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Items tagged with: climatechange


Spain's winter heatwave just got worse. 29.9⁰C (86F) in Malaga today!
That's 12⁰C (22F) above normal for December.
Highest temperature ever recorded in Spain in December.
#globalwarming #ClimateChange



A large group of scientists has collaborated to produce the "2023 State of the Climate" report. And guess what, it's not pretty...
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Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory.

For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.

In the present report, we display a diverse set of vital signs of the planet and the potential drivers of climate change and climate-related responses. The trends reveal new all-time climate-related records and deeply concerning patterns of climate-related disasters. At the same time, we report minimal progress by humanity in combating climate change.

Given these distressing developments, our goal is to communicate climate facts and policy recommendations to scientists, policymakers, and the public. It is the moral duty of scientists and our institutions to clearly alert humanity of any potential existential threat and to show leadership in taking action.

The effects of global warming are progressively more severe, and possibilities such as a worldwide societal breakdown are feasible and dangerously underexplored. By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change.

Big problems need big solutions. Therefore, we must shift our perspective on the climate emergency from being just an isolated environmental issue to a systemic, existential threat. Although global heating is devastating, it represents only one aspect of the escalating and interconnected environmental crisis that we are facing (e.g., biodiversity loss, fresh water scarcity, pandemics). We need policies that target the underlying issues of ecological overshoot where the human demand on Earth's resources results in overexploitation of our planet and biodiversity decline.

To address the overexploitation of our planet, we challenge the prevailing notion of endless growth and overconsumption by rich countries and individuals as unsustainable and unjust. Instead, we advocate for reducing resource overconsumption; reducing, reusing, and recycling waste in a more circular economy; and prioritizing human flourishing and sustainability. We emphasize climate justice and fair distribution of the costs and benefits of climate action, particularly for vulnerable communities. We call for a transformation of the global economy to prioritize human well-being and to provide for a more equitable distribution of resources.
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It's wonderful to see these scientists boldly calling for system change in the face of a planetary overshoot emergency. Now if only someone will listen...

FULL REPORT -- academic.oup.com/bioscience/ad…

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Degrowth




"...the city of Paris has made enormous investments in public transit, built hundreds of miles of bike paths, and closed many streets to cars. Car trips within the city dropped by almost sixty per cent between 2001 and 2018, car crashes dropped by thirty per cent, and pollution has improved. The city is quieter and calmer; test scores go up as the air around schools cleans up."

#TheWarOnCars #Paris #climatechange

newyorker.com/news/daily-comme…


For those who haven’t seen it before, here is my review of The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg…
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I've read dozens of books about climate change, and this one is easily the best. It's packed with information, written to be accessible for anyone from high school (or a bright middle school student) on up, and most importantly it does NOT shy away from the true severity of our situation and the imperative need not only for individual action but for system change.

It's stunning to me that a young woman who just turned twenty years old was able to pull together such a massive project — coordinating the submissions of more than a hundred scientists, activists, and educators — while also writing a large part of the content herself. A truly amazing accomplishment.

This essential work should be in every school library and in every home. It will remain relevant for years to come, I believe, because although there certainly is plenty of data, mostly it's about *ideas* which will never age.
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bookwyrm.social/user/BreadAndC…

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #CO2 #Emissions #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice


*borrowed from someone who borrowed and just pasted, without comment, explanation, credit or inclusion.

IF YOU DON'T USE #AltText and describe your images, I won't boost them. If you stole them anyway, and are just sharing Goggle *finds* and random pictures that strike your fancy, I'll do the work for you, and include those with Visual Impairment or other languages to know what this is about.

#ClimateChange #Response #Cartoon #Alt4You

TELL EVERYONE ABOUT THIS.
AND the inclusion thing too?



A message from Greta Thunberg (@gretathunberg)...
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School strike, week 251.

Today, I graduate from school, which means I’ll no longer be able to school strike for the climate. This is then the last school strike for me, so I guess I have to write something on this day.

When I started striking in 2018 I could never have expected that it would lead to anything. After striking every day for three weeks, we were a small group of children who decided to continue doing this every Friday. And we did, which is how Fridays For Future was formed.

Some more people joined, and quite suddenly this was a global movement growing every day. During 2019, millions of youth striked from school for the climate, flooding the streets in over 180 countries. When the pandemic started, we had to find new ways to protest.

With time, we started to get back on the streets again. We’re still here, and we aren’t planning on going anywhere. Much has changed since we started, and yet we have much further to go.

We are still moving in the wrong direction, where those in power are allowed to sacrifice marginalised and affected people and the planet in the name of greed, profit and economic growth. They continue to destabilise the biosphere and our life supporting systems. We’re rapidly approaching potential nonlinear ecological and climatic tipping points beyond our control.

