While there is a propaganda shield between news coverage of the global climate emergency and those of us absorbing news here in the US, the American Meteorological Society bravely continues to publish their annual State of the Climate report. I think “absorbing” is the right word because, while accurate news sources are not actually censored and are out there to be sought out, if you are just getting your news from headlines and sound bites and passing a monitor in an airport, you’re getting the impression that the ongoing collapse of our world’s biophysical life support system is not a front and center concern.

Anyway, I think of this report as sort of the interim annual report between whenever the IPCC gets around to their major releases. Here are some quick highlights:

• Atmospheric CO2 stands at 423 ppm. This is the highest ever, it is growing each year and it is growing at the fastest rate recorded since the 1960s. So the world is not only turning the corner, it is not decelerating toward turning the corner. It is accelerating.
• Record heat. Record drought. Record ocean heat. Record polar heat, ocean ice and glacier loss.
• Record sea level. Well, this is not surprising because the trend is up, and this one I wouldn’t expect to fluctuate so much year to year. The summary in the article I linked to doesn’t say whether there is evidence of unexpected acceleration. But with all that ice melt, there is a mass balance situation here…

So it’s bad bad bad, dad. I don’t know how else you can spin this other than to say it’s important to put one year in the context of longer-term trends. But the long-term trends are all bad. And if we are hitting unexpected records, that suggests that the projections (which are bad) may not be bad enough. Increasingly it looks like the world may be at that tipping point – it will be called in retrospect rather than definitively in the moment, but it might be now. 2025 will be a nice round year to put in the history books.