A new analysis funded by NASA and conducted in conjunction with its High Mountain Asia Team and Sea Level Change Team has found that with 1.5 degrees Celsius of global heating above pre-industrial levels, half the world’s glaciers would disappear and cause sea levels to rise 3.5 inches by the year 2100.
From 2013 to 2017, David Rounce, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and his research team measured the Imja-Lhotse Shar Glacier near Mount Everest’s base in the Himalayas as it quickly receded. As the glacier melted, the lake at the base of the famous mountain filled up, a press release from NASA said.
“To go to the same place and to see the lake expand and see how the glacier was thinning rapidly was quite eye-opening to say the least,” Rounce said in the press release.
Rounce led a study in January that predicted Earth’s glaciers could shrink by up to 40 percent by 2100.
The study, “Global glacier change in the 21st century: Every increase in temperature matters,” was published in the journal Science.
In their analysis, the research team modeled the planet’s glaciers, except the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, in order to make projections of how they would be affected by temperature increases from 1.5 to four degrees Celsius, the press release said.
While they found that half the world’s glaciers would melt at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, if the planet warms by 2.7 degrees Celsius, which is the predicted temperature increase based on COP26 climate pledges, almost all of the glaciers in western Canada, the U.S. (including Alaska) and Central Europe would disappear. If temperatures warm by four degrees Celsius, 80 percent of Earth’s glaciers would be gone and cause sea levels to rise by six inches.
“Regardless of temperature increase, the glaciers are going to experience a lot of loss,” Rounce said in the press release. “That’s inevitable.”
The study by Rounce and his team was the first to use mass change data taken from satellites of all 215,000 of the planet’s glaciers.
“Sea level rise is not just a problem for a few specific locations,” said leader of NASA’s Sea Level Change Team Ben Hamlington in the press release. “It’s increasing almost everywhere on Earth.”
The model took into account glacial debris cover, including sediment, soot, dust, rocks and volcanic ash on the surface of glaciers. Glacial debris can affect melting — a thin layer can cause more while a thick layer can provide insulation that reduces it.
Especially strong indicators of climate change are glaciers located in remote parts of the planet.
Glaciers that are melting quickly affect landscapes, the availability of freshwater, sea level rise, tourism, ecosystems and the severity and frequency of hazards.
“We are not trying to frame this as a negative look at the loss of these glaciers, but instead how we have the ability to make a difference,” Rounce said in the press release. “I think it’s a very important message: a message of hope.”
In its first major assessment of progress made on the 2015 Paris Agreement goals, the United Nations warned Friday that the world is “not on track” to meet any of the long-term targets set in the landmark climate treaty. According to the U.N., countries are falling short in efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), to adapt to climate impacts, and to provide enough climate financing to developing countries.
The report marks “a truly damning report card for global climate efforts,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, said in a statement. “Carbon emissions? Still climbing. Rich countries’ finance commitments? Delinquent. Adaptation support? Lagging woefully behind.”
The report is the result of two years of intense negotiations between governments, experts, and nonprofits, reflecting hundreds of thousands of pages of written input. Its comprehensive review of global climate action finds that current emissions reduction goals set by governments worldwide fall short in both ambition and follow-through.
“There is a rapidly narrowing window to raise ambition and implement existing commitments in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C {2.7 degrees F} above pre-industrial levels,” report authors cautioned.
In addition to reviewing progress made, the report also identified areas for policymakers to take further action. It called for countries to set more ambitious targets for reducing emissions and to implement them as soon as possible. The report also said leaders should involve “those most affected by climate impacts” while crafting policies, including young people, women, and Indigenous peoples.
Other key recommendations include “phasing out all unabated fossil fuels,” investing in and building out renewable energy, and ending deforestation. The U.N. noted that while there’s been encouraging progress in renewable energy development, with solar power and electric vehicle deployment growing over 10 and 100 times respectively, the benefits of clean technology have been largely concentrated in wealthier, more developed nations.
Meanwhile, global investment in “emissions-intensive” activities continues to grow. To respond to the climate crisis, the U.N. said, countries will need to redirect trillions in subsidies from fossil fuels toward renewable technologies and climate adaptation.
