Quite right. Pollution reduction is essential. The piece is interesting for those trying to ascertain climate sensitivity and predict future warming.

Thanks Elliot, quite the moment of doom.

A high ECS suggests warming of at least 3ºC well before the end of the century.

Being at the high end of previous estimates, this work supports high climate sensitivity (ECS), meaning more warming will unfold as pollution levels decline. It also helps explain the recent acceleration of global warming and adds urgency to decarbonisation efforts.

The findings should help refine global climate models, offering policymakers and scientists more accurate climate predictions and insight into how environmental policy can protect human health.

By comparing NO2 levels with cloud droplets count, the relationship could be calculated. They found a 67% reduction in ships' cloud-altering abilities after the IMO regulations went into effect.

There has been high uncertainty about the strength of the aerosol effect. Groups report between 10 and 80%. The new study used shipping NO2 measurements as their indicator of shipping levels in the Red Sea and South Atlantic, since those emissions were not effected by the IMO2020 rule change.

These aerosol particles cause clouds to form with smaller, more numerous droplets, making them brighter and longer lasting, thus more reflective of sunlight. This creates a cooling effect, which has historically masked about one-third of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

In January 2020, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) mandated a major reduction in sulphur content in marine fuels to decrease air pollution. Aerosols from ship emissions, especially sulphate, influence cloud formation and brightness, which in turn affect Earth's energy balance.

When militia attacks disrupted the shipping lane in the Red Sea, many cargo ships were re-routed around the Cape of Good Hope. This provided researchers a unique opportunity to quantify aerosol-cloud interactions, reducing the largest source of uncertainty in global climate projections.

That’s not to say that any death from cold or hot should be trivialised, but perhaps the “benefits” of global warming are not as strong as the vested interests would have you believe.

In other words, most of the world’s hottest countries are not represented.

Another issue is that while cold deaths commonly appear on death records, heat deaths are often put down to heart attack, kidney failure or other chronic disease.

The main problem is that good data on heat deaths is not widely available. For example the study involved was not able to get any data from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, the Gulf states (except Kuwait), Indonesia or Melanesia. The only African country included was South Africa.

Both are big wins for the climate, and show that real progress happens when countries join forces. Read the full announcement: www.ccacoalition.org/news/ministe...

Thank you so much, I really appreciate the feedback.

The adaptation challenge is immense and needs to begin now to prepare our homes, infrastructure, society and agriculture for the future.

This was not an easy article to write as its like the plot of a disaster movie, but unfortunately this is non-fiction.

This is not some distant threat. Collapse is a process with every fraction of weakening driving increasing impacts such as cold winter extremes, European summer heatwaves, reduced rainfall, rapid sea level rise, shifted global rain belts and southern hemisphere warming.

The odds are stacked against us in preventing this disaster, but rapid and deep decarbonisation is our best hope. There is no longer a choice that reduces the risk to under 10%, but rapid action could reduce it to 25%.

In this article I look at the latest research to uncover what drives the AMOC, how it is vulnerable to global warming, why scientists are now confident of its weakening, what we can expect, not just in Europe and the American west coast, but globally, and what if anything we can do about it.