Climate

Earth now is hotter than it’s been at any time in recorded history.

Average global temperatures shattered records on two consecutive days last week, reaching 17.09° Celsius on July 21 and then inching up still more the next day, to 17.15° C, or nearly 63° Fahrenheit. That’s almost an entire degree Celsius hotter than the planet’s average temperature of 16.25° C for every July 22 from 1990 to 2020.

Those new heat records come amid 13 months in a row of record-breaking temperatures on Earth — not just over land, but in the oceans too (SN: 4/29/24). Before 2023, the record highest temperature was 16.8 °C, set in August 2016. Since mid-2023, the planet has broken that 2016 threshold 58 times. More

Abby Wallace is the digital engagement producer at Science News. She has an undergraduate degree in biology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland — College Park. More

Earth’s plants aren’t holding onto carbon as long as we thought.

A new analysis of pulses of radioactive carbon-14 from 20th-century bomb tests reveals that plants stock more carbon in short-lived tissues such as leaves than previously estimated, scientists report in the June 21 Science. That means that this carbon is probably more vulnerable to re-release to the atmosphere — potentially altering estimates of how much anthropogenic carbon the biosphere can hold, the team says. More

Hurricane Beryl, the Atlantic Ocean’s first hurricane in 2024, began roaring across the Caribbean in late June, wreaking devastation on Grenada and other Windward Islands as it grew in power. It’s now swirling on like a buzzsaw toward Jamaica and Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.

Beryl is a record-breaking storm, commanding attention in a year already filled with record-breaking climate events (SN: 6/21/24; SN: 4/30/24).

On June 30, the storm became the earliest Atlantic hurricane on record to achieve Category 4 status. Just a day later, it had intensified further, becoming the earliest Atlantic storm on record to achieve Category 5 status, with sustained winds of about 270 kilometers per hour, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. (As of late July 2, the storm has weakened slightly but remains a powerful Category 4 ahead of making landfall in Jamaica.) More

On a banana plantation in rural Australia, a second-generation farming family spreads crushed volcanic rock between rows of ripening fruit. Eight thousand kilometers away, two young men in central India dust the same type of rock powder onto their dry-season rice paddy, while across the ocean, a farmer in Kenya sprinkles the powder by hand onto his potato plants. Far to the north in foggy Scotland, a plot of potatoes gets the same treatment, as do cattle pastures on sunny slopes in southern Brazil.

And from Michigan to Mississippi, farmers are scattering volcanic rock dust on their wheat, soy and corn fields with ag spreaders typically reserved for dispersing crushed limestone to adjust soil acidity. More

Warming UpMadeleine OrrBloomsbury Sigma, $28

It’s easy to think of sports as an escape from reality, removed from the glaring problems of our world. Researcher Madeleine Orr shatters that illusion in Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport. In her debut book, Orr shepherds readers through an at-times overwhelming deluge of all the ways climate change is disrupting sports around the world, providing a compelling case for action from athletes, sports leagues and fans alike. More

June is the new July. Or maybe even August. At least it feels that way, as summer heat has already soared to record highs.

In the United States, West Coast residents sweltered earlier in the month as a high-pressure weather system called a heat dome trapped record-breaking high temperatures over the region (SN: 7/19/23). Now, another heat dome is bringing another wave of extreme heat to swaths of the Midwest and East Coast, with temperatures forecasted to reach close to 38° Celsius (100° Fahrenheit) in many cities. More

In the Arctic, a mysterious atmospheric phenomenon generates some of the oddest clouds on Earth.

Up there, streaky wisps can swiftly transform into towering thunderstorms. These strange clouds are not just visually mesmerizing. Nor are they just drivers of powerful storms. They may also play a role in the Arctic’s breakneck pace of warming, researchers say, a pace about four times as fast as that of the rest of the planet (SN: 8/11/22).

But climate simulations of the region can’t accurately incorporate the birth and evolution of these clouds: There’s simply too little known about the forces that shape them. More