World

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering with senior scientist Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. 

Scientists monitoring Earth’s climate have identified a concerning trend in global warming starting in April 2023. While climate change has been steadily heating up the planet for decades, in 2023 global average temperatures suddenly jumped by about 0.2 degrees Celsius and have remained elevated. 

The spike in temperature has raised alarm among climate scientists about how fast the climate crisis is progressing as they scramble to explain Earth’s worsening fever. 

Jennifer Francis studies climate and weather in the Arctic at the Woodwell Climate Research Center and has had her eyes on the planet’s rising temperature for decades. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

JENNI DOERING: What’s so abnormal about this temperature spike observed in the last couple of years that’s raising concerns among researchers? 

JENNIFER FRANCIS: There are many factors that come into play in creating both last year 2023 and again this year, breaking temperature records for the globe going back as far as we have records. 

We can estimate the temperature going back quite a ways. We’re pretty sure that this past July 2023 and then again in 2024 are really the warmest we’ve seen in many hundreds of years. So this is quite concerning, and we know what’s going on. The Earth actually should be cooling right now, if it were only natural causes at play. But we know that, because we’ve been adding so many heat trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere over the last several decades, that these heat trapping gases are indeed keeping a lot more heat in the climate system than we should have right now. 

So, what’s going on is that we’re seeing some very large and intense marine heat waves in various parts of the global ocean, and those are the result of that heat being trapped by those greenhouse gases. It gets stored in the ocean, about 90 percent of it goes into the ocean, and now we’re seeing some of that heat coming back out and going into the atmosphere. 

DOERING: This spike in temperature is only about 0.2 degrees Celsius. That doesn’t sound like much. Why does that number mean so much to climate scientists?

FRANCIS: It doesn’t sound like much, and certainly any individual in any location would not really notice it. But in fact, this is a lot for the average over the entire globe. 

If we look back at the natural fluctuations that have happened to the Earth’s temperatures, going back thousands of years, we know that it doesn’t take very much to shift the globe from an ice age and the opposite, which we call an interglacial, this is a relatively warm period in the Earth’s temperature natural cycle. That’s only three degrees Celsius difference. So, it really doesn’t take a lot of temperature change in terms of absolute degree Celsius, to make a huge difference in what the climate system feels, what the living part of the Earth system feels. 

It can have huge impacts on things like weather and changes in ice and changes in plants and agriculture, because that small change in temperature globally gets translated to big changes in things like the atmosphere and ocean currents and things like that.

DOERING: What are some of the other theories or explanations that are being proposed for this recent temperature rise? 

FRANCIS: This recent temperature rise is mainly caused by the increasing amounts of heat trapping greenhouse gases that we’ve been putting into the atmosphere. That is the number one cause, and the Earth should be cooling right now, but instead, we’re seeing this incredibly rapid increase in global temperatures and sea surface temperatures. 

Some of the other factors that are playing a very much smaller role than the greenhouse gas increases are decreases in the amount of particles that are in the air that we’ve been putting in by burning fossil fuels, by forest fires, by volcanoes, by pollution from industry. There’s been a decrease in the amount of those particles, and that plays a role, because those particles tend to reflect some of the sun’s energy that’s coming in, and that helps by having fewer of those particles, more of the sun’s energy is making it into the climate system. 

Also starting in April 2023, an El Niño started to develop. El Niño is basically a pattern of ocean temperatures that we see coming and going every few years, and we know that when an El Niño comes along, we tend to see increases in the global average temperature. And indeed, we saw that. But this is well beyond what an El Niño should do. 

Another potential cause, although I’d say the jury is still out, is the recent eruption of the volcano in Tonga, which is an island group in the South Pacific, and that put a lot of extra water vapor, moisture in the atmosphere. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, so that potentially could have added to the greenhouse effect. But it’s been generally shown that that effect is relatively small as well. 

So really it comes down to the fact that we’ve been adding all of these greenhouse gases to the atmosphere for decades by mostly burning fossil fuels, but also cutting down forests, removing mangrove trees along coastlines, getting rid of wetlands, all of these natural ways that the climate system can remove things like carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help offset the effects of those heat trapping gases. 

DOERING: Sounds like things are really catching up with us. 

FRANCIS: Yes, indeed. And this is not a surprise.

DOERING: Not a surprise, but it sounds like there are climate scientists who are scratching their heads and saying, why are the numbers not lining up with what we expected? So, what’s going on there?