Last year, those investments reached a record high. According to the International Monetary Fund, government subsidies for oil, coal, and natural gas totaled $7 trillion in 2022. While tax breaks and other subsidies are often provided to lower consumer energy bills, they can also further delay an already overdue energy transition.
“The removal of fossil fuel subsidies is a key strategy for addressing structural economic barriers that can perpetuate inertia to change and prevent cost-effective low-carbon alternatives from being adopted at scale,” the U.N. report stated.
The report’s findings will likely be central to discussions at this year’s upcoming UN climate summit, COP28, in Dubai. There, negotiators are expected to review previous emissions reductions commitments made by countries and submit revised targets in light of the report. Countries are expected to hammer out the details of a new “loss and damage” fund, which aims to funnel money from wealthier nations to developing countries that experience the brunt of climate impacts.
But some environmental advocates, including prominent U.N. figures, have grown disenchanted with the lack of progress made at the annual conferences. Christiana Figueres, a former executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, called the upcoming COP in Dubai a “circus.”
“The Paris Agreement is good for nothing if it is not financed and executed,” Figueres said at the Sarawak Renewable Energy Forum in Malaysia this week. “Honestly, I would prefer 90,000 people stay at home and do their job.”
The CDC has issued an emergency alert over a harmful bacteria, Vibrio vulnificus, in warming coastal waters. The center noted that with extreme weather, like heat waves, flooding and severe storms, people should be careful when participating in coastal water activities.
“Amid increasing water temperatures and extreme weather events (e.g., heat waves, flooding, and severe storms) associated with climate change, people who are at increased risk for V. vulnificus infection should exercise caution when engaging in coastal water activities. Prompt treatment is crucial to reduce mortality from severe V. vulnificus infection,” the CDC shared in a health alert.
The “flesh-eating” bacteria, Vibrio vulnificus, live in salt water and brackish water, making them common in coastal areas and estuaries. While the bacteria don’t actually consume flesh, a Vibrio vulnificus infection can cause necrotizing fasciitis, which damages or kills the tissue around a wound.
This bacterial infection can be severe and even fatal, with about one in five people dying, even within just one or two days of becoming infected. If an infection is suspected or occurs, immediate treatment is critical.
The center also advised doctors to consider Vibrio vulnificus as the possible cause of infections for patients, particularly those who have had recent contact with coastal waters.
Warmer waters create conditions for the bacteria to thrive, and with sea surface temperatures reaching record highs this summer, the CDC is warning of potential open-wound contact, which is the primary way Vibrio vulnificus is transferred.
According to the CDC, Vibrio vulnificus may enter inland waters after extreme weather events such as hurricanes or floods.
Vibrio vulnificus has been primarily reported in states along the Gulf of Mexico, but infections of this bacteria along the eastern coast have increased by as much as eight times from 1988 to 2018. Some infections this year have been linked to consuming raw or undercooked seafood.
There have been at least seven deaths from this bacterial infection in Florida, which has also seen ocean temperatures rise to the temperature of a hot tub in recent months.
To protect against infection, the CDC recommended people with any open wounds to stay out of salt and brackish waters, and get out of the water immediately if they get a cut while they are in these waters. Open wounds should be covered with waterproof bandages if there’s a chance for them to come into contact with salt or brackish water, and wounds need to be washed with soap and clean water.
Because some Vibrio infections are caused by consuming raw or undercooked seafood, the CDC also advises to properly cook shellfish and seafood and wash hands thoroughly when handling seafood.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
More than a decade ago, two climate scientists defined what they considered at the time to be the upper limit of human survivability: 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, at 100 percent humidity, also known as the wet-bulb threshold. In those conditions, a person, no matter who they are or where they live, cannot shed enough heat to stay alive for more than a few hours. The scientists’ operating assumption was that carbon emissions would need to warm the planet 5 to 7 degrees C (9 to 12.6 degrees F) before the world exceeded the wet-bulb threshold every year. Since then, more advanced work has demonstrated the world only needs to warm by about 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) before heat waves in the hottest parts of the world first cross that survivability line.
