An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Human life "as we know it" could be threatened by climate change, economists at JP Morgan have warned. In a hard-hitting report to clients, the economists said that without action being taken there could be "catastrophic outcomes." The bank said the research came from a team that was "wholly independent from the company as a whole." Climate campaigners have previously criticized JP Morgan for its investments in fossil fuels. The firm's stark report was sent to clients and seen by BBC News. While JP Morgan economists have warned about unpredictability in climate change before, the language used in the new report was very forceful.

"We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened," JP Morgan economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray said. Carbon emissions in the coming decades "will continue to affect the climate for centuries to come in a way that is likely to be irreversible," they said, adding that climate change action should be motivated "by the likelihood of extreme events." Climate change could affect economic growth, shares, health, and how long people live, they said. It could put stresses on water, cause famine, and cause people to be displaced or migrate. Climate change could also cause political stress, conflict, and it could hit biodiversity and species survival, the report warned. To mitigate climate change net carbon emissions need to be cut to zero by 2050. To do this, there needed to be a global tax on carbon, the report authors said. But they said that "this is not going to happen anytime soon."

Google's image-labeling AI tool will no longer label pictures with gender tags like "man" and "woman." From a report: In the email, Google cites its ethical rules on AI as the basis for the change. This is a progressive move by Google -- and one that will hopefully set a precedent for the rest of the AI industry. Ethics aside, Google also says it's made this change because it isn't possible to infer gender from someone's appearance. Google is correct on that count. AI's tendency toward a gender binary might be helpful in blunt categorization, but there are also many gender identities that fall on the spectrum outside of "man" and "woman." Though Google doesn't go as far as saying so in its policies, removing the gender binary from its AI actively makes the software more inclusive of transgender and non-binary people. It's a move that the rest of the tech industry would do well to emulate.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says he's launching a $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund that will issue grants aimed at addressing climate change -- a move that comes less than a month after hundreds of Amazon employees criticized what they saw as the company's weak commitment to tackling the issue. From a report: Bezos, who's the world's richest individual with a net worth estimated at nearly $130 billion, unveiled his philanthropic initiative in an Instagram post. "Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet," he wrote. "I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share."

The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time. From a report: There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they've agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3 Celsius. It's an outcome that would be disastrous -- flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat -- but there's been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations. Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5C, a nightmare scenario.

The scientists involved couldn't agree on why -- or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began "talking to each other like, 'What'd you get?', 'What'd you get?'" said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model. "The question is whether they've overshot," said Mark Zelinka, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Researchers are starting to put together answers, a task that will take months at best, and there's not yet agreement on how to interpret the hotter results. The reason for worry is that these same models have successfully projected global warming for a half century. Their output continues to frame all major scientific, policy and private-sector climate goals and debates, including the sixth encyclopedic assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due out next year. If the same amount of climate pollution will bring faster warming than previously thought, humanity would have less time to avoid the worst impacts.

The 2010s were the hottest decade ever measured on Earth, and 2019 was the second-hottest year ever measured, scientists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today. From a report: After a year of flash droughts, rampant wildfires, and searing heatwaves that set all-time records across Europe and turned parts of Greenland's ice sheet into slush, the finding was not a surprise to researchers, or likely anyone else. But it capped an anxious decade that saw human-caused climate change transform from a far-off threat to an everyday fact of life. Last year was 1.8 degree Fahrenheit -- or just under one degree Celsius -- warmer than the 20th century average, Gavin Schmidt, the chief climate scientist at NASA, said at a briefing announcing the news. Almost everywhere on the planet's surface was warmer than average, though the Arctic was especially searing. "Every decade since the 1960s has been warmer than the decade previous," he said.

