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.
Mike Davis, California’s ‘prophet of doom’, on activism in a dying world: ‘Despair is useless’
by Lois Beckett in The Guardian…lHis warnings of ecological and social breakdown have proved accurate. But with months to live, Davis is anything but defeated
The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth
by William J Ripple, et al. in BioScience…The surge in yearly climate disasters shows we are in a major crisis with worse to come if we continue with business as usual. Today, more than ever, our actions matter for the stable climate system that has supported us for thousands of years. Humanity’s future depends on our creativity, moral fiber, and perseverance.
Open letter by climate scientists to the Nordic Council of Ministers
by Climate Scientists….Many further impacts are likely to be felt globally, including a shift in tropical rainfall belts, reduced
oceanic carbon dioxide uptake (and thus faster atmospheric increase) as well as major additional sea-level rise particularly along the American Atlantic coast, and an upheaval of marine ecosystems and fisheries
Derailment risk: A systems analysis that identifies risks which could derail the sustainability transition
by Laurie Laybourn, et al. in Earth Systems Dynamics…How will the effects of climate change, nature loss, and other environmental change impact our ability to tackle the causes of these problems? There is already a high demand on resources to respond to worsening climate shocks, knock-on impacts for areas such as food production and health, and the many other growing consequences of changes to the Earth system (Pörtner et al., 2022). These impacts are expected to increase in a warmer future, placing ever greater demands on our attention and resources as we respond to worsening conditions and larger crises.
Cli-Fi—helping us manage a crisis
by Howard Frumkin in the British Medical Journal…Cli-fi may be important for our patients as they come to grips with the looming climate crisis—a hyper-object too vast to grasp, a threat too frightening to confront directly, a challenge that can feel paralysing. Indeed, health professionals may find cli-fi helpful in the same way. Cli-fi may function in at least three relevant domains: cognitive, emotional, and behavioural.
More in this category
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.
Multisolving: making systems whole, healthy, and sustainable
by Elizabeth R. Sawin, et al, in Stanford Social Innovation Review…Crossing system boundaries to build partnerships and solve shared problems will strengthen communities and build resilience.
The ‘flickering’ of Earth systems is warning us: act now, or see our already degraded paradise lost
by George Monbiot in The Guardian…Every hour is now an “if only” moment: offering a better chance of avoiding collapse than the hour that follows. Grim as our time on Earth is, future generations will look back on it as a golden age. A golden age of wildlife, of mild weather, stability, prosperity, of opportunities to act. Our living world is a grey shadow of what it once was, but a vibrant paradise in comparison with what it will be. Unless, unless.
2023 Executive Summary
from the Executive Summary UNEHS…Today, we are moving perilously close to the brink of multiple risk tipping points. Human actions are behind this rapid and fundamental change to the planet. We are introducing new risks and amplifying existing ones by indiscriminately extracting our water resources, damaging nature and biodiversity, polluting both Earth and space, and destroying our tools and options to deal with disaster risk.
Climate change has toppled some civilizations but not others. Why?
by Kate Yoder in Grist…Of course, there’s no guarantee that a better system will replace the vulnerable, unequal one after a collapse. “You still have to do the work of putting in the reforms, and having the support of those in power, to be able to actually set and reinforce these kinds of revisions,” Hoyer said. “So I would argue, if that’s the case, let’s just do that without the violence to begin with.”
Rehabilitating Lahaina
by Travis Hartman, et al. in Reuters…After Hawaii’s worst wildfire killed scores of people in August, local and federal agencies are reckoning with the toxic chemicals created when a built environment burns
The world’s top industrial countries are in treacherous waters
by Richard Heinberg in Resilience.org…Whatever is coming will be as historically unique as our present circumstances. The ever-louder rumblings from just over the horizon suggest that, whatever it is, it’s not far off.