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The concentration of planet-heating pollutants clogging the atmosphere hit record levels in 2023, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said. From a report:
It found carbon dioxide is accumulating faster than at any time in human history, with concentrations having risen by more than 10% in just two decades. “Another year, another record,” said Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the WMO. “This should set alarm bells ringing among decision makers.” The increase was driven by humanity’s “stubbornly high” burning of fossil fuels, the WMO found, and made worse by big wildfires and a possible drop in the ability of trees to absorb carbon. The concentration of CO2 reached 420 parts per million (ppm) in 2023, the scientists observed. The level of pollution is 51% greater than before the Industrial Revolution, when people began to burn large amounts of coal, oil and fossil gas.

A record 15 national heat records have been broken since the start of this year, an influential climate historian has told the Guardian, as weather extremes grow more frequent and climate breakdown intensifies. An additional 130 monthly national temperature records have also been broken, along with tens of thousands of local highs registered at monitoring stations from the Arctic to the South Pacific, according to Maximiliano Herrera, who keeps an archive of extreme events.

He said the unprecedented number of records in the first six months was astonishing. “This amount of extreme heat events is beyond anything ever seen or even thought possible before,” he said. “The months from February 2024 to July 2024 have been the most record-breaking for every statistic.” This is alarming because last year’s extreme heat could be largely attributed to a combination of man-made global heating — caused by burning gas, oil, coal and trees — and a natural El Nino phenomenon, a warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean surface that is associated with higher temperatures in many parts of the world. The El Nino has been fading since February of this year, but this has brought little relief.

“Far from dwindling with the end of El Nino, records are falling at even much faster pace now compared to late 2023,” said Herrera. New ground is broken every day at a local level. On some days, thousands of monitoring stations set new records of monthly maximums or minimums. The latter is particularly punishing as high night-time temperatures mean people and ecosystems have no time to recover from the relentless heat. In late July, for example, China’s Yueyang region sweltered though an unprecedentedly elevated low of 32C during its dark hours, with dangerously high humidity.

Data center construction “could delay California’s transition away from fossil fuels and raise electric bills for everyone else,” warns the Los Angeles Times — and also increase the risk of blackouts:
Even now, California is at the verge of not having enough power. An analysis of public data by the nonprofit GridClue ranks California 49th of the 50 states in resilience — or the ability to avoid blackouts by having more electricity available than homes and businesses need at peak hours… The state has already extended the lives of Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant as well as some natural gas-fueled plants in an attempt to avoid blackouts on sweltering days when power use surges… “I’m just surprised that the state isn’t tracking this, with so much attention on power and water use here in California,” said Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside. Ren and his colleagues calculated that the global use of AI could require as much fresh water in 2027 as that now used by four to six countries the size of Denmark.

Driving the data center construction is money. Today’s stock market rewards companies that say they are investing in AI. Electric utilities profit as power use rises. And local governments benefit from the property taxes paid by data centers.

The article notes a Goldman Sachs estimate that by 2030, data centers could consume up to 11% of all U.S. power demand — up from 3% now. And it shows how the sprawling build-out of data centers across America is impacting surrounding communities:

The article notes that California’s biggest concentration of data centers — more than 50 near the Silicon Valley city of Santa Clara — are powered by a utility emitting “more greenhouse gas than the average California electric utility because 23% of its power for commercial customers comes from gas-fired plants. Another 35% is purchased on the open market where the electricity’s origin can’t be traced.” Consumer electric rates are rising “as the municipal utility spends heavily on transmission lines and other infrastructure,” while the data centers now consume 60% of the city’s electricity.

Energy officials in northern Virginia “have proposed a transmission line to shore up the grid that would depend on coal plants that had been expected to be shuttered.”

In 2022 an Oregon newspaper discovered Google data centers were consuming 29% of one city’s water supply.

“Earlier this year, Pacific Gas & Electric told investors that its customers have proposed more than two dozen data centers, requiring 3.5 gigawatts of power — the output of three new nuclear reactors.”

To build the massive datacenters generative AI requires, major companies like Amazon and Microsoft “are going nuclear,” reports CIO magazine. AWS:
Earlier this year, AWS paid $650 million to purchase Talen Energy’s Cumulus Data Assets, a 960-megawatt nuclear-powered data center on site at Talen’s Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, nuclear plant, with additional data centers planned — pending approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency… In addition to its purchase of the Cumulus data center, AWS will have access to nuclear energy as part of a 10-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) from the Susquehanna site.