In short, it's bad, but you probably knew that already. At least four different groups of scientists, each working independently, have now concluded that the 2010s were the hottest decade of the modern era. (NASA and NOAA start this era at 1880, when they say weather record-keeping became reliable and widespread enough to trust, but the nonprofit research agency Berkeley Earth argues that 2019 was the second warmest year since at least 1850.) What's worse is that greenhouse-gas pollution from fossil fuels, which are the biggest driver of climate change, also surged to an all-time high last year, according to a preliminary estimate. Deke Arndt, a chief climate scientist at NOAA, said at a briefing today that "an obvious signal" of this greenhouse-gas-powered heating had appeared in the upper layers of the ocean, which broke the all-time heat record last year.

Australia's wildfires have already burned at least 12 million acres, reports NBC News, with more than 100 blazes still active. "And the season has yet to reach its peak." The ability of animals to recover from Australia's wildfires is also a concern. Scientists are estimating that more than half a billion animals have already died in the fires, a figure that Stuart Blanch, a forest and woodland conservation policy manager at the World Wildlife Fund-Australia, called conservative... Blanch said animals generally recover over the subsequent years and decades, but he added that Australia has not dealt with fires of this size and intensity before, and there are concerns that entire species or subspecies will be wiped out. "Ecologists have much lower confidence that wildlife populations -- particularly the 1,000 threatened species across the continent -- will recover from such widespread and utter forest devastation," he told NBC News in an email...

The impact of these fires is also providing a stark warning about the kinds of natural disasters that can be exacerbated by climate change, which is lengthening wildfire seasons in Australia, according to Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "It's really shocking and really horrible and as much as I hate to say 'I told you so,' climate scientists have been warning about this for a very long time -- especially in Australia," she said. "We knew that if we have drought and a heat wave, the whole country is a tinderbox. We knew it was going to happen."

She said the biggest wildfires of the season typically break out in January or February, rather than in the spring. These earlier-than-usual blazes could portend a worrisome trend that is echoed around the world. "If you look at places like Portugal and Spain, they are seeing fires during the year when they didn't historically see them," Stevens-Rumann said. "In California, it's hard to find a month where there isn't a bad fire. This is one of those big concerns with climate change, that these fires are going to continue to be an issue."

Australia has experienced its hottest day on record with the national average temperature reaching a high of 40.9C (105.6F). The Bureau of Meteorology (Bom) said "extensive" heat on Tuesday exceeded the previous record of 40.3C set on 7 January 2013. From a report: Taking the average of maximum temperatures across the country is the most accurate measure of a heatwave. The record comes as the nation battles a severe drought and bushfire crisis. Forecasters had predicted the most intense heat would come later in the week, meaning the record could be broken again. As hundreds of fires rage, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been criticised for his response to the natural disasters and his government's climate policies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Weather Channel: Sea levels will continue to rise for the next three centuries even if governments meet carbon emissions pledges for 2030 set in the Paris climate agreement, a new study indicates. Greenhouse gas emissions from 2016 to 2030 alone would cause sea levels to increase nearly 8 inches (20 cm) by 2300, research led by Climate Analytics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research showed. And that doesn't take into account the effects of already irreversible melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, according to a news release about the study.

"Our results show that what we do today will have a huge effect in 2300. Twenty centimeters is very significant; it is basically as much sea-level rise as we've observed over the entire 20th century. To cause that with only 15 years of emissions is quite staggering," said Climate Analytics' Alexander Nauels, lead author of the study. The 8-inch increase is one-fifth of the nearly 40-inch total rise in sea levels expected by 2300, according to the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More than half of the 8-inch increase can be attributed to emissions from the world's top five polluters: China, the United States, the European Union, India and Russia, the study found. "Only stringent near-term emission reductions" aimed at preventing global temperatures from rising more than the Paris agreement goal would provide a chance of limiting long-term sea level rise to below 40 inches, the study said. Global greenhouse gas emissions, however, have not shown a sign of peaking since the adoption of the Paris agreement and the individual countries' pledges "are inadequate to put the global community on track to meet the Paris agreement Long-term Temperature Goal by the end of the 21st century."

