Rapid reduction in fossil fuel burning urgently needed to preserve liveable conditions, say scientists, as climate damage deepens
2023 “smashed” the record for the hottest year by a huge margin, providing “dramatic testimony” of how much warmer and more dangerous today’s climate is from the cooler one in which human civilization developed.
Link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/09/2023-record-world-hottest-climate-fossil-fuel
Hello!
ATC is happy to hand out the first issue of the Anti-Tech Collective Journal. The journal features 4 essays but should be enough to keep you busy for a while! This project has been an experiment in focussing on subscriber-submitted contributions, differing significantly from ATC’s past publication projects. We look forward to hearing all of your feedback–both positive and negative–as this is primarily a community endeavor to foster discussion of and expose to anti-tech ideas.
Happy reading, and apologies for the general lack of communication,
The ATC team
ATCJ 1.1
Across the globe, this summer has been unusually, unseasonably, and scarily hot, with the United Nations announcing that we’ve entered the era of “global boiling.” Scientists say this extreme heat wave would be impossible if it weren’t for the warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. And yet it’s hard to grapple with the damage caused by extreme heat. It’s the deadliest kind of climate disaster, and yet victims of heat often die out of sight of the public eye. FEMA doesn’t even respond to extreme heat waves in the way it does to other “major disasters.” Jake Bittle is a staff writer at Grist covering climate impact. In this conversation, Bittle speaks with Brooke about the invisibility of extreme heat, and the challenge it presents to news outlets, and the potential value of naming heat waves.
This is a segment from our August 18, 2023 show, Read All About It.
An American lawyer has been arrested in Panama after allegedly shooting two people taking part in an environmental protest Tuesday. Local media reports identified Kenneth Darlington, 77, as a Panama-born U.S. citizen. On Tuesday, he allegedly walked up to a group of protesters blocking the Pan-American Highway in the Chame District and remonstrated with the attendees. He then pulled out a pistol and—in front of a group of journalists reporting on the protest—allegedly opened fire. One victim, Abdiel Díaz Chávez, died at the scene, while another Iván Rodríguez Mendoza, was pronounced dead at a medical facility, according to TVN. Both victims were teachers, the report said, adding that Darlington has been charged with aggravated homicide and illegal possession of firearms.
The vast floating ice platforms of northern Greenland, unrivaled features of the northern hemisphere that keep our seas lower by holding back many trillion tons of ice, are in stark decline, according to new scientific research published Tuesday.
These northern Greenland ice shelves, as they are called, have lost 35 percent of their overall volume since 1978, the research published in “Nature Communications” found. That’s equivalent to a loss of roughly 400 billion tons of floating ice that acted like the stopper of a decanter, preventing glaciers from flowing into the sea and accelerating sea level rise.
And now there are only five large shelves left, stretching out from their fjords toward the Greenland Sea and the Arctic Ocean. That includes three major ones — Petermann, Ryder and Nioghalvfjerdsbrae (often referred to as 79 North for its location in degrees Latitude) — whose respective glaciers could ultimately account for 3.6 feet of sea level rise if they were to melt entirely — a process that would take centuries to play out.
This year is “virtually certain” to be the warmest in 125,000 years, European Union scientists said on Wednesday, after data showed last month was the world’s hottest October in that period.
Last month smashed through the previous October temperature record, from 2019, by a massive margin, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.
“The record was broken by 0.4 degrees Celsius, which is a huge margin,” said C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess, who described the October temperature anomaly as “very extreme”.
The heat is a result of continued greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, combined with the emergence this year of the El Nino weather pattern, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Globally, the average surface air temperature in October was 1.7 degrees Celsius warmer than the same month in 1850-1900, which Copernicus defines as the pre-industrial period.
The record-breaking October means 2023 is now “virtually certain” to be the warmest year recorded, C3S said in a statement. The previous record was 2016 – another El Nino year.
Copernicus’ dataset goes back to 1940. “When we combine our data with the IPCC, then we can say that this is the warmest year for the last 125,000 years,” Burgess said.
We can now hear one of the largest and most ancient living organisms on Earth whisper with the tremble of a million leaves echoing through its roots.
The forest made of a single tree known as Pando (“I spread” in Latin) has 47,000 stems (all with the same DNA) sprouting from a shared root system over 100 acres (40 hectares) of Utah. Here, this lone male quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) gradually grew into a massive 6,000 metric tons of life.
After possibly 12,000 years of life on Earth, this massive plant, whose tree-like stems tower up to 24 meters (80 feet), surely has plenty to say. And recordings released this year let us ‘hear’ it like never before.
“The findings are tantalizing,” Lance Oditt, founder of Friends of Pando, said when the project was unveiled in May.
LINK: https://www.sciencealert.com/haunting-sounds-made-by-worlds-largest-living-thing-recorded
Living in The Time of Dying is an unflinching look at what it means to be living in the midst of climate catastrophe and finding purpose and meaning within it. Recognising the magnitude of the climate crisis we are facing, independent filmmaker Michael Shaw, sells his house to travel around the world looking for answers. Pretty soon we begin to see how deep the predicament goes along with the systems and ways of thinking that brought us here.
This year we saw the hottest July ever recorded, and the same was true again in August. In fact, 2023 is on track to be the hottest year so far recorded, breaking the record set by 2020 and 2016. Over the past few months, more than 6,500 daily heat records have been broken in the U.S. alone, and in some places the roads became so hot that people suffered serious burns from falling on them. Terrible floods have ripped through China, Spain, Greece and elsewhere. Wildfires raged in Canada, the Canary Islands, Maui and parts of Europe. A tropical storm hit Los Angeles, the first in living memory. Wind speeds of Hurricane Lee, in the Atlantic Ocean, increased from 80 mph to 165 mph in roughly 24 hours.
The climate catastrophe is already here. We’ve been watching it unfold in real time on the news and over social media. Some have witnessed it first-hand, losing their homes, being forced to evacuate under emergency conditions and even losing their lives or the lives of friends and family. For those sensitive to human suffering and the grave injustices driving the climate crisis, this summer has been difficult to deal with. It’s been one extreme weather event, one shattered record, one shocking tragedy after another — and though the summer is now officially over, there’s more to come.
Bernard Charbonneau’s The Garden of Babylon (1969) is not only an impassioned, deeply personal and nostalgic manifesto on behalf of nature, traditional farming and rural culture—which are being destroyed by industrial and urban expansion and by government policies supposedly designed to save them but which in fact only promote financial interests and mass tourism—but also a revolutionary polemic on behalf of human freedom, whose indivisible unity with nature was ambiguously reflected in the “feeling of nature” that arose during the 18th century: “it was no mere coincidence that the century that discovered nature was also the century of the individual and his freedom”.