FRANCIS: I would argue actually, that these numbers are not out of line with what we should have expected when we look at the simulations by these very complicated computer models that we use to project what the climate system is going to do. These models, they fluctuate just like the Earth’s real climate does, around this trend line that’s caused by the increasing greenhouse gases, and those fluctuations in the model simulations are within the range of the spike that we saw last year and this year. It’s really not out of the realm of expectations to see a spike like this. And in my mind, anyway, I don’t think there’s really a big surprise here.

DOERING: The current national plans from governments to reduce carbon emissions would still result in around three degrees Celsius of warming, far more than the Paris Climate Agreement goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius. How does this recent temperature spike and this increase we’re seeing long term relate to how nations should be thinking about their climate ambition? 

FRANCIS: These spikes in temperatures are kind of a wakeup call. And not just the temperatures, but the increases in extreme weather events that we’ve been observing increasing not only in the number of them, but how much damage they’re doing, how intense they are, how much area they’re covering, how many areas are being affected by these extreme events. 

Heat waves are a big part of that, and connected to heat waves, often are droughts. We’ve seen some very severe droughts emerging and increasing, and both of those together are the recipe for wildland fires. We’ve seen a big increase in fires, which is a big concern, not because of the damage they do, but also because they release a lot more carbon-containing gases into the atmosphere, which just makes the whole global warming problem worse. 

We’ve seen yet another unprecedented flooding event unfolding in Spain, which follows on the heels of some incredible flooding that we’ve seen in our own country, here in Asheville, North Carolina, and up in Vermont and Maine and places that usually you think of being relatively immune to the major impacts of climate change. 

So we have to really get on the stick here. The commitments that were made in Paris we knew were not going to be enough. But not only are we not meeting those insufficient targets, but we’re falling behind even farther. And so, the expectation is that we’ll blow right by the 1.5-degree target that was ambitious in Paris, but probably heading more towards three degrees. And we’ve already seen what these extreme events are doing, even with 1.2 degrees Celsius warming on average. This is, I hope, a big wake-up call for countries and for the public who vote for leaders who are making these decisions in these countries.

DOERING: You’ve been studying this for decades now and sounding the alarm for quite some time. What keeps you going in this work? It must be tiring. 

FRANCIS: Every day you wake up and you read about another extreme weather event, because I study extreme weather, of course, that’s what I pay attention to most closely. 

But what gives me hope to carry on is knowing that my research is helping communities understand what is possible in the future, what these extreme events are going to do in the future, and how they might affect various areas. 

I also see young people really charged up to figure out ways to reduce the severity of the climate crisis, and not just by becoming scientists or engineers, but by going into law, for example, and changing policy. People studying art that help the public understand in different ways, without just listening to the news and understanding the science, but reaching people through art, for example. Writers doing a better job of communicating the science, and also when an extreme event, like we were seeing recently, when those events happen, translating it better to the public to understand the fact that climate change is making these sorts of things more intense and more concerning. 

I mean, there’s all kinds of ways for people to get involved. And to help make a difference. So, as we go forward, we can make this problem a little less bad.

What was billed as a “sprint to cut climate super pollutants” may soon slow to a jog. 

Top climate diplomats from the U.S., China and host country Azerbaijan gathered at COP29, the United Nations Climate Conference in Baku, this week to host a summit on methane and other “non-CO2” greenhouse gases.

However, efforts to curb emissions of these climate super pollutants—greenhouse gases that on a pound-for-pound basis are far more effective at warming the planet than carbon dioxide—are likely to stall under President-elect Donald Trump. He has pledged to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, and the oil industry is lobbying him to roll back emission regulations. 

Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is the second leading driver of climate change after carbon dioxide. Quickly curbing its emissions from the oil and gas sector, agriculture and landfills is widely viewed as the most effective way to combat the near-term worsening of climate change over the next couple of decades, rather than centuries.

Emissions of methane, along with other non-CO2 greenhouse gases, including nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases, are responsible for as much as half of current warming.

“Global consensus on the need to tackle non-CO2 greenhouse gases is stronger than ever,” U.S. climate envoy John Podesta said at the methane and non-CO2 summit on Tuesday.

Podesta noted that 158 countries have now endorsed the Global Methane Pledge, a voluntary agreement to curb methane emissions launched by the U.S. and the European Commission in 2021.