Microsoft:
Last year, Constellation signed a deal giving Microsoft the rights to receive up to 35% of its power from nuclear sources in addition to its existing solar and wind purchases from Constellation for Microsoft’s Boydton, Va., data center. Microsoft has also signed a nuclear carbon credits deal with Ontario Power Generation for its operations in Canada.

The broader industry:
Many of the deals under discussion are with existing nuclear power providers for hyperscalars [large-scale datacenters] to access energy or to employ small module nuclear reactors (SMRs) with smaller carbon footprints that will be annexed to existing nuclear power plants. Nucor, Oklo, Rolls-Royce SMR, Westinghouse Electric, Moltex Energy, Terrestrial Energy, General Electric, Hitachi Nuclear Energy, and X-energy are among the roster of companies with SMRs under development to meet the growing needs of AI data centers…

One energy analyst does not expect nuclear SMRs to be operational until 2030, yet he and many others acknowledge the need for sustainable, carbon-free alternatives to electricity, wind, and solar is very pressing. “Today’s electric grids are struggling to keep up with demand, even as datacenter companies are planning huge new additions to their fleets to power generative AI applications. As a result, companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are increasingly taking matters into their own hands and getting creative. They are now looking at on-site nuclear-based SMRs, and even fusion reactors,” says Peter Kelly-Detwiler, principal of Northbridge Energy Partners. “This global arms race for power arose pretty quickly, and it’s like nothing we have ever seen before.”

While its analysis is preliminary, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming over 2 percent of the US’s electricity. That’s roughly the equivalent of having added an additional state to the grid over just the last three years.

Training large language models is an incredibly power-intensive process that has an immense carbon footprint. Keeping data centers running requires a ludicrous amount of electricity that could generate substantial amounts of greenhouse emissions — depending, of course, on the energy’s source. Now, the Verge reports, Microsoft is betting so big on AI that its pushing forward with a plan to power them using nuclear reactors. Yes, you read that right; a recent job listing suggests the company is planning to grow its energy infrastructure with the use of small modular reactors (SMR)…

But before Microsoft can start relying on nuclear power to train its AIs, it’ll have plenty of other hurdles to overcome. For one, it’ll have to source a working SMR design. Then, it’ll have to figure out how to get its hands on a highly enriched uranium fuel that these small reactors typically require, as The Verge points out. Finally, it’ll need to figure out a way to store all of that nuclear waste long term…

Other than nuclear fission, Microsoft is also investing in nuclear fusion, a far more ambitious endeavor, given the many decades of research that have yet to lead to a practical power system. Nevertheless, the company signed a power purchase agreement with Helion, a fusion startup founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this year, with the hopes of buying electricity from it as soon as 2028.

Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”

By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University. The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action — although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.

“We are very quickly about to lose the Arctic summer sea-ice cover, basically independent of what we are doing,” Dirk Notz, a climate scientist at the University of Hamburg in Germany tells the New York Times’ Raymond Zhong. “We’ve been waiting too long now to do something about climate change to still protect the remaining ice.” An ice-free summer, also called a “blue ocean event,” will happen when the sea ice drops below one million square kilometers (386,102 square miles), writes Jonathan Bamber, a professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol, in the Conversation. This equates to just 15 percent of the Arctic’s seasonal minimum ice cover of the late 1970s, per the Times.

Previous assessments using models have estimated an ice-free summer under high and intermediate emissions scenarios by 2050. But researchers noticed differences between what climate models predicted about what would happen to sea ice and what they’ve actually seen through observations, according to Bob Weber of the Canadian Press. “The models, on average, underestimate sea ice decline compared with observations,” says Nathan Gillett, an environment and climate change Canada scientist, to Weber.

Now, in a new study published in Nature Communications, Notz, Gillett and their colleagues tweaked these models to more closely fit satellite data collected over the past 40 years. Using these modified models, the researchers projected ice changes under different possible levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Their paper suggests that regardless of emissions scenario, “we may experience an unprecedented ice-free Arctic climate in the next decade or two.” Under a high emissions scenario, the Arctic could see a sustained loss of sea ice from August until as late as October before the 2080s, lead author Seung-Ki Min, a climate scientist at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, tells CNN’s Rachel Ramirez.

This year, nations are projected to emit roughly 36.6 billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide by burning coal, natural gas and oil for energy, according to new data from the Global Carbon Project. That’s 1 percent more than the world emitted in 2021 and slightly more than the previous record in 2019, which came before the coronavirus pandemic caused a temporary drop in global energy use and emissions.