But just looking at the survivability threshold doesn’t paint the full picture of heat-related risk. The theoretical experiment underpinning that threshold was based on two assumptions: that humans are fully adapted to heat, or used to hot conditions, and that people do everything in their power — seek out shade, fan themselves, and douse themselves with water — to stay cool during an extreme heat event. The reality is that death can occur long before wet-bulb conditions are eclipsed for a variety of reasons that have to do with age, health, adaptation, and access.
A study published in Science Advances this week used a more realistic threshold to determine when and where the world will become dangerously hot for humans. The researchers, from the University of Oxford and the Woodwell Climate Research Center, used a framework called the “noncompensable heat threshold,” the conditions under which a human being can no longer maintain a healthy core temperature without taking action to cool off. Six hours of unmitigated exposure to these temperatures would be sufficient to cause death. This threshold can be reached under different combinations of air temperature and humidity — the hotter the temperature, the less humidity needed to cross the limit. At 40 degrees C (104 degrees F), for example, you need about 50 percent relative humidity to cross the noncompensable threshold.
The researchers found that parts of the world have already surpassed this threshold. They identified 21 weather stations that clocked conditions exceeding the noncompensable threshold between 1970 and 2020, mainly along coastlines in the hottest regions of the planet such as the Persian Gulf and South Asia. Even more people will face such conditions as the planet continues to warm from fossil fuel combustion.
Christopher W. Callahan, an earth systems scientist at Dartmouth University who researches health and heat and was not involved in the research, called the study’s results “striking.” “Some locations are already experiencing these critically hot conditions,” he said. “They’re not just a forecast from a climate model, they’re directly observable using quality-controlled weather station observations.”
As more countries experience abnormally high temperatures every summer, using pure “survivability” as the metric for when heat-related mortality will occur is a dangerous proposition. Death can occur much sooner than that.
At the wet-bulb threshold, “no matter what you do short of air conditioning, you face lethal risk,” said Carter Powis, a researcher at the University of Oxford and the study’s lead author. “The threshold we looked at, noncompensable heat, is you face lethal heat risk unless you do something. Meaning there are still ways you can survive above this threshold such as using a fan, drinking cold water.” Any conditions between these two definitions are what the study’s authors call the “danger zone.” Whether someone dies when they’re in that zone depends on what cooling strategies are available to them and how well adapted they are.
The study shows that, under current climate change conditions, 8 percent of the globe by land area experiences conditions that are in the danger zone once every decade. At 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming, a climate change benchmark the world is currently on track to exceed, more than a quarter of the world will experience these conditions at least once a decade. The percentage of the planet that will experience potentially fatal heat continues to grow the more climate change accelerates.
A pharmacy thermometer reaches 41.5°C at 5pm during a record-breaking heat wave in Toulouse, France, 2022.
Alain Pitton/NurPhoto via Getty Images
It’s not just the hottest regions of the planet that are at risk. In the U.S., the Midwest and East Coast could see rapid increases in noncompensable heat exposure. The same is true for the Mediterranean region up north through Europe. These are areas that are not used to extreme heat.
“While prior research has indicated that fatal wet bulb temperatures will occur more often in the most populated and poor regions of the planet, this research suggests that wealthier countries in North America and Europe will also face increasingly dire heat waves,” Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Montana State University who was also not involved in the study, told Grist.
For Powis, the biggest takeaway is that communities need to be aware that past heat-related mortality events are not a good way to gauge future risk. As the planet warms, the past will become an increasingly poor metric for looking at the future. “The danger is, in the near term, in the next decade or two decades, you have one of these extreme heat waves that departs from the historical maximum by a substantial amount, crosses this threshold, and causes wide-scale mortality,” Powis said. “Everything is fine until suddenly it’s not.”
The Copernicus Climate Change Service has found that June through August of this year had the highest global temperatures for summer on record. Additionally, sea surface temperatures of the North Atlantic and globally have reached record highs in summer 2023.
The service used data from satellites, weather stations, ships and aircraft around the world, amounting to billions of measurements to determine the temperatures. The findings revealed that June through August 2023 hit an average global temperature of 16.77 degrees Celsius, or 0.66 degrees Celsius above the average global temperature recorded for these three months.
Further, August 2023 hit record high temperatures for that month and came just behind July 2023 as the hottest month ever recorded.
“Global temperature records continue to tumble in 2023, with the warmest August following on from the warmest July and June leading to the warmest boreal summer in our data record going back to 1940,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement.
