Does talking about climate ‘tipping points’ inspire action — or defeat?
by Kate Yoder in Grist…Kopp said that the emphasis on climate tipping points might have made sense as a call to action 20 years ago, when the consequences of climate change weren’t so obvious. But in 2024, the hottest year ever recorded, its effects are apparent, with floods, fires, and heat waves noticeably worse than they used to be.
The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?
by Tess McClure in The Guardian…As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.
Implications of the polycrisis for resilience in humanitarian action
Cascade Institute presents Thomas Homer-Dixon…Implications of the polycrisis for resilience in humanitarian action. A Forum for European and Central Asia National Society Leaders.
Global emergence of regional heatwave hotspots outpaces climate model simulations
by Kai Kornhuber, et al. in PNAS…Multiple recent record-shattering weather events raise questions about the adequacy of climate models to effectively predict and prepare for unprecedented climate impacts on human life, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Here, we show that extreme heat in several regions globally is increasing significantly and faster in magnitude than what state-of-the-art climate models have predicted under present warming even after accounting for their regional summer background warming.
Multisolving
Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World For most of Elizabeth Sawin’s career, she was not a multisolver. Instead, she worked on a single, albeit immensely important problem: climate change. Despite tremendous effort—long hours of teaching,...
The R word
by Alex Evans in The Good Apocalypse Guide…My idea of apocalypse resilience used to be pretty similar. Survival = self preservation (emphasis on self there) = stockpiling + steel doors x semiautomatic weapons.
‘Would you survive 72 hours?’ Germany and the Nordic countries prepare citizens for possible war
by Jon Henley, et al. in The Guardian…Apps and booklets are offering advice on how to build a bunker, stockpile food and live without electricity in case the worst happens
Society is right on track for a global collapse, new study of infamous 1970s report finds
by Brandon Specktor in LiveScience.com…A steep downturn in human population and quality of life could be coming in the 2040s, the report finds.
Bunkerised society – why prepping for end times is so American
by Robert Kirsch in Psyche…
Millions are preparing for doomsday, not together, but by closing the hatch. It’s a logical response to a hollowed-out state
Trees as infrastructure
from Dark Matter Laboratories…An open source model to support municipalities in transitioning toward resilient urban forest management practices
An emerging third option: Reclaiming democracy from dark money & dark tech
by Otto Scharmer in Medium…What does that tell us about democracy? Democracy is under strain globally, with mass misinformation eroding citizens’ ability to perceive and respond to the realities they face.
Heat-related mortality in Europe during 2023 and the role of adaptation in protecting health
by Eliso Gallo, et al. in Nature…The year of 2023 was the warmest on record globally and the second warmest in Europe. Here we applied epidemiological models to temperature and mortality records in 823 contiguous regions from 35 countries to estimate sex- and age-specific heat-related mortality in Europe during 2023 and to quantify the mortality burden avoided by societal adaptation to rising temperatures since the year 2000.
A logic for the future: International relations in the age of turbulence
by Stephen Heintz in the Rockefellerl Brothers Fund…Many of the causes and consequences of present-day turmoil are transnational or even global in nature. These conflicts have no regard for borders and are not responsive to solutions devised and implemented by individual nation-states or the existing ecosystem of multilateral institutions.
A brittle network
by Steve Lohr in The New York Times…The biggest and most valuable companies also carry the most risk to the economy as a whole. They are linked to more users, so if something happens to them, all the people who depend on them suffer. Think of Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, which is Google’s corporate parent. They are dominant hubs in fields like cloud computing and software, online advertising and e-commerce. If they go down, they can disrupt your daily routines, or your company’s.
He’ll try, but Trump can’t stop the clean energy revolution
by Matt Simon in Grist…The cost of renewables is plummeting, heat pumps are selling like crazy, and red states are raking in cash from the IRA.
I’m finally into ‘prepping’ and ready for the apocalypse
by Eva Wiseman in The Guardian…Piles of loo paper, a years worth of tinned goods and snake-proof boots. No wonder prepping has become a lifestyle choice