The State of the Climate Is: Grim

These reports, now 35 years old, don’t necessarily offer new data, as they are looking back to fully describe the climate the previous year. Still, putting it all in one place is never fun — along with the temperature record, the abstract alone notes that greenhouse gases including not just carbon dioxide but methane and nitrous oxide “continued to climb to record-high levels,” that all-time high temperatures were recorded in parts of the Arctic, that sea ice extent at both poles was the second-lowest on record, that average sea-surface temperatures were the highest in the 171-year record and that 91 percent of ocean surface area experienced at least one marine heat wave, that global drought increased “both in intensity and extent,” and a bunch more but this sentence is already too long.

There is a repetitiveness to these reports that gains in sinister meaning only if compared over time. For example, from the report released 20 years ago, covering the climate of 2004: “The annual average surface temperature in 2004 was the fourth highest value observed since regular instrumental records began in 1880.” The temperature anomaly that year has been eclipsed by all but one of the 19 years since (2006).

In other ways they have found new avenues for descriptive climate gloom. That 2004 report makes only a few mentions of glaciers, mostly relating to Antarctica and without a generalized analysis; in the new version, the 589 authors from 58 countries note that all 58 reference glaciers around the world lost mass for the second consecutive year, setting a new record for total ice loss — of relevance this week, as Alaska’s disappearing glacier helped flood the capital.

Still, they are relatively dispassionate documents, intended as scientific summary rather than primal scream for action. One can’t even really find pithy quotes to pull out, no “the situation is dire” sorts of tidbits that might get people talking. Even the press release from the AMS announcing its release focuses on the process rather than the result, with President David Stensrud praising the collaborative approach. “It is a truly global effort, in which hundreds of researchers from universities, government agencies, and more come together to provide a careful, rigorously peer-reviewed report on our planet’s climate,” he said — perhaps, though maybe we’re over-reading here, with a hint of spice thrown toward the one particular government scrubbing its own climate reports from websites and generally throwing a wrench in that international scientific process. Still, as he went on, there’s no report now that will do anything other than confirm the water continues to boil, ever hotter: “The results affirm the reality of our changing climate.”