Regulations enacted by the EPA last year are projected to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by 80 percent. 

On Tuesday, the U.S. also finalized an oil and gas Waste Emissions Charge that places a fee on large emitters of methane, oil and gas facilities whose emissions exceed 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. Excessive emissions will initially be charged $900 per metric ton of methane in 2024, increasing to $1,500 per metric ton in 2026. The fee was imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and first applies to emissions that occur in the 2024 calendar year. 

“The cost of methane abatement technology will continue to go down, and the availability of these solutions will continue to go up—this progress cannot be stopped,” Podesta said.

However, the American Exploration and Production Council, a group of 30 mostly independent oil and gas producers, is working to roll back the methane fee and other climate rules, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Executives of companies represented by the industry group were among the oil and gas industry leaders aggressively courted for campaign funding by Trump earlier this year.

The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group representing a wider swath of the oil and gas industry, released its own wish list for the Trump administration on Tuesday that included a repeal of the methane fee.

This comes as disasters supersized by climate change keep mounting, killing people and destroying property. Greenhouse gases have already begun setting off dangerous feedback loops that threaten to make the crisis far worse, scientists warn. Climate advocates said the world—especially a top emitter like the U.S.—can’t afford to pump the breaks on efforts to reduce methane pollution. 

“The only way to slow warming fast enough to prevent self-amplifying feedbacks from pushing the planet past tipping points is to cut methane and other super climate pollutants,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, a climate advocacy organization based in Washington.

Rather than rolling back regulations, Zaelke said it’s time for a binding global agreement on methane.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, a co-founder of Climate TRACE, a nonprofit organization that tracks greenhouse gas emissions, agreed.

“In the year after the methane pledge was finalized, global methane emissions went up 1.8 percent,” Gore said on Thursday as the organization released its latest inventory of emissions data. “Maybe we should start just by actualizing the methane pledge and getting the countries that have agreed to it to live up to what they agreed to do.”

Speaking at the methane and non-CO2 summit, Liu Zhenmin, China’s special envoy for climate change, said his country is working to improve monitoring and reduce methane emissions, particularly from coal mines.

China, the world’s largest methane emitter, released a national methane emissions control action plan in November of last year. However, the plan did not set targets on methane emission reductions.

China has since committed to including methane and other non-CO2 greenhouse gases in its emission reduction targets under the Paris climate agreement, due in February.

China could reduce methane emissions equivalent to 660 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030 at little cost, according to a study published Nov. 8 in the journal Nature Communications. That’s like closing 170 coal-fired power plants.

Gore said he was optimistic China and other countries would continue to reduce emissions regardless of what happens in the U.S., due in part to the low cost of renewable energy.

“Market forces are giving us a tailwind in our efforts to solve the climate crisis, but it’s also true that governments have to do a much better job of organizing and pursuing the policy changes that are needed,” he said. “We’re in real danger.”

For the Indigenous Rapa Nui people who live on Easter Island, one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world, the high seas have played an integral role in their daily lives for at least two thousand years. These ocean areas that extend beyond any one country’s national jurisdiction connect their small island—which they also call Rapa Nui—in the South Pacific to their nearest neighbors, all of which are at least 2,000 miles away, including mainland Chile and the Galapagos islands. 

“The high seas are in our DNA,” said Rapa Nui ocean advocate Sebastián Yankovic Pakarati. “It’s where our ancestors, our gods and traditional foods come from,” he said in Cali, Colombia kicking off an event held within the margins of the world’s largest biodiversity summit, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s 16th Conference of the Parties, commonly referred to as COP16. 

The event last month was attended by government leaders from Chile, Panama, Madagascar, Nigeria, Belgium and Germany, as well as philanthropists and non-governmental leaders calling for the swift ratification of a new treaty that provides the first legal pathway to protecting and sustainably managing high seas areas outside of countries’ 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zones. 

The high seas account for two-thirds of the ocean and are widely recognized for providing habitat for key ecosystem functions for diverse marine life, including endangered whales, sharks and turtles that traverse currents and underwater mountain ranges as they move between breeding and foraging grounds. The high seas are also home to carbon-sequestering seagrass beds, deep sea coral reefs and hydrothermal vents, which host unique animal species that do not exist anywhere else on Earth. Yet, only one percent of these waters is protected. 

Industrial fishing, commercial shipping, pollution and climate change are increasingly threatening the cultural values, heritage and livelihoods of Indigenous people and local communities, said Pakarati. 