And in so many parts of the world, we are even speeding up the process. There are probably many of us who graduate who now wonder what kind of future it is that we are stepping into, even though we did not cause this crisis.

We who can speak up have a duty to do so. In order to change everything, we need everyone. I’ll continue to protest on Fridays, even though it’s not technically “school striking”. We simply have no other option than to do everything we possibly can. The fight has only just begun.
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🤗 💚

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice


We can have one of two things — but not both.

We can either have a society that tolerates millionaires and billionaires polluting the planet and destroying the biosphere. Or we can have a planet with a healthy biosphere but with fewer millionaires and no billionaires at all.

This is from a recently published peer-reviewed scientific paper titled “Millionaire Spending Incompatible with 1.5 C Ambitions”...
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Much evidence suggests that the wealthiest individuals contribute disproportionately to climate change. Here we study the implications of a continued growth in the number of millionaires for emissions, and its impact on the depletion of the remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

Our findings suggest that the share of millionaires in the world population will grow from 0.7% today to 3.3% in 2050, and cause accumulated emissions equivalent to 72% of the remaining carbon budget. This significantly reduces the chance of stabilizing climate change at 1.5°C.

The concentration of wealth at the top means that a significant share of the remaining carbon budget to 1.5°C is depleted by a very small share of humanity. This comparably small group is also likely to invest its wealth in ways that further increase emissions.

Continued growth in emissions at the top makes a low-carbon transition less likely, as the acceleration of energy consumption by the wealthiest is likely beyond the system's capacity to decarbonize. To this end, we question whether policy designs such as progressive taxes targeting the high emitters will be sufficient.
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Like I said, we can have one thing or the other — but not both.

READ THE PAPER --sciencedirect.com/science/arti…

#Politics #Capitalism #Inequality #CO2 #Emissions #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice


Cycling is now the single largest mode of travel during peak times in the City of London, according to a new report.

Cyclists represent 40% of traffic during peak hours and 27% of traffic throughout the day.

Since 1999, the number of motorists has dropped 64% and the number of cyclists has increased 386%.

#Urbanism #UrbanDesign #ClimateChange #Cycling #BikeTooter #UK #London #Mobility #Transportation

forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2…


Physicist John Tyndall is often credited with discovering the greenhouse effect, which he wrote about in 1859.

But female scientist Eunice Foote published a paper - 3 years earlier - demonstrating how atmospheric water vapor & CO2 affected solar heating. She theorized that heat trapping gases in Earth’s atmosphere warm its #climate.

Tyndall was widely read. And Foote, being a woman, wasn't even permitted to present her own work. climate.gov/news-features/feat… #history #science #ClimateChange



You see that thin line of light? That's the edge of the atmospheric skin surrounding our planet. All the climate occurs in that little collection of gases, and that's what we're flooding with greenhouse gas contaminants.
#climatechange
#climate





Also, now that I’m back at my computer, here’s a non-YouTube link to Greta Thunberg’s “The Climate Event” talk on an Invidious instance:

invidious.flokinet.to/watch?v=…

#climateChange #extinction #capitalism #gretaThunberg




Cory Doctorow: The Swerve

People are already getting really badly hurt, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re poised to break through key planetary boundaries – loss of biosphere diversity, ocean acidification, land poisoning – whose damage will be global, profound and sustained. Once we rupture these boundaries, we have no idea how to repair them. None of our current technologies will suffice, nor will any of the technologies we think we know how to make or might know how to make.

These boundaries are the point of no return, the point at which it won’t mat­ter if we yank the wheel, because the bus is going over the cliff, swerve or no.

Focus on the swerve.


locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doct…

HN discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3…

#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #BusinessAsUsual #TheSwerve #CoryDoctorow #LetsRoll #MassCivilResistance


Weather is not climate but ...

"... across Japan the skies are clear, and the mercury is stuck in the high 30s and has twice broken through 40C this week. And that's just the official temperature - out of the shade it's often much hotter. Even though summer has barely begun, 263 places across Japan have seen temperature records broken in the last six days, according to meteorologist Sayaka Mori."

rnz.co.nz/news/world/470151/li…

#RNZ #Japan #ClimateChange


"Formal peace agreements in the 20th century dealt only sporadically with environmental issues, but in the past two decades all major peace agreements have included provisions on natural resources and environmental protection and management. Recent formal peace processes have also highlighted their direct and critical interdependence with environmental issues."

The overlap and disconnect between #climatechange and #peace processes – Inclusive Peace inclusivepeace.org/the-overlap…


Climate change isn't just a future risk (although it is), it's increasing the frequency and potential damage of major weather events in the here and now.

"The silverbeet and cabbage crops looked as if someone had shot a machine gun at the plants"

- #JayClarke, 2022

rnz.co.nz/news/national/467492…

#ClimateChange