An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Global heating will reach at least 1.8C under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, according to a UN report that warns every fraction of temperature rise intensifies destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion. The report by the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program confirmed overshooting the 1.5C goal inscribed in the landmark Paris agreement of 2015 was now "unavoidable" and, despite some progress in addressing the human-caused climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels, likely in the next few years. It said: "There are no good outcomes above 1.5C." Heating of up to 3C above preindustrial levels could lead to glaciers losing more than a quarter of their mass by 2100, raising sea levels by up to 13cm. Global food production could decline by up to 14% by 2050 if there are not effective strategies to adapt. Human health, water supplies, nature, cities, infrastructure and economies could all be severely damaged. Some losses would be irreversible. Many communities may have to relocate or change their livelihoods. The report said the best hope for humanity to limit damage was to adopt an "overshoot, peak and decline" pathway that required immediate and sustained greenhouse gas emissions cuts combined with steps to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It described the goal of net zero emissions -- increasingly politically contentious in some countries -- as "an essential milestone that cannot be skipped" and stressed carbon dioxide removal through steps such as establishing vast new forests must occur alongside, not as an alternative to, deep cuts in fossil pollution. Crucially, the authors of the report, titled Limiting Overshoot, said the average global temperature could be returned to 1.5C this century only if heating stayed below about 1.8C. They warned nature's capacity to store carbon was uncertain and would shrink the more the planet heats. [...] The report's authors cited earlier work that found limiting heating to about 1.8C required global emissions to be halved by 2035. They said existing national policies were projected to lead to at least 2.3C heating, but it would still be possible to limit stay below 2C if countries delivered on net zero emissions commitments by mid-century.

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Researchers have found that tiny electrical charges picked up by moving water droplets may be damaging cars and buildings like the Eiffel Tower. In experiments, thousands of charged droplets degraded Teflon and corroded the copper beneath it, while uncharged droplets caused no comparable damage. C&EN reports: For years, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research have studied how water droplets from rain, dew, ocean waves, and melting snow become electrically charged. They say the process is like tribocharging, which causes static when we rub certain objects together, such as a balloon on our hair or a sweater on our skin. "Water drops spontaneously become electrically charged when moving on different surfaces, such as plant leaves, insect wings, building walls, window glass, and plastic. This process, known as contact or sliding electrification, is analogous to tribocharging between solids," says study coauthor Zhongyuan Ni, a PhD candidate at Max Planck. "Water drops getting charged is not a new phenomenon, but for the past 200 years, people have not paid attention to this," Ni says. In 2023, Ni and colleagues set out to determine whether electrically charged water droplets affect the surfaces they contact. To find out, the team poured water over four common surfaces -- a plant leaf; polyvinyl chloride foam board; polystyrene glass; and perfluoro octadecyltrichlorosilane (PFOTS), a commonly used water-repelling coating -- and let it drip onto sheets of Teflon-coated copper tilted at 50 degrees. When the experiments began, the team would allow only a few dozen drops to fall onto the copper before using electron microscopy to examine it. The researchers repeatedly failed to find any evidence of decay. But one day, Ni just let the drops keep falling. "After thousands of drops, it looked like the drops were pinning onto the surface," he says. After inspecting the copper under the microscope, Ni got his first glimpse of the destructive strength of electrically charged water drops. After repeating the experiment several times with thousands rather than dozens of drops, the researchers found that the electrified water drops not only broke down the Teflon coating but also corroded the underlying copper. Up close, the copper sheets looked like scraped-up skin. But when the experiment was conducted with nonelectrified drops, neither the copper nor its Teflon coating was any worse for wear. Even though the drops contained only around 0.2 to 2.0 nanocoulombs of charge -- around one billionth of a standard unit -- the impact of the charged drops was significant. "The finding is important because it suggests that the electrical state of a water droplet, not just its chemical composition, acidity, or mechanical impact, can influence how corrosion begins," says Guangwen Zhou, a professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton University who was not involved in the study. "This perspective could open up new approaches to designing protective coatings and materials that are more resistant to corrosion in environments where charged water droplets are present."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The world's oceans are hotter than ever recorded, new data suggests, as they suffer from human-caused climate change and the growing El Nino weather phenomenon. The average surface temperature of the planet's seas outside the polar regions hit 21.1C (70F) on Saturday, according to figures from the European Copernicus climate change service. That edges past the 21.09C recorded on three separate days in March 2024, and is far above average for the time of year. [...] The data is based on sea temperatures 10m (32ft 10in) below the surface, using measurements from buoys, ships and satellites, which are combined to produce a global estimate. While the margin of record is currently very small and any global estimate comes with uncertainties, scientists say its timing is particularly notable. Average worldwide sea temperatures tend to reach their yearly peak in March or April, which corresponds to the end of summer in the southern hemisphere -- and not in August. The southern hemisphere contains more of the planet's ocean surface than the northern hemisphere and so exerts a bigger influence on average sea temperatures. What is especially concerning to scientists is that the oceans are already so hot when the natural El Nino weather phenomenon is still some way off its expected peak. "The fact that we are already breaking records is an early indicator of how strong the El Nino is becoming," said Dr Jeremy Grist, senior research fellow at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. "All things being equal we might expect the ocean temperature record to be broken again in March [or] April 2027," he added.

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A rapidly developing El Nino is already reaching record-setting levels for this time of year and is expected to intensify further over the coming months. "The El Nino has blossomed. It is off the charts. Usual measures of El Nino have blown past prior record levels in the period with good data, even though maximum effects are still several months in the future," writes renowned climate scientist James Hansen at Columbia University in New York in a newsletter sent today. Climate scientists disagree over whether it has already surpassed previous "super El Nino" events on every metric, but several say the signal is unprecedented in forecasts and could ultimately become the strongest modern event on record. New Scientist reports: There are different ways of measuring El Ninos, which occur when warm surface waters spread eastwards along the equator across the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Hansen thinks the best measure is how much warmer than usual the upper 300 meters of the eastern tropical Pacific becomes. "Our preferred metric, the heat anomaly in the upper 300 meters of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean... already exceeds the 1997-98 super El Nino," he writes. [...] What's clear is that this developing super El Nino will soon exceed previous events on all measures. "I have never seen an El Nino signal this intense in our forecasts," [Adam Scaife at the Met Office, the UK's national weather service] said in a statement released today. "If the forecast is accurate... then 2026 will far exceed our recent experience of El Nino and its worldwide climate influences." While Hansen is comparing the developing super El Nino to other modern events for which we have direct temperature records, Hayley Fowler at Newcastle University in the UK thinks it could also exceed historical events suspected to be even larger. "The super El Nino evolving in the Pacific will likely be the biggest ever recorded, reaching or exceeding the levels of the 1877-1878 El Nino which caused widespread impacts, including famines and around 50 million deaths (3-4 percent of the global population at the time), mostly across Asia and South America," Fowler said in a statement.

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