As the northern hemisphere burns, experts feel deep sadness – and resentment – while dreading what lies ahead this Australian summer
Tag: death
‘We are damned fools’: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come
James Hansen, who testified to Congress on global heating in 1988, says world is approaching a ‘new climate frontier’
The world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1m years, prior to human existence, because “we are damned fools” for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis, according to James Hansen, the US scientist who alerted the world to the greenhouse effect in the 1980s.
Hansen, whose testimony to the US Senate in 1988 is cited as the first high-profile revelation of global heating, warned in a statement with two other scientists that the world was moving towards a “new climate frontier” with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years, bringing impacts such as stronger storms, heatwaves and droughts.
LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/19/climate-crisis-james-hansen-scientist-warning
“The Heat Will Kill You First”: Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell on Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
The world is in the grips of a dangerous heat wave that has sent temperatures skyrocketing to deadly levels throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas. Unless urgent action is taken to reduce carbon emissions, the United Nations says, Earth could pass a temperature threshold in the next decade when climate disasters are too extreme to adapt to. We speak with longtime climate journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the new book, _The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet_, about how the climate crisis is raising temperatures, the toll such heat can have on the human body, and how “heat is the primary driver for this climate transformation we are undergoing right now,” fueling natural disasters such as floods, wildfires and more. Transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/1…
World’s oceans changing colour due to climate breakdown, study suggests
The sea is becoming greener due to changes in plankton populations, analysis of Nasa images finds
Earth’s oceans are changing colour and climate breakdown is probably to blame, according to research.
The deep blue sea is actually becoming steadily greener over time, according to the study, with areas in the low latitudes near the equator especially affected.
Sun To Reach Solar Maximum In 2 Years, May Lead To “Internet Apocalypse”
Outages caused by solar storms could last for months, leading to huge economic impact
Just took a quick look at the weather across the world, this is fine?
Debris from Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch remains, marking environmental concerns
‘A Wake Up Call’: The World Needs to Prepare for Massive Crop Failure
Climate change is messing with the jet stream, and it means more extreme weather events in the future.
LINK: https://gizmodo.com/study-world-needs-to-prepare-for-massive-crop-failure-1850605691
Are We Facing the Reality of Civilizational Collapse?
The Hottest Days in 100,000 Years. How Long Do We Have, and What Does “Collapse” Mean for a Civilization?
The hottest series of days in 100,000 years. The world, for its part, looked away. Nobody much noticed. Us, humankind, going through this historic, epochal change. Things will never be the same again — not even if, somehow, the temperature “goes back down,” because the planet, of course, will by then have been altered, profoundly.
Those of us who are paying attention, though, might have begun to wonder: what about this thing called “civilizational collapse”? How close is it? What does it really mean?
LINK: https://eand.co/are-we-facing-the-reality-of-civilizational-collapse-18d2817cf85d
Needed: Either Degrowth or Two Earths
In a May 30 essay for the New York Times titled “The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring,” one of the architects of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Brian Deese, wrote, “Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
There’s just one problem. Those technologies aren’t going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to reduce emissions fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe is to phase out the burning of oil, gas, and coal by law, directly and deliberately. If, against all odds, the United States does that, we certainly will need wind- and solar-power installations, batteries, and new technologies to compensate for the decline of energy from fossil fuels. There is no reason, however, to expect that the process would work in reverse; a “clean-energy” mobilization alone won’t cause a steep reduction in use of fossil fuels.
I think top leaders in Washington are using green-energy pipe dreams to distract us from the reality that they have given up altogether on reducing US fossil fuel use. They’ve caved. This month’s bipartisan deal on the debt limit included a provision that would ease the permitting of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines like the ecologically destructive Mountain Valley fossil-gas pipeline so dear to the heart of West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has issued new rules allowing old coal and fossil gas power plants to continue operating if they capture their carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into old oil wells. And under the IRA, those plants that capture emissions will receive federal climate subsidies, even if they use the carbon dioxide that’s pumped into the old wells to push out residual oil that has evaded conventional methods of extraction. And the IRA did not even end federal subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, which could have saved somewhere between $10 and $50 billion annually. Taken together, these policies could extend the operation of existing coal and gas power plants much further into the future.