ECOLOGISTS RISE UP!

Next week, @ScientistRebellion will be at the Nordic #Oikos 2024 conference in Lund, Sweden. We'll hold 2 workshops, discussing ways scientists can change tactics and re-embrace #advocacy and #activism in the #Climate and #EcologicalEmergency. We will also feature an #NVDA training. Everyone is welcome!

Tuesday March 12th at 13:30-15:30, Biology building, Sölvegatan 35, Lund. Room: D215 Cerebrum

Friday March 15th at 13:30-15:30, Ecology Building, Sölvegatan 37, Lund. Room: Heden (G110)

https://nordicsocietyoikos.glueup.com/event/nordic-oikos-2024-80737/scientist-rebellion-workshops.html

Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week. In your free time, you play sports, spend time with loved ones, garden, and engage with local politics.

Overnight shipping, advertising, and private jets no longer exist, but health care, education, and clean electricity are free and available to all.

“The Growing Popularity of Degrowth”

See -- https://grist.org/looking-forward/the-growing-popularity-of-degrowth/

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #Degrowth

The growing popularity of degrowth - Grist

Excerpts from a Q&A with bestselling degrowth author Kohei Saito.

^Grist

Snowless winter in Himalayas – another sign of climate change

Lack of snow could mean water shortages for millions across Asia

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/environment/tibet-snowless-winter-01232024144224.html

#MassExtinction #pollution #ecology #environment #climate #Himalayas

Snowless winter in Himalayas – another sign of climate change

Lack of snow could mean water shortages for millions across Asia.

^{By Subel Rai Bhandari and Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan (Radio Free Asia)}

Even within the last 4 years:

- #Climate change denial has significantly decreased
- 40% of US electricity is now emissions-free https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/12/40-of-us-electricity-is-now-emissions-free/ , a huge jump.
- $600 billion invested in clean energy in the USA alone, jumpstarting everything from solar to EV sales and charging (many of those funded chargers will come online this year)
- Far-right leadership candidates were defeated in the USA, Brazil, Argentina, France, and others.

8/

40% of US electricity is now emissions-free

Good news as natural gas, coal, and solar see the biggest changes.

^{Ars Technica}

This is the first thing I’ve seen from a major press outlet that even resembles a stick in the eye of conventional economic wisdom. And it is absolutely on point.

We must scream at the top of lungs, and shame any who dare, try to defend the conventional orthodox economic machine that is tearing our children’s future down around their ears. #FUCKNORDHAUS!!!

Please, I beg you, circulate this article as far and wide as you can.

#Climate #ClimateCrisis #economics
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/

When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics

How William Nordhaus and an elite clique of math-addled economists hijacked climate policy.

^{Christopher Ketcham (The Intercept)}

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 -- https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biad080/7319571

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

What if I told you that most promoted actions about climate-friendly software are misguided?

Backing data for that claim and my opinion on the low-hanging fruits:

https://blog.ltgt.net/climate-friendly-software/

Key takeaways:
* Pick servers in carbon-neutral or low-carbon datacenters first
* Optimize for the perceived performance and battery life
* Don't be the one that will make your users change their device
* Sometimes, ideas aren't even worth their impacts

#greenIT #climate #sustainability #carbonfootprint #co2

Climate-friendly software: don't fight the wrong battle

What if I told you that most promoted actions about climate-friendly software are misguided? Here's backing data for that claim and my opinion on the low-hanging fruits.

^{tbroyer's pages}

A timely and rather shocking meme, to which I have added #AltText...

#Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency

TODAY IN SPAIN!

The northern Spanish city of Zaragoza was inundated by a heavy downpour in less than 20 minutes. The fire brigade had to rescue desperate people from their cars.
#climate #climatechange #weather #ClimateEmergency #GlobalWarming #climatecrisis #Spain

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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https://bookwyrm.social/user/BreadAndCircuses/review/1196642/s/essential-reading#anchor-1196642

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

Let’s get this right. Scientists didn’t fail to communicate the risks of #climatechange, they have been warning us for a century. Our policies are failing because after knowing the risks, fossil fuel companies spent billions of dollars blocking meaningful action on #climate.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4057045-catch-22-scientific-communication-failures-linked-to-faster-rising-seas/

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 --https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666791622000252

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