While the summer temperatures have reached record highs, the year as a whole is currently ranked as the second warmest on record, behind 2016. But 2023 is just 0.01 degrees Celsius behind the record-high temperatures of 2016, with another four months left in the year, Burgess explained.
Earlier this year, the World Meteorological Organization reported that there is a 98% chance that the Earth will have its hottest year on record within the next five years.
“Our planet has just endured a season of simmering — the hottest summer on record. Climate breakdown has begun,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, as reported by ABC News. “Scientists have long warned what our fossil fuel addiction will unleash. Surging temperatures demand a surge in action. Leaders must turn up the heat now for climate solutions. We can still avoid the worst of climate chaos — and we don’t have a moment to lose.”
In addition to the high global temperatures around the world, Copernicus Climate Change Service also found that the average sea surface temperatures globally have been higher than usual since April, and in August, sea surface temperatures hit the highest daily and highest monthly global average on record.
According to the service, global average sea surface temperatures broke the record of 20.95 degrees Celsius (March 2016), reaching 21.02 degrees Celsius on August 23 and 24. The global average sea surface temperatures of each day from July 31 to August 31 of 2023 were warmer than the previous record high from March 2016.
“The scientific evidence is overwhelming — we will continue to see more climate records and more intense and frequent extreme weather events impacting society and ecosystems, until we stop emitting greenhouse gases,” Burgess said.
Nominated by readers, the 2023 Grist 50 list of climate changemakers celebrates the grit, determination, and creativity of all kinds of people who share one goal: putting us all on a path to an equitable, cleaner future.
But for some, mobile homes conjure up an image of rusting metal units in weed-choked lots, an unfair stereotype that has real consequences — advocates argue that mobile homes are not only a housing fix but could also help with the climate crisis.
According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, mobile homes are a good solution with a bad reputation.
It’s unfair, he said, because the residents of mobile homes are often hampered by restrictive zoning laws that make it hard to upgrade maintenance and care of the structures. These zoning laws also have put communities at risk for climate-related disasters, which explains why so many mobile home parks are in floodplains.
“It’s not the home itself that often makes mobile homes vulnerable,” said Rumbach. “It’s actually the fact that we sort of stuck the poor away in these places that makes them vulnerable.”
A report by the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy organization, echoes Rumbach’s research. The report found that mobile homes have consistently been an affordable and underutilized solution that meets the housing needs of low- and moderate-income people.
Newer models can also be a low-carbon solution as these prefabricated homes, which are built in large pieces for easy assembly, can include things like heat pumps and solar panels, in contrast to older models that relied on propane or natural gas. Older models can also be eligible for retrofits to make them more energy efficient and climate-friendly.
“They’re a pretty terrific solution,” said Rumbach. “Unfortunately, by law, in many places in the country [mobile homes] are not allowed to be placed anymore because there is such a cultural stigma.”
The Eastern Coachella Valley in California is one place where mobile home parks and residents have been consistently overlooked by public officials. People in the majority Latino area grapple with getting access to necessities like electricity and clean water. Arsenic was found in the water supply and is a persistent issue.
But despite that, there is also an incredible sense of community among the residents of informal mobile home parks in the area, according to Jovana Morales-Tilgren, a housing policy coordinator at Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, a California nonprofit focusing on underserved rural communities.
The parks were originally built for migrant farmworkers and today they operate without a permit, which means federal agencies and local governments don’t have official recognition that they exist. So if there’s a disaster, that makes it harder to get federal relief, and if there is a municipal upgrade, it doesn’t happen in those communities.
“They do have a lot more issues than regular mobile home parks,” said Morales-Tilgren. “Many of them don’t have weatherization, insulation. Many were built more than 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so they do have a lot of issues.”
A community of mobile homes in Boulder City, Nevada. George Rose / Getty Images
Mobile homes can be roughly categorized into two sections: older homes that predate the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rules in 1976, and newer, prefabricated homes that often are greener, more efficient, and better functioning than some traditional homes.
When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California last month, residents in the unpermitted mobile home parks were trapped, because a power outage meant that residents had to sleep in their cars to get access to air conditioning.