By the end of this century, rising oceans will almost certainly flood the lands where tens of millions of people live as accelerating climate change warms the waters and melts ice sheets. From a report: But precise estimates of the vulnerable populations depend on precise measurements of the planet's topography, to understand just how close to sea level communities have settled. A new study that seeks to correct for known errors in earlier elevation models finds that researchers might have been undercounting the number of people exposed to rising tides by hundreds of millions. That's three to four times more people than previously projected, depending on the specific scenarios. If these higher estimates prove correct, it will dramatically increase the damages and casualties from sea-level rise, swell the costs of adaption efforts like constructing higher seawalls, and escalate mass migration away from the coasts. Many of the estimates to date have relied on essentially a three-dimensional map of the planet produced from a radar system that flew on board NASA's space shuttle Endeavour in 2000.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Many moons ago in Tibet, the Second Buddha transformed a fierce nyen (a malevolent mountain demon) into a neri (the holiest protective warrior god) called Khawa Karpo, who took up residence in the sacred mountain bearing his name. Khawa Karpo is the tallest of the Meili mountain range, piercing the sky at 6,740 metres (22,112ft) above sea level. Local Tibetan communities believe that conquering Khawa Karpo is an act of sacrilege and would cause the deity to abandon his mountain home. Nevertheless, there have been several failed attempts by outsiders -- the best known by an international team of 17, all of whom died in an avalanche during their ascent on 3 January 1991. After much local petitioning, in 2001 Beijing passed a law banning mountaineering there.

However, Khawa Karpo continues to be affronted more insidiously. Over the past two decades, the Mingyong glacier at the foot of the mountain has dramatically receded. Villagers blame disrespectful human behaviour, including an inadequacy of prayer, greater material greed and an increase in pollution from tourism. People have started to avoid eating garlic and onions, burning meat, breaking vows or fighting for fear of unleashing the wrath of the deity. Mingyong is one of the world's fastest shrinking glaciers, but locals cannot believe it will die because their own existence is intertwined with it. Yet its disappearance is almost inevitable.

Khawa Karpo lies at the world's "third pole." This is how glaciologists refer to the Tibetan plateau, home to the vast Hindu Kush-Himalaya ice sheet, because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic -- about 15% of the global total. However, a quarter of its ice has been lost since 1970. This month, in a long-awaited special report on the cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists will warn that up to two-thirds of the region's remaining glaciers are on track to disappear by the end of the century. It is expected a third of the ice will be lost in that time even if the internationally agreed target of limiting global warming by 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is adhered to.

Kate Marvel, writing for Scientific American: We are, I promise you, not doomed, no matter what Jonathan Franzen says. We could be, of course, if we decided we really wanted to. We have had the potential for total annihilation since 1945, and the capacity for localized mayhem for as long as societies have existed. Climate change offers the easy choice of a slow destruction through inaction like the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling pot. And there are times when the certainty of inevitability seems comforting. Fighting is exhausting; fighting when victory seems uncertain or unlikely even more so. It's tempting to retreat to a special place -- a cozy nook, a mountaintop, a summer garden -- wait for the apocalypse to run its course, and hope it will be gentle.

[...] It is precisely the fact that we understand the potential driver of doom that changes it from a foregone conclusion to a choice, a terrible outcome in the universe of all possible futures. I run models through my brain; I check them with the calculations I do on a computer. This is not optimism, or even hope. Even in the best of all possible worlds, I cannot offer the certainty of safety. Doom is a possibility; it may that we have already awakened a sleeping monster that will in the end devour the world. It may be that the very fact of human nature, whatever that is, forecloses any possibility of concerted action. But I am a scientist, which means I believe in miracles. I live on one. We are improbable life on a perfect planet. No other place in the universe has nooks or perfect mountaintops or small and beautiful gardens. A flower in a garden is an exquisite thing, rooted in soil formed from old rocks broken by weather. It breathes in sunlight and carbon dioxide and conjures its food as if by magic. For the flower to exist, a confluence of extraordinary things must happen. It needs land and air and light and water, all in the right proportion, and all at the right time. Pick it, isolate it, and watch it wither. Flowers, like people, cannot grow alone.