“We are a small community, eight thousand people. We do not have large boats, only artisanal fishing. But all around us it is full of boats from other nations fishing on the edge of the exclusive economic zone,” Pakarati said. Consequently, local fish stocks are becoming more scarce.

To safeguard these waters and ensure all countries benefit equally from their resources, he said, global governments must ratify the High Seas Treaty, the formal name for which is the Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, or the BBNJ Agreement (BBNJ), for short. 

Last year the agreement was adopted by the United Nations after two decades of discussions. But it needs at least 60 countries to ratify it before it can go into effect. To date, more than 100 countries have signed the treaty, signifying their support and intent to ratify. But only 14 countries have ratified it. The goal is to have it ratified by June 2025 during the UN Ocean Conference. It will go into force 120 days after ratification. 

If that happens, the treaty will become the world’s first legal instrument to mandate biodiversity conservation in international waters around the globe. 

“It is the most important new international ocean law to help protect and manage the half of the planet that is found in the high seas,” said Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance, a coalition of more than 60 non-governmental members and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has been advocating for high seas protection since 2011. 

The alliance also co-hosted the high-level side event at COP16. 

“30×30” 

Throughout the two-week conference, which brought together more than 20,000 international delegates, the treaty was repeatedly recognized and lauded as an essential complementary tool to implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMBGF). The framework was adopted last year by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and includes 23 action-oriented targets for halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030 and beyond. 

“We know we cannot achieve any of the targets in the framework unless we fully integrate the ocean in our work,” said Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity during a high-level day-long panel held during COP16 on the conservation and sustainable use of oceans. 

Considering the majority of ocean waters exist beyond national boundaries, said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, it is essential that portions of the high seas be protected and sustainably managed. 

“We have to increase political momentum to get BBNJ on the books, to get it ratified and effected,” said Andersen during the ocean panel. “Every moment lost is indeed moments lost for the ocean.”

“It is the most important new international ocean law to help protect and manage the half of the planet that is found in the high seas.”

— Rebecca Hubbard, High Seas Alliance

Nature is disappearing at an alarming rate. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature 2024 Living Planet Report, published last month, the average size of monitored wildlife populations plummeted by 73 percent in just 50 years between 1970-2020. Human activity causing habitat destruction and climate change are driving entire ecosystems to the brink of extinction, according to the report.

Just this week, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced at the U.N. climate conference (COP29) in Azerbaijan that nearly half of all reef-building coral species are at risk of becoming extinct globally due to rising ocean temperatures and other pervasive threats, including pollution, agricultural runoff, unsustainable fishing and disease. 

The consequences of losing such reefs would be ecologically devastating. They support at least a quarter of all marine species, provide food and income for a billion people and protect coastlines from increasingly frequent storm surges. 

One of the framework’s most ambitious goals to curb such biodiversity loss calls for the effective conservation and management of at least 30 percent of lands, inland waters and coastal and marine areas by 2030. That’s the minimum level of protected areas scientists say must be safeguarded in order to stem the twin biodiversity and climate crises our planet is experiencing. 

While nearly 200 countries have committed to achieving this target, often referred to as “30 by 30,” ocean protection is lagging. To date, only around 8 percent of the global ocean is protected, according to the Marine Protection Atlas, an initiative of the Marine Conservation Institute. And only 2 percent of the ocean is highly and fully protected, meaning all destructive or extractive activities are prohibited.

At this rate, it is unlikely that this key biodiversity target will be met, unless governments agree to protect the high seas, said Chile’s minister for the environment, Maisa Rojas, at COP16. 

“We are not going to be able to protect 30 percent of our oceans without BBNJ,” Rojas told audience members at the side event focused on the high seas. 

That’s why, she announced, Chile has launched a new initiative called “BBNJ First Movers” to support governments and other stakeholders in developing proposals for the first generation of marine protected areas that will be established on the high seas. By developing these proposals now, the initiative aims to accelerate the implementation of the treaty once it’s ratified. 

To complement these efforts a group of funders pledged $51.7 million to support stakeholders in creating the governance processes that will be needed to ensure a rapid adoption of proposed high seas marine protected areas. 

