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Antarctic sea ice extent was 1.788 million km² on February 21, 2023, an all-time low in the NSIDC record. Antarctic sea ice area was 1,050,708 km² on February 22, 2023, as illustrated by the Nico Sun image below. This means that a huge amount of heat that was previously reflected back into space by the sea ice is now instead absorbed by the Southern Ocean, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop that results in further sea ice loss, in turn further speeding up the temperature rise and making the weather ever more extreme. Arctic sea ice extent was 14,271,000 km² on February 19, 2023, the third-lowest extent in the NSIDC record for the time of year, as illustrated by the above image. Global sea ice extent reached a record low of 15,500,000 km² on February 11, 2023, as illustrated by the above image. The situation is dire The dire situation is further illustrated by the image below, showing high sea surface temperature anomalies (from 1...

Most important metric Kevin Trenberth et al. suggest in a recent  article  that Earth's energy imbalance, defined as the absorbed solar radiation minus the net outgoing longwave radiation, is arguably the most important metric related to climate change. Of the extra heat from Earth's energy imbalance, about 93% ends up in the ocean as increasing ocean heat content (see image below), 3% goes into melting ice, 4% goes into raising temperatures of land and melting permafrost, and less than 1% remains in the atmosphere.  One could also argue that the most important metric related to climate change is the monthly mean surface temperatures on land, as illustrated by the image below that was created with a July 16, 2022 screenshot from  NASA customized analysis plots  and shows that the February 2016 (land only) anomaly from 1886-1915 was 2.94°C or 5.292°F.  Land only anomalies are important. After all, most people live on land and humans will likel...

A rise of more than 5°C could happen within a decade, possibly by 2026. Humans will likely go extinct with a 3°C rise and most life on Earth will disappear with a 5°C rise. In the light of this, we should act with integrity. When will we die? The outlook for people living now is that they will die before the end of the century. After all, even in more developed regions, people statistically die at an age below 75 years, as the image on the right illustrates. The image calls up questions regarding possible shortening of life expectancy due to global heating. A 2018 study by Strona & Bradshaw indicates that most life on Earth will disappear with a 5°C rise (see box on the right). The first question therefore is whether and how fast such a rise could eventuate. Furthermore, global heating projections for the year 2100 may seem rather irrelevant to many people, as they do not expect to be alive by the year 2100. A second question therefore is what makes most sense, focusing on the yea...