The Grim Reefer shares a report from Live Science: For the first time, scientists have created a permanently magnetic liquid. These liquid droplets can morph into various shapes and be externally manipulated to move around, according to a new study. Thomas Russell, a distinguished professor of polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his team created these liquid magnets by accident while experimenting with 3D printing liquids at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (where Russell is also a visiting faculty scientist). The goal was to create materials that are solid but have characteristics of liquids for various energy applications.

One day, postdoctoral student and lead author Xubo Liu noticed 3D-printed material, made from magnetized particles called iron-oxides, spinning around in unison on a magnetic stir plate. So when the team realized the entire construct, not just the particles, had become magnetic, they decided to investigate further. Using a technique to 3D-print liquids, the scientists created millimeter-size droplets from water, oil and iron-oxides. The liquid droplets keep their shape because some of the iron-oxide particles bind with surfactants -- substances that reduce the surface tension of a liquid. The surfactants create a film around the liquid water, with some iron-oxide particles creating part of the filmy barrier, and the rest of the particles enclosed inside, Russell said. The team then placed the millimeter-size droplets near a magnetic coil to magnetize them. But when they took the magnetic coil away, the droplets demonstrated an unseen behavior in liquids -- they remained magnetized. (Magnetic liquids called ferrofluids do exist, but these liquids are only magnetized when in the presence of a magnetic field.) A video of the new material has been posted to YouTube. The researchers say their findings could lead to a revolutionary class of printable liquid devices for a variety of applications from artificial cells that deliver targeted cancer therapies to flexible liquid robots that can change their shape to adapt to their surroundings.

The scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming is likely to have passed 99% https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/24/scientific-consensus-on-humans-causing-global-warming-passes-99, according to the lead author of the most authoritative study on the subject, and could rise further after separate research that clears up some of the remaining doubts. From a report: Three studies published in Nature and Nature Geoscience use extensive historical data to show there has never been a period in the last 2,000 years when temperature changes have been as fast and extensive as in recent decades.

It had previously been thought that similarly dramatic peaks and troughs might have occurred in the past, including in periods dubbed the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly. But the three studies use reconstructions based on 700 proxy records of temperature change, such as trees, ice and sediment, from all continents that indicate none of these shifts took place in more than half the globe at any one time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: As the globe warms in the years ahead, days with extreme heat are forecasted to skyrocket across hundreds of U.S. cities, a new study suggests, perhaps even breaking the "heat index." By 2050, hundreds of U.S. cities could see an entire month each year with heat index temperatures above 100 degrees if nothing is done to rein in global warming. The heat index, also known as the apparent temperature, is what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature. This is the first study to take the heat index -- instead of just temperature -- into account when determining the impacts of global warming. The number of days per year when the heat index exceeds 100 degrees will more than double nationally, according to the study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Communications. On some days, conditions would be so extreme that they'd exceed the upper limit of the heat index, rendering it "incalculable," the study predicts. What is there to be done about this? "Rapidly reduce global warming emissions and help communities prepare for the extreme heat that is already inevitable," report co-author Astrid Caldas said. "Extreme heat is one of the climate change impacts most responsive to emissions reductions, making it possible to limit how extreme our hotter future becomes for today's children."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A Nasa-funded study found instability in the Thwaites glacier meant there would probably come a point when it was impossible to stop it flowing into the sea and triggering a 50cm sea level rise. Other Antarctic glaciers were likely to be similarly unstable. The Thwaites glacier, part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, is believed to pose the greatest risk for rapid future sea level rise. Research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal found it was likely to succumb to instability linked to the retreat of its grounding line on the seabed that would lead to it shedding ice faster than previously expected.

The researchers found a precise estimate of how much ice the glacier would shed in the next 50 to 800 years was not possible due to unpredictable climate fluctuations and data limitations. However, 500 simulations of different scenarios pointed to it losing stability. This increased uncertainty about future sea level rise but made the worst-case scenarios more likely. A complete loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet would be expected to increase global sea levels by about five meters (16ft), causing coastal cities around the world to become submerged.