“[Mobile homes] are not equipped to handle those extreme weather events,” said Morales-Tilgren.
This is especially an issue because a large portion of people that live in the area are low-income people of color who are undocumented, according to Morales-Tilgren. Consequently, people lack access to resources needed to recover from large flooding events like the kind that Hilary brought.
Another key issue: Mobile home parks, both permitted and unpermitted, are reliant on their own infrastructure. In other types of housing, such as apartments or single family homes, a municipality is usually in charge of providing electricity, water, sewage, and tree maintenance. But in mobile home parks, residents are reliant on owners to provide those services.
In addition, once extreme weather happens, residents are often caught in the grip of the confusing bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While mobile home parks can vary wildly, the main distinction that the agency makes is whether or not people own or rent the land underneath the home.
A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers found that there are numerous barriers to accessing resources, such as money from FEMA, for vulnerable populations in the wake of a flood-related disaster. Affordable housing units were affected more, and often the number of units did not bounce back to pre-disaster levels.
Additionally, mobile home residents are often at risk of being evicted in the aftermath of disasters that might displace them from their homes. This can fuel housing instability because mobile homes tend to be located in climate-vulnerable areas like floodplains, according to Rumbach.
“Around the country, you see a disproportionate amount of mobile homes located in hazardous areas,” said Rumbach. “The demand is being driven by a segment of the housing market that’s looking for lower costs. And as a result, you see a lot of manufactured housing being placed into relatively climate-vulnerable places, because that land tends to be a little bit less valuable.”
On the other side of the country, though, mobile home owners in Ithaca, New York, have been the beneficiaries of a pilot project aimed at retrofitting mobile homes in the area to be more climate-friendly.
This first-of-its-kind project is giving owners funding for heat pumps to replace the polluting natural gas or propane furnaces needed to heat mobile homes. The program also provides money to cover the cost of insulation needed to keep the heating and cooling provided by electric appliances in the home and reduce electric bills.
Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Finger Lakes, a nonprofit focused on climate solutions in upstate New York, says that while their program, which is ongoing, has so far been successful in helping people access funding, they still are limited in their reach. The program would need more money as well as guidance from state and federal authorities to be able to meet the needs of everyone who applied.
Nicholson said that currently, the program is trying to help people transition off of natural gas, which is available cheaply despite its destructive climate impacts. This often puts the onus on consumers to be able to invest in climate-friendly technology, if no additional funding is available.
Cost is a vital aspect of upgrading mobile homes: “It affects how people make decisions,” said Nicholson. “Whether or not they’re going to stay on gas and stick to another cheap gas furnace.”
Stigma surrounding mobile home parks is a huge reason for issues regarding resource allocation and zoning issues. Additionally, some of the most pressing issues come from a common problem for almost all mobile home residents: They’re just not considered.
In Ithaca, that means many transmission lines that service mobile home parks are capped at a certain wattage that is far below what it would take to electrify them, which provides challenges for Nicholson.
“There are no incentives set up by the state or the feds to help to pay a mobile home park owner to upgrade the electrical capacity of his park,” said Nicholson. “We’re way behind schedule for electrification.”
Back in California, in the Eastern Coachella Valley, this means that not only did Tropical Storm Hilary flood mobile home parks but that the roads were closed — further isolating residents. In this case, as in others such as in Texas in 2021, large-scale efforts to avoid the impacts of a disaster such as a hurricane or a cold snap do not consider mobile home residents and owners.
This is a problem, according to Zachary Lamb, a professor at the college of environmental design at the University of California, Berkeley, because not being considered makes it difficult to be resilient to climate change.
“Mobile home parks are disproportionately located in parts of landscapes that are vulnerable to climate risks,” said Lamb. “So they’re disproportionately located in floodplains. They’re disproportionately located in places that are exposed to extreme heat. …They’re also disproportionately located in places that are close to other environmental harms.”
Despite those vulnerabilities, past research shows that in areas where marginalized communities live, people can and do come together to solve issues collaboratively. This makes one of the most misunderstood forms of housing a good place to invest in, according to Lamb.
“Making investments in climate resilience, that is such a no-brainer,” said Lamb. “In terms of both improving the infrastructure quality, and also in terms of giving residents more agency and more control over their communities.”