“There’s an increasing recognition that investment in ocean conservation and protection is also an investment in climate,” said Jonathan Kelsey, director of the Bloomberg Ocean Fund, a regranting partner of the Bloomberg Ocean Initiative at Bloomberg Philanthropies, one of the funding groups that pledged to finance high seas protection at COP16.

The ocean is a powerful climate regulator. Scientists estimate the ocean absorbs around 25 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions and 90 percent of the excess heat generated by these emissions. 

The High Seas Treaty

By ratifying the high seas treaty, participating countries agree to protect high sea biodiversity across all activities they are engaged in with other international governing bodies including the regional fisheries management organizations; the International Maritime Organization, which oversees commercial shipping; and the International Seabed Authority, which manages seabed use and extraction. 

“If they’ve ratified the treaty, when they go to the regional fisheries management organizations, they can’t then approve overfishing or destroying ancient coral reefs on sea mountains or seabed mining without some form of extensive impact assessments,” said Hubbard. 

These environmental impact assessments are a key part of the treaty that include processes for evaluating and mitigating the potential effect of any planned human activities on biodiversity. 

Additionally, countries supporting the treaty commit to equitably sharing information about marine genetic resources they find in the high seas, as well as a portion of financial benefits they receive as a result. Many cosmetic, pharmaceutical and industrial products are made from marine life found in the unique ocean ecosystems in the high seas, including the raw materials in some Covid 19 tests, said Hubbard. 

These funds will be used to help ensure developing countries can equitably participate in high seas protection activities, including establishing new networks of marine protected areas in biodiversity hotspots. 

First Generation of High Seas MPAS

New marine protected areas proposed by countries will undergo rigorous review by a BBNJ scientific decision-making body established by the treaty. Once they are approved by the scientific body, treaty members will vote to decide whether or not to move forward in establishing the protected area. All parties involved will collaborate with the scientific committee to continue to monitor the protected area to make sure it is achieving its specific conservation goals. 

Already, stretches of the high seas are being recommended as potential protected areas. A report from the Pew Charitable Trusts released last this year lists ten places worthy of consideration based on their ecological, biological and cultural significance. It can be hard for some people to fathom the diverse biodiversity that exists in the high seas, said Nichola Clark, one of the authors of the report, who leads the nonprofit’s BBNJ governance work. 

“They think of the high seas as just like watery deserts, deep blue nothingness,” said Clark. “One of the reasons for doing the report and highlighting a couple of the sites was to just dispel that myth.” 

The Sargasso Sea and Corner Rise Seamounts in the central to western Atlantic, for example, are renowned for their floating forests of sargassum seaweeds that serve as protection, food, spawning and nursery habitat for nearly 300 species of fish, 25 birds and 100 invertebrates.

Other suggested areas in the report include the Arabian Sea, located in the northern Indian Ocean, where deep-sea creatures have adapted to living in low oxygen conditions and larger predators like squids and tuna thrive. The Lord Howe Rise and South Tasman Sea, which serves as an important breeding and feeding ground for humpback whales, is also listed.

“They think of the high seas as just like watery deserts, deep blue nothingness. One of the reasons for doing the report and highlighting a couple of the sites was to just dispel that myth.”

— Nichola Clark, the Pew Charitable Trusts

Pakarati, who serves as an ocean council member for the Indigenous Rapa Nui, is calling for the protection of another listed area, the Salas y Gómez and Nazca Ridges. These connected deep-sea volcanic mountain ranges extend for nearly 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile to Rapa Nui in the Central Pacific. The area includes more than a 100 underwater mountains called seamounts, which provide important habitat for blue whales and leatherback sea turtles and more than 80 other threatened or endangered species. Earlier this year, a team of oceanographers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute identified deep sea coral reefs in the area and 20 possible new species across 10 of these seamounts. Currently, more than 70 percent of these underwater ridges extend into areas beyond national jurisdiction, leaving them prone to increasing threats.

According to the High Seas Alliance, deep-sea trawling—a fishing method that drags weighted nets along the seafloor—is taking a toll on biodiversity in the area. Deep sea corals and other seabed habitats have been destroyed. Lost fishing gear and plastic debris threaten to entangle fish and marine mammals. In the future, Pakarati said he worries deep sea mining may pose further threats. The seabed in the area is rich in minerals like cobalt. 

“We believe that by protecting that mountain range, we will be able to ensure the maintenance of the marine resources that we have,” said Pakarati. But, he added, “Let’s start, not with one area, but with an area in each ocean and in each hemisphere.”