I read somewhere, with regards to the Trump administration, that experts on authoritarianism warn that you should keep a list of the changes that are happening so as not to forget the way things were, that the new normal is not normal. The erosion of civil liberties is exactly that: a slow chipping away at your fundamental rights, so that by the time you realise what is happening, it is already too late.

There’s a chance what’s going on with climate change is already too late, but only time will tell. This page maintains a list of phenomena around the world, related to global warming or climate change, and will be continually updated.

As a scientist, I feel it’s my duty encourage you to dig through to the original source when possible. Almost always, reporting about scientific progress is exaggerated and distorted. To start, here’s a primer on climate change by the NYT.

  • 7/2018 The Teacher-Friendly Guide™ to Climate Change looks like a great resource for teaching about climate change at the high school level. The e-book is free to download!

  • 6/2018 Carbon dioxide toxicity and climate change. “The toxicity of CO2 for breathing has been well defined for high concentrations but it remains effectively unknown what level will compromise human health when individuals are perpetually exposed for their lifetime. There is evidence from the few studies of long-term low-level exposure that permanent exposure, to CO2 levels predicted by the end of the century, will have significant effects on humans.”

  • 5/2018 The third-degree world: cities that will be drowned by global warming

  • 5/2018 AirVisual Earth. Watch air pollution flow across the planet in real time. Also, a Nature article on the carbon footprint of global tourism. and a visualisation of the fact that every Google search results in CO2 emissions.

  • 5/2018 Alaskan Sea Ice

  • 4/2018 Antartica is turning into a snow globe. “Warmer temperatures mean more moisture in the air, which creates better conditions for snow over Antartica. So really, this is a sign of the same climate problems causing droughts, storms, and floods.” Further north, the Atlantic’s circulation is weakest in 1600 years. “If hemisphere-spanning currents are slowing, greater flooding and extreme weather could be at hand.” Also, ocean heat waves are getting worse.

  • 3/2018 More on Greenland, melting faster than any time in the last 400 years. “Melting in western Greenland is now nearly double what it was at the end of the 19th century, research suggests.)

  • 1/2018 2017 was one of the hottest years on record. And that was without El Niño. The title about says it all. Without El Niño, meaning that the world is now experiencing a weak La Niña, so average mean temperatures aren’t expected to break records again until the next El Niño. Which is soon enough.

  • 11/2017 Watch climate change in real time with these trackers. These tickers show the unrelenting rise in global temperatures and carbon dioxide.

  • 10/2017 Bitcoin energy consumption. Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption is around 33TWh, just a little more than Denmark, and a little less than Belarus. “Bitcoin’s biggest problem is not even its massive energy consumption, but that the network is mostly fueled by coal-fired power plants in China. Coal-based electricity is available at very low rates in this country. Even with a conservative emission factor, this results in an extreme carbon footprint for each unique Bitcoin transaction.”

  • 10/2017 There’s a climate bomb under your feet. “What they found, published yesterday in the journal Science, may mean the accelerating catastrophe of global warming has been fueled in part by warm dirt. As the Earth heats up, microbes in the soil accelerate the breakdown of organic materials and move on to others that may have once been ignored, each time releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

  • 9/2017 The great nutrient collapse. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising. We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

  • 8/2017 Wildfire in Greenland. For over two weeks, 40 miles from the ice sheet. UPDATE: Reporting on the affects of melting permafrost—including in Greenland—re-animating ancient viruses and bacteria.

  • 7/2017 The Larsen C shelf. A floating platform of glacial ice on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is the fourth largest ice shelf ringing Earth’s southernmost continent. In 2014, a crack that had been slowly growing into the ice shelf for decades suddenly started to spread northwards, creating the nascent iceberg. Now that the close to 2,240 square-mile (5,800 square kilometers) chunk of ice has broken away, the Larsen C shelf area has shrunk by approximately 10 percent. [14.11.2017 UPDATE: See ongoing reports from NASA’s Operation Icebridge]

  • 10/2016 Obituary: Great Barrier Reef. “In 1981, the same year that UNESCO designated the reef a World Heritage Site and called it “the most impressive marine area in the world,” it experienced its first mass-bleaching incident. Corals derive their astonishing colors, and much of their nourishment, from symbiotic algae that live on their surfaces. The algae photosynthesize and make sugars, which the corals feed on. But when temperatures rise too high, the algae produce too much oxygen, which is toxic in high concentrations, and the corals must eject their algae to survive. Without the algae, the corals turn bone white and begin to starve. If water temperatures soon return to normal, the corals can recruit new algae and recover, but if not, they will die in months. In 1981, water temperatures soared, two-thirds of the coral in the inner portions of the reef bleached, and scientists began to suspect that climate change threatened coral reefs in ways that no marine park could prevent.”

  • 3/2010 An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress. “One implication is that recent estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change are too low unless the range of possible warming can somehow be narrowed. Heat stress also may help explain trends in the mammalian fossil record.”