This Week on Earth: Jan 30-Feb 6

Source: Flickr

World

In 2023, the Earth was on average more than 1.5°C hotter than it was before industrialization, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation service that uses satellites to collect data about the planet. Furthermore, this past January was the warmest ever recorded at 1.66°C hotter than the average pre-industrial temperature for January.

The Paris Agreement, a 2015 climate treaty signed by 196 countries, had a stated goal of holding global warming under a limit of 1.5°C but also set a hard limit of 2.0°C. With this new data, it appears that the first threshold has been crossed not even a decade after the agreement went into effect. Though this landmark does not indicate that the Paris Agreement has failed, it highlights the urgency of the climate crisis.

“Exceeding 1.5°C in one year underlines the rapidly shrinking window of time humanity has to make deep emissions cuts and avoid dangerous climate change,” said Matt Patterson, a researcher of atmospheric physics at the University of Oxford.

Recently, global warming has been driven by a confluence of fossil fuel consumption and El Niño, a weather phenomenon that brings high amounts of precipitation to the Gulf Coast. As a result, natural disasters have also become more frequent and devastating.

Chile

Wildfires have been ravaging central Chile for over a week and killed over 112 people as of Sunday, according to Chile’s Forensic Medicine Service. The destruction was concentrated in the city of Vina del Mar, where 200 people were reported missing and 1,600 are now homeless. Curfews were enacted in the city and surrounding areas to maintain order while emergency services worked to combat the inferno and evacuate survivors. 

The fire started during a period of high temperatures and drought caused by El Niño. Chilean President Gabriel Boric has suggested that it could have been caused intentionally. 

United States

SpaceX launched NASA’s Pace climate satellite into orbit aboard a Falcon rocket this past Thursday. Pace, short for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem, will study ocean biology and the Earth’s atmosphere for the next three years. Using data collected by its three onboard instruments, the satellite will show scientists how atmospheric pollutants interact with algae and plankton. On a macroscopic scale, Pace can help forecast extreme weather events and record changes to the planet caused by global warming.

“It’s going to be an unprecedented view of our home planet,” said project scientist Jeremy Werdell.