Long stories short, here’s the top six news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa-NZ this week, and a discussion above between Bernard Hickey and The Kākā’s climate correspondent Cathrine Dyer: * The month of August was 1.49˚C warmer than pre-industrial levels, tying with 2023 for the warmest August ever, according to the EU’s Copernicus climate dataset. This is despite the absence of El Niño’s heat amplifying effects that were present last year. * The Government’s National Land Transport Programme (NLTP) plans on executing a U-turn, taking us back in time to a car-dependent past, according to University of Auckland academic Timothy Welch in The Conversation. The worst thing, he suggests, is that most of the $8 billion in planned spending will go on planning, design and preparatory work, rather than actual construction. * Debate about whether ‘climate intellectuals’ should focus on disinformation and misinformation underestimates the political versus the technical obstacles to decarbonisation, according Aaron Regunberg in the Jacobin. The critique was ‘story of the week’ on the website skepticalscience.com, who argue that systematic climate mitigation is an inherently political matter. * The population effects of climate displacement are causing increasing concern in the US. “When multiple cataclysmic disasters strike one region in quick succession, climate change-driven phenomena called “compounding events,” they create overlapping ripples of displacement, making the movement that much harder to track. If it was tracked in real time, local officials would see disturbing trends,” according to this gnarly tale in The Grist. * Glaciologists are in a race to collect ancient virus specimens from fast-melting glaciers after finding 1,700 mostly new-to-science ones in Tibet. Meanwhile other scientists are coming up with massive geo-engineering plans to try to slow the collapse of the so-called Doomsday Glacier in Antarctica. * The chart of the week is putting the terrors into gulf coast communities in the US. (See more detail and analysis below, and in the video and podcast above. Cathrine Dyer’s journalism on climate and the environment is available free to all paying and non-paying subscribers to The Kākā and the public. It is made possible by subscribers signing up to the paid tier to ensure this sort of public interest journalism is fully available in public to read, listen to and share. Cathrine wrote the wrap. Bernard edited it. Lynn copy-edited and illustrated it.) 1. A dead heat in August August 2024 has come in at +1.49˚C above pre-industrial levels, tying with 2023 for the warmest August on record, according to the Copernicus ECMWF dataset. This means 2024 is virtually certain to break the record for hottest year ever, according to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Source: Zeke Hausfather on X.com While temperatures in August 2023 were in the grip of an El Niño, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has now been neutral for several months. That should have resulted in temperatures dropping through the back half of 2024 compared to the El Niño elevated 2023. The size of the heat anomaly has been declining, but the effect is more muted than it should be. The decline is more visible in sea surface temperatures – it helps to look at the two side-by-side: Source: Copernicus Climate Pulse Some countries have been sweltering through record-breaking temperatures. Japan’s hottest summer ever has produced thousands of “extreme heat” events. “The average temperature in June, July and August was 1.76C higher than the average recorded between 1991 and 2020, the Japan meteorological agency said, according to Kyodo news agency. It was the hottest summer since comparable records were first kept in 1898 and tied the record set in 2023, the agency said. Japan has recorded 8,821 instances of “extreme heat” – a temperature of 35C or higher – so far this year, easily beating