restricted to dairy cattle in 14 states. Since then, 68 people have been infected — 40 working with infected dairy cows — and the virus is reported have infected herds in 16 states.

Advertisement

John Korslund, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist, said in an email that finding H5N1 antibodies in the blood of veterinarians was an interesting “but very imprecise way to measure state cattle incidence.” But it underscored “that humans ARE susceptible to subclinical infections and possible reassortment risks, which we already knew, I guess.”

Reassortment occurs when a person or animal is infected with more than one influenza virus, allowing the two to mingle and exchange “hardware,” potentially creating a new, more virulent strain.

More important, he said, the D1.1 version of the strain — which has been detected in Nevada dairy cattle and one person living in the state — is “changing the landscape. … [P]eople may be more more susceptible (or not) with a greater potential for severeness (or not).”

“I’m confident that we’ll find it in other states. Its behavior and transmissibility within and between cattle herds is still pretty much a black box,” he said.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Science

Top N.I.H. Official Abruptly Resigns as Trump Orders Deep Cuts

Published

on

Top N.I.H. Official Abruptly Resigns as Trump Orders Deep Cuts

The No. 2 official at the National Institutes of Health abruptly resigned and retired from government service on Tuesday, in another sign that the Trump administration is reshaping the nation’s public health and biomedical research institutions.

The official, Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, a dentist and researcher, was long considered a steadying force and had weathered past presidential transitions. In a letter that Dr. Tabak sent to colleagues on Tuesday, he did not give a reason for his decision. One person familiar with the decision said Dr. Tabak had been confronted with a reassignment that he viewed as unacceptable.

“It has been an enormous privilege to work with each of you (and your predecessors) to support and further the critical NIH mission,” Dr. Tabak wrote.

Dr. Tabak resigned at a turbulent time for the institutes, the nation’s premier biomedical research industry, composed of 27 separate institutes and centers that study and develop treatments for diseases like cancer and heart conditions as well as infectious diseases like AIDS and Covid. The N.I.H. spends roughly $48 billion a year on medical research, much of it in grants to medical centers, universities and hospitals across the country.

President Trump’s decision to slash billions of dollars in N.I.H. grant funding has sparked a bitter court battle. And the Senate on Wednesday voted to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and the president’s pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the N.I.H.

Advertisement

Mr. Kennedy has said he would cut 600 N.I.H. jobs.

The N.I.H. said it would soon have a statement about Dr. Tabak’s decision.

Dr. Tabak was not well-known to the public. But his decision to leave is surprising, and destabilizing for an agency that is on the political hot seat. He was viewed as someone who could work across party lines; he had survived the presidential turnovers of both parties and had indicated he expected to stay on after Mr. Trump was elected in November.

Ordinarily, Dr. Tabak would have ascended to the job of acting N.I.H. director during the transition from one administration to the next. But the Trump administration installed another researcher, Matthew Memoli of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as acting director. Dr. Memoli criticized Covid vaccine mandates, as did Mr. Kennedy.

As acting director of the N.I.H. last year, Dr. Tabak pushed back against Republicans’ assertions that a lab leak stemming from U.S. taxpayer-funded research might have caused the coronavirus pandemic. He told lawmakers that viruses being studied at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, bore no resemblance to the one that set off the world’s worst public health crisis in a century.

Advertisement

Ellen Barry contributed reporting.

Continue Reading

Science

California’s Scary Product Warning Labels Might Be Working, Study Says

Published

on

California’s Scary Product Warning Labels Might Be Working, Study Says

The warnings, on thousands of products sold in California, are stark.

“Use of the following products,” one label says, “will expose you to chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

Now, new research shows the warnings may be working.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that California’s right-to-know law, which requires companies to warn people about harmful chemicals in their products, has swayed many companies to stop using those chemicals altogether.

As it turns out, companies don’t want to sell a product that carries a big cancer warning label, said Dr. Megan Schwarzman, a physician and environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and an author of the study.

Advertisement

Combine that with the threat of lawsuits and reputational costs, as well as companies just wanting to do the right thing for health, and “it becomes a great motivator for change,” she said.

California maintains a list of about 900 chemicals known to cause cancer and other health effects. Under the 1986 right-to-know law, also known as Prop 65, products that could expose people to harmful amounts of those chemicals must carry warning labels.

Critics had long mocked the measure, saying the warnings were so ubiquitous — affixed to cookware, faux leather jackets, even baked goods — that they had become largely meaningless in the eyes of shoppers. But the latest study found that companies, more than consumers, may be most influenced by the warnings.

To assess the law’s effect, researchers carried out interviews at 32 global manufacturers and retailers that sell clothing, personal-care, cleaning, and a range of home products. Almost 80 percent of interviewees said Prop 65 had prompted them to reformulate their products.

Companies can avoid the warning labels if they reduce the level of any Prop 65 chemicals below a “safe harbor” threshold.

Advertisement

A similar share of companies said they looked to Prop 65 to determine which chemicals to avoid. And 63 percent said the law had prompted them to also reformulate products they sold outside California.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the study.

No other state has a law quite like Prop. 65, requiring warnings on such a wide range of products about cancer or reproductive harm. New York enacted a more limited law in 2020 that requires manufacturers to disclose certain chemicals in children’s products and that bans the use of certain chemicals by 2023. Other states have laws geared toward disclosure of ingredients on labels.

California, meanwhile, is pushing ahead. A 2018 change to Prop 65 has meant products are starting to carry even more specific labels. Some food and beverage cans, for example, may carry labels that warn that they “have linings containing bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical known to the State of California to cause harm to the female reproductive system.”

The latest research is part of a larger effort to analyze Prop 65’s effect on people’s exposure to toxic chemicals. In a study published last year, researchers at the Silent Spring Institute and UC Berkeley found that in the years after certain chemicals were listed under the law, levels of those chemicals in people’s bodies decreased both in California and nationwide.

Advertisement

That research came with a caveat, however. In some examples where levels of a listed chemical decreased, a close substitute to that chemical, potentially with similar harmful effects, increased. Prop 65 has no mechanism to check the safety of alternative chemicals.

It suggested that stronger policies were needed at both the federal and state levels to study and regulate the thousands of chemicals on the market, Dr. Schwarzman said. “This is so much bigger than the individual consumer and what we choose off-the-shelf,” she said.

Continue Reading

Trending