by Danny Lewis in Smithsonian Magazine….“Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
Climate crisis → drought → food deficit → migration
by Mohan Mainali in Nepali Times….Half-century of eastern Nepal’s rainfall data points to a link between chronic drought and depopulation
Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists
by Johathan Watts in The Guardian…If the anomaly does not stabilise by August, ‘the world will be in uncharted territory’, says climate expert
The Eco-Civilization Framework
As the planet burns, authoritarian populists dominate politics, oil executives direct the COP process, and the wealthy elite pull further away from everyone else, it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that the movement for a beneficial future is failing. We...
Global energy-related CO2 emissions hit record high in 2023 – IEA
by Reuters in Climate Home News…Global emissions from energy rose by 410 million tonnes, or 1.1%, in 2023 to 37.4 billion tonnes, hitting a record hight
Forget the partisan hype, Aust farmers are preparing for the extremes of climate change
by Jamie Seidel in Cosmos Magazine…Farmers consider the animal breeds and crop types they produce to be flexible choices. Others are prepared to relocate operations to chase the conditions their particular produce needs.
More in this category
Pivotal moment for humanity as disasters threaten to converge
by David Nield in Science Alert…The researchers warn of a catastrophic loss of crop-growing capacity with up to half the global area for growing wheat and maize potentially lost, putting the “stability of our societies” under threat. These processes are already well underway, with more than 27 million children driven into hunger by extreme weather in 2022 alone.
What a major solar storm could do to our planet
by Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker…Scientists can’t predict what will happen in space. All they can do is try to identify a threat quickly enough to minimize its impact on everything that it might damage or destroy.
Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change
by Rebecca Solnit…..We are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now.
Critical Atlantic Ocean current system is showing early signs of collapse, prompting warning from scientists
by Laura Paddison on CNN….For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm on the circulation’s stability as climate change warms the ocean and melts ice, disrupting the balance of heat and salt that determines the currents’ strength.
The perverse policies that fuel wildfires
by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker…Strategies intended to safeguard forests and homes have instead increased the likelihood that they’ll burn.
Hurricanes becoming so strong that new category needed, study says
by Oliver Milman in The Guardian…Scientists propose new category 6 rating to classify ‘mega-hurricanes’, becoming more likely due to climate crisis
Western US seeing extreme weather ‘unprecedented’ in 500 years
by Robyn White in Newsweek…These hot temperatures have increased the soil moisture, which in turn has contributed to the severity and frequency of drought. The researchers have linked the notable increase in drought to human activities.
The 100-Year extinction panic is back, right on schedule
by Tyler Austin Harper in The New York Times…Climate anxiety, of the sort expressed by that student, is driving new fields in psychology, experimental therapies and debates about what a recent New Yorker article called “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.” Our public health infrastructure groans under the weight of a lingering pandemic while we are told to expect worse contagions to come. The near coup at OpenAI, which resulted at least in part from a dispute about whether artificial intelligence could soon threaten humanity with extinction, is only the latest example of our ballooning angst about technology overtaking us.
Ecological ‘doom loops’ edging closer
from University of Sheffield….Extreme weather events such as wildfires and droughts will accelerate change in stressed systems leading to quicker tipping points of ecological decline, according to a new study.
How Octavia Butler told the future
by Tiya Miles in The Atlantic…We need her conception of “histofuturism” now more than ever.
Food shortages ‘alarmingly likely’ in the UK next year
by Madeleine Ross in The Telegraph….Warning that global conflicts and climate change will lead to empty shelves
WEP2018 TV: Energy, money and technology – From the lens of the superorganism
During Nate Hagens’ #WEP2018 keynote, he will discuss how all of our lives will be influenced by how we react to the coming era of harder to extract and more costly fossil fuels that will be combined with cleaner but more stochastic energy types.
‘Nanoplastics’ could be worse than ,microplastics and we know almost nothing about them
by Mirjam Guesgen in Vice….”From the public point of view, this could be the next asbestos.”
500+ pages, 200+ researchers: Global Tipping Points Report delivers comprehensive assessment of tipping point risks and societal opportunities
by T.M. Lenton, et al in Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research…Tipping points pose some of the biggest risks to our planet’s life-support systems and the stability of our societies. In an unprecedented effort by the scientific community, researchers have now published a comprehensive report on Earth system tipping points and their potential impacts and opportunities for societal change. More than 200 scientists from around the world contributed to the ‘Global Tipping Points Report’. The report with more than 500 pages provides an authoritative guide to the state of knowledge on tipping points, explores opportunities for accelerating much needed transformations, and outlines options for a new governance of tipping point risks and opportunities.
Is it too late to keep global warming below 1.5 °C? The challenge in 7 charts
by Jeff Tollefson in Nature…Chances are rapidly disappearing to limit Earth’s temperature rise to the globally agreed mark, but researchers say there are some positive signs of progress.