The findings were released at the United Nations climate change summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, where world leaders have gathered to discuss how to avert catastrophic levels of warming. Scientists have warned that the world as a whole will need to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by around midcentury in order to stabilize global temperatures and minimize the risks from deadly heat waves, sea-level rise and ecosystem collapse. That deadline is getting harder to hit, experts said, with each passing year. “Every year that emissions go up makes it that much more challenging to bring them back down again by a certain date,” said Glen Peters, a research director at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, who is one of more than 100 scientists involved in the research.

The WMO found there was the biggest year-on-year jump in methane concentrations in 2020 and 2021 since systematic measurements began almost 40 years ago. Methane levels have risen rapidly in recent years, puzzling scientists. Some blamed it on an increase in fracking in the US but this came into doubt as industrial emissions were not showing a similarly sharp rise.

Now the theory is that the methane rise could be caused by activities of microbes in wetlands, rice paddies and the guts of ruminants. Rising temperatures have caused the ideal conditions for microbial methane production, as they enjoy warm, damp areas. Carbon dioxide levels are also soaring, with the jump from 2020 to 2021 larger than the annual growth rate over the past decade. Measurements from WMO’s global atmosphere watch network stations show these levels continue to rise. These greenhouse gases cause global heating, with the warming effect rising by 50% between 1990 and 2021. Carbon dioxide comprised about 80% of this increase. According to the WMO, carbon dioxide concentrations in 2021 were 415.7 parts per million, methane was 1908 parts per billion (ppb) and nitrous oxide was 334.5 ppb. These are respectively 149%, 262% and 124% of pre-industrial levels.

The European continent is bearing the brunt of climate change, warming at a rate that is twice as fast as the global average, a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) found. The report analyzed 30 years’ worth of data from 1991 onwards, revealing a disconcerting trend of speedy warming across Europe that is faster than the warming experienced by any other continent. Average temperatures in Europe were rising at a rate of 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade over the studied period, reaching an overall average of 2.2 degrees C (4 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels. That is way above the 1.5 degree C (2.7 degrees F) limit set by the international climatology community with the goal of minimizing devastating environmental effects of climate change.

The report, which was compiled in cooperation with the European Earth-observation program Copernicus, stated that Europeans are already feeling the pinch of this warming. According to estimates, the summer of 2022 was the driest in 500 years, with widespread water shortage and wildfires affecting even those nations that are usually accustomed to wetter summers. Alpine glaciers lost about one hundred feet (30 meters) in ice thickness from 1997 to 2021 as a result of the warming, according to the report. In 2021 alone, weather related disasters, mostly related to floods and storms, caused damages worth $50 billion across all European countries.

Scientists don’t know exactly why Europe is warming so fast, Samantha Burgess, deputy director for climate change services at Copernicus told Space.com in a previous interview. The fast-paced warming may have something to do with the proximity of the Arctic, which is by far the world’s fastest warming region. “We know that the Arctic is warming about three times faster than the global average rate,” Burgess told Space.com last year. “It’s already 3 degrees C [5.4 degrees F] warmer than in the pre-industrial times. It is quite complicated to unpick the scientific reasons behind why the warming is happening so much faster there.” […] The new WMO report states that regardless of emission reduction efforts, temperatures in all regions of Europe will continue to rise at a rate higher than the global average.

The WMO found there was the biggest year-on-year jump in methane concentrations in 2020 and 2021 since systematic measurements began almost 40 years ago. Methane levels have risen rapidly in recent years, puzzling scientists. Some blamed it on an increase in fracking in the US but this came into doubt as industrial emissions were not showing a similarly sharp rise.

Now the theory is that the methane rise could be caused by activities of microbes in wetlands, rice paddies and the guts of ruminants. Rising temperatures have caused the ideal conditions for microbial methane production, as they enjoy warm, damp areas. Carbon dioxide levels are also soaring, with the jump from 2020 to 2021 larger than the annual growth rate over the past decade. Measurements from WMO’s global atmosphere watch network stations show these levels continue to rise. These greenhouse gases cause global heating, with the warming effect rising by 50% between 1990 and 2021. Carbon dioxide comprised about 80% of this increase. According to the WMO, carbon dioxide concentrations in 2021 were 415.7 parts per million, methane was 1908 parts per billion (ppb) and nitrous oxide was 334.5 ppb. These are respectively 149%, 262% and 124% of pre-industrial levels.

Despite intensifying warnings in recent years, governments and businesses have not been changing fast enough, according to the United in Science report published on Tuesday. The consequences are already being seen in increasingly extreme weather around the world, and we are in danger of provoking “tipping points” in the climate system that will mean more rapid and in some cases irreversible shifts.

