This website gets skeptical about global warming “skepticism”.
Climate Adam: Will 2025 be the Hottest Year Ever Recorded?
22 January 2025 @ 3:48 pm
This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).
2025 has only just begun, but already climate scientists are working hard to unpick what could be in store for us. As greenhouse gas emissions continue to drive more and more climate change, the overall trend is for more global warming. But other factors - like the El Niño oscillation moving towards La Niña - will also have a major impact. So how hot will 2025 be? And how will climate change affect us in the form of extreme weather disasters? Whether that's heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires - like the ones ravaging Los Angeles right now?
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Moving away from high-end emissions scenarios
20 January 2025 @ 6:30 pm
This is a re-post from the Climate Brink
I have a new paper out today in the journal Dialogues on Climate Change exploring both the range of end-of-century climate outcomes in the literature under current policies and the broader move away from high-end emissions scenarios. Current policies are defined broadly as policies in place today and a continuation of trends in technology costs, but no additional climate policy enacted for the remainder of the century.
The figure below shows the literature summary I put together (as of fall 2024), which includes estimates of current policy outcomes (in red), outcomes where countries meet their 2030 Paris Agreement nationally determined contributions (in orange), constrained estimates using socioeconomic factors
2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #03
19 January 2025 @ 3:09 pm
A listing of 25 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, January 12, 2025 thru Sat, January 18, 2025.
This week's roundup is again published soleley by category. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!
Stories we promoted this week, by category:
Climate Change Impacts
Los Angeles burns: What you need to know This is terrible. This is climate change. by Andrew Dessler, The Climate Brink, Jan 13, 2025
Fact brief - Can CO2 be ignored because it’s just a trace gas?
18 January 2025 @ 3:27 pm
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park from the Gigafact team in collaboration with members from our team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.
Can CO2 be ignored because it’s just a trace gas?
While carbon dioxide is a small part of the atmosphere, it has a large impact on climate as a greenhouse gas.
Nitrogen and oxygen make up around 99% of the atmosphere, but neither traps heat. Les
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #3 2025
16 January 2025 @ 8:27 pm
Open access notables
Long-term trends in heat wave gaps for the New York City metropolitan area, Lin & Colle, Urban Climate:
Heat waves occurring in close succession to one another are hazardous because of the prolonged stress on the human body and energy demand. A heat wave gap metric, the time between two adjacent heat wave events, was utilized to examine the gap length and frequency trend for several stations around New York City (NYC) during the last several decades. From 1961 to 1990 to 1991–2020, the average heat wave gap for the various stations decreased by 15–41 %, the number of short gaps (≤5 days) increased by 33–300 %,
Nobody’s insurance rates are safe from climate change
15 January 2025 @ 8:23 pm
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
Asheville, North Carolina, was once widely considered a climate haven thanks to its elevated, inland location and cooler temperatures than much of the Southeast. Then came the catastrophic floods of Hurricane Helene in September 2024.
It was a stark reminder that nowhere is safe from climate-worsened extreme weather risks: Hurricanes arriving from the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic seaboard. Hail in the Midwest. Floods in the East. Sea level rise along the coasts. Wildfires in the West, most recently exemplified by the devastating and cos
The role of climate change in the catastrophic 2025 Los Angeles fires
13 January 2025 @ 2:41 pm
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters and Bob Henson
Flames from the Palisades Fire burn a building at Sunset Boulevard amid a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The fast-moving wildfire had destroyed thousands of structures and burned more than 15,000 acres by Thursday, January 9. (Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #02
12 January 2025 @ 3:53 pm
A listing of 23 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, January 5, 2025 thru Sat, January 11, 2025.
This week's roundup is again published soleley by category. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!
Stories we promoted this week, by category:
Climate Change Impacts
The Risks of Climate Change to the United States in the 21st Century CBO assesses how climate change will pose risks to the United States through its effects on economic activity, real estate and financial markets, human health, biodiversity, immigration, and national security. 
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #2 2025
9 January 2025 @ 10:03 pm
Open access notables
Large emissions of CO2 and CH4 due to active-layer warming in Arctic tundra, Torn et al., Nature Communications:
Climate warming may accelerate decomposition of Arctic soil carbon, but few controlled experiments have manipulated the entire active layer. To determine surface-atmosphere fluxes of carbon dioxide and methane under anticipated end-of-century warming, here we used heating rods to warm (by 3.8 °C) to the depth of permafrost in polygonal tundra in Utqia?vik (formerly Barrow), Alaska and measured fluxes over two growing seasons. We show that e
Exploring the drivers of modern global warming
8 January 2025 @ 9:34 pm
This is a re-post from the Climate Brink
Global surface temperatures have risen around 1.3C since the preindustrial (1850-1900) period as a result of human activity.1 However, this aggregate number masks a lot of underlying factors that contribute to global surface temperature changes over time.
These include CO2, which is the primary driver of long-term warming, as well as non-CO2 greenhouse gases like CH4, N2O, and halocarbons. But it also includes planet-cooling aerosols that have masked a sizable portion of the warming of our greenhouse gas emissions