Recent flooding in Pakistan, which the country’s climate minister claimed had covered a third of the country in water, is the latest example of extreme weather that is devastating swathes of the globe. The heatwave across Europe including the UK this summer, prolonged drought in China, a megadrought in the US and near-famine conditions in parts of Africa also reflect increasingly prevalent extremes of weather. The secretary general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, said: “There is nothing natural about the new scale of these disasters. They are the price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction. This year’s United in Science report shows climate impacts heading into uncharted territory of destruction.”

Days after Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, touted the company’s efforts to combat climate misinformation in a blog as the Glasgow summit began, conservative media network Newsmax ran an ad on Facebook (FB.O) that called man-made global warming a “hoax.” The ad, which had multiple versions, garnered more than 200,000 views.

In another, conservative commentator Candace Owens said, “apparently we’re just supposed to trust our new authoritarian government” on climate science, while a U.S. libertarian think-tank ran an ad on how “modern doomsayers” had been wrongly predicting climate crises for decades. Newsmax, Owens and the Daily Wire, which paid for the ad from Owens’s page, did not respond to requests for comment. Facebook, which recently changed its name to Meta, does not have a specific policy on climate misinformation in ads or unpaid posts. Alphabet’s Google said last month it would no longer allow ads that contradict scientific consensus on climate change on YouTube and its other services, though it would allow content that discusses false claims.

As the world battles historic droughts, landscape-altering wildfires and deadly floods, a landmark report from global scientists says the window is rapidly closing to cut our reliance on fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic changes that would transform life as we know it. The state-of-the-science report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world has rapidly warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, and is now careening toward 1.5 degrees — a critical threshold that world leaders agreed warming should remain below to avoid worsening impacts.

Only by making deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, while also removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, can we halt the precipitous trend. “Bottom line is that we have zero years left to avoid dangerous climate change, because it’s here,” Michael E. Mann, a lead author of the IPCC’s 2001 report, told CNN. Unlike previous assessments, Monday’s report concludes it is “unequivocal” that humans have caused the climate crisis and confirms that “widespread and rapid changes” have already occurred, some of them irreversibly.

That is due in part to the breakneck pace at which the planet has been recently warming, faster than scientists have previously observed. Since 2018, when the panel published a special report on the significance of 1.5-degrees, greenhouse gas emissions have continued mostly unabated and have pushed global temperatures higher. Even under the IPCC’s most optimistic scenario, in which the world’s emissions begin to drop sharply today and are reduced to net zero by 2050, global temperature will still peak above the 1.5-degree threshold before falling. In a statement, UN Secretary-General Antanio Guterres called the report “a code red for humanity,” and noted the 1.5-degree threshold is “perilously close.” “The only way to prevent exceeding this threshold is by urgently stepping up our efforts, and pursuing the most ambitious path,” Guterres said.

A data center can easily use up to 1.25 million gallons of water each day — and “More data centers are being built every day by some of America’s largest technology companies,” reports NBC News, “including Amazon, Microsoft and Google and used by millions of customers.”

Almost 40 percent of them are in the United States, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft account for more than half of the total. The U.S. also has at least 1,800 “colocation” data centers, warehouses filled with a variety of smaller companies’ server hardware that share the same cooling system, electricity and security, according to Data Center Map. They are typically smaller than hyperscale data centers but, research has shown, more resource intensive as they maintain a variety of computer systems operating at different levels of efficiency.

Many data center operators are drawn to water-starved regions in the West, in part due to the availability of solar and wind energy. Researchers at Virginia Tech estimate that one-fifth of data centers draw water from moderately to highly stressed watersheds, mostly in the Western United States, according to a paper published in April…

The growth in the industry shows no signs of slowing. The research company Gartner predicts that spending on global data center infrastructure will reach $200 billion this year, an increase of 6 percent from 2020, followed by 3-4 percent annually over the next three years. This growth comes at a time of record temperatures and drought in the United States, particularly in the West. “The typical data center uses about 3-5 million gallons of water per day — the same amount of water as a city of 30,000-50,000 people,” said Venkatesh Uddameri, professor and director of the Water Resources Center at Texas Tech University. Although these data centers have become much more energy and water efficient over the last decade, and don’t use as much water as other industries such as agriculture, this level of water use can still create potential competition with local communities over the water supply in areas where water is scarce, he added…

Sergio Loureiro, vice president of core operations for Microsoft, said that the company has pledged to be “water positive” by 2030, which means it plans to replenish more water than it consumes globally. This includes reducing the company’s water use and investing in community replenishment and conservation projects near where it builds facilities.

Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

Carbon dioxide levels are now higher than at anytime in the past 3.6 million years. Levels of the two most important anthropogenic greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic response, NOAA announced today. The global surface average for carbon dioxide (CO2), calculated from measurements collected at NOAA’s remote sampling locations, was 412.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2020, rising by 2.6 ppm during the year. The global rate of increase was the fifth-highest in NOAA’s 63-year record, following 1987, 1998, 2015 and 2016. The annual mean at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii was 414.4 ppm during 2020.

The economic recession was estimated to have reduced carbon emissions by about 7 percent during 2020. Without the economic slowdown, the 2020 increase would have been the highest on record, according to Pieter Tans, senior scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. Since 2000, the global CO2 average has grown by 43.5 ppm, an increase of 12 percent.

The atmospheric burden of CO2 is now comparable to where it was during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period around 3.6 million years ago, when concentrations of carbon dioxide ranged from about 380 to 450 parts per million. During that time sea level was about 78 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.

Also: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-carbon-dioxide-highest-level-million-years/

The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said.

The planet’s geographic north and south poles are the point where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed. Changes in how the Earth’s mass is distributed around the planet cause the axis, and therefore the poles, to move.

In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions.

The scientists found the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward in 1995 and that the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than from 1981 to 1995.

Since 1980, the position of the poles has moved about 4 metres in distance.

“The accelerated decline [in water stored on land] resulting from glacial ice melting is the main driver of the rapid polar drift after the 1990s,” concluded the team, led by Shanshan Deng, from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Gravity data from the Grace satellite, launched in 2002, had been used to link glacial melting to movements of the pole in 2005 and 2012, both following increases in ice losses. But Deng’s research breaks new ground by extending the link to before the satellite’s launch, showing human activities have been shifting the poles since the 1990s, almost three decades ago.

The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, showed glacial losses accounted for most of the shift, but it is likely that the pumping up of groundwater also contributed to the movements.

Groundwater is stored under land but, once pumped up for drinking or agriculture, most eventually flows to sea, redistributing its weight around the world. In the past 50 years, humanity has removed 18tn tonnes of water from deep underground reservoirs without it being replaced.

Vincent Humphrey, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and not involved in the new research said it showed how human activities have redistributed huge amounts of water around the planet: “It tells you how strong this mass change is – it’s so big that it can change the axis of the Earth.” However, the movement of the Earth’s axis is not large enough to affect daily life, he said: it could change the length of a day, but only by milliseconds.

Prof Jonathan Overpeck, at the University of Arizona, US, told the Guardian previously that changes to the Earth’s axis highlighted “how real and profoundly large an impact humans are having on the planet”.

Some scientists argue that the scale of this impact means a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared. Since the mid-20th century, there has been a marked acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the destruction of wildlife and the transformation of land by farming, deforestation and development.

Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31 percent more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers.

Scientists blame human-caused climate change.

Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. That’s enough melt flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year.

Half the world’s glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada.

Almost all the world’s glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia that are fed by increased precipitation, the melt rates are accelerating around the world.

Twitter accounts run by machines are a major source of climate change disinformation that might drain support from policies to address rising temperatures. In the weeks surrounding former President Trump’s announcement about withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, accounts suspected of being bots accounted for roughly a quarter of all tweets about climate change, according to new research. “If we are to effectively address the existential crisis of climate change, bot presence in the online discourse is a reality that scientists, social movements and those concerned about democracy have to better grapple with,” wrote Thomas Marlow, a postdoctoral researcher at the New York University, Abu Dhabi, campus, and his co-authors. Their paper published last week in the journal Climate Policy is part of an expanding body of research about the role of bots in online climate discourse.

The new focus on automated accounts is driven partly by the way they can distort the climate conversation online. Marlow’s team measured the influence of bots on Twitter’s climate conversation by analyzing 6.8 million tweets sent by 1.6 million users between May and June 2017. Trump made his decision to ditch the climate accord on June 1 of that year. President Biden reversed the decision this week. From that dataset, the team ran a random sample of 184,767 users through the Botometer, a tool created by Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, which analyzes accounts and determines the likelihood that they are run by machines.

Researchers also categorized the 885,164 tweets those users had sent about climate change during the two-month study period. The most popular categories were tweets about climate research and news. Marlow and the other researchers determined that nearly 9.5% of the users in their sample were likely bots. But those bots accounted for 25% of the total tweets about climate change on most days. […] The researchers weren’t able to determine who deployed the bots. But they suspect the seemingly fake accounts could have been created by “fossil-fuel companies, petro-states or their surrogates,” all of which have a vested interest in preventing or delaying action on climate change.