Climate Emergency
ZNet reports on the extreme heat wave covering some of the most densely populated regions of the world.. Wide areas of south and Southeast Asia, from Pakistan to the Philippines, have experienced prolonged extreme heat affecting everything from human health to the economy and education.
Many pupils in India, Bangladesh, and Philippines have been told to stay at home for days due to a severe health risk from extreme heat, while the heatwaves are becoming a major issue in India’s election. Bangladesh even closed all primary schools for weeks while the temperature reached 43.8°C on April 30.
Microsoft’s Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources | PCMag
What good is AI if you don’t have a planet to use it on?
Microsoft released its 2024 Sustainability Report on Wednesday, and it’s mostly bad news. Last year, Microsoft’s emissions went up 29%, and it used 23% more water, primarily due to “new technologies, including generative AI.”
…It’s now full steam ahead on selling the Copilot AI assistant add-on for Microsoft 365 products while building a new AI model that consumes tons of electricity during the training phase alone.
The Guardian sent a survey to 843 of the world’s top climate scientists, these were lead authors and review editors of the IPCC reports since 2018. 380 replied. They don’t sleep at night and they are scared.
Hundreds of climate experts expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels by 2100…
Reading the responses, he could feel this “overwhelming feeling of frustration and despair and unhappiness at being ignored for so many years, and the difficulty they’re having of living with this information”.
Middle class Americans don’t care much about the future inhabitability of the planet but they love their homes and possessions, this may get their attention. Yes, the climate emergency is coming for you too.
The New York Times on the collapse of the US home insurance system:
Across the United States, more frequent extreme weather is starting to cause the home insurance market to buckle, even for those who have paid their premiums dutifully year after year.
Christopher Flavelle, a climate reporter, discusses a Times investigation into one of the most consequential effects of the changes.
Canada continues to burn
Canada wildfire: Thousands evacuate in British Columbia, winds push smoke into Alberta | AP News
The blaze, which started Friday, almost doubled in size the following day, reaching about 17 square kilometers (4,200 acres). BC Wildfire Service maps showed the fire burning just a few kilometers (miles) west of Fort Nelson’s city limits.
In 2023, Canada witnessed a record number of wildfires that also caused choking smoke in parts of the U.S. and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate across British Columbia.
World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target | The Guardian
Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed.
Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.
Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.
Numerous experts said they had been left feeling hopeless, infuriated and scared by the failure of governments to act despite the clear scientific evidence provided.
“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” said Gretta Pecl, at the University of Tasmania. “ Authorities will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”
Not surprising. We continue to move in the wrong direction.
Record-breaking increase in CO2 levels in world’s atmosphere | The Guardian
The largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred, according to researchers who monitor the relentless accumulation of the primary gas that is heating the planet.
The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO2 levels over a 12-month period.
The US is propping up gas while the world moves to renewable energy - The Verge
“The decline of power sector emissions is now inevitable. 2023 was likely the pivot point – a major turning point in the history of energy. But the pace … depends on how fast the renewables revolution continues.”
It’s a transition that could be happening much faster if not for the US, which is already the world’s biggest gas producer, using record amounts of gas last year. Without the US, Ember finds, electricity generation from gas would have fallen globally in 2023.
The wealthy 10% of the over-developed nations are wondering where they’ll fly to for their next vacation.
Brazil battles nature as ‘largest ever’ floods submerge whole cities - YouTube
At least 83 people are dead after days of heavy rain in southern Brazil and more than a hundred are missing.
Another 122 thousand people have been displaced by floods, which have destroyed roads and bridges in several cities, triggered landslides and caused a dam to partially collapse.
Vox has an excellent story on annual global food waste. The climate specific stats are eye watering. 8 to 10% of carbon emissions are related to food waste and if it were a country, it would be 3rd in emissions, behind only the US and China.
Such waste takes a significant toll on the environment. The process of producing food — the raising of animals, the land and water use, and the subsequent pollution that goes with it — is horribly intensive on the planet. Food waste squanders those efforts, and then makes it worse: as it rots in landfills, it creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Mass die-offs and constant crisis will define the brutality of our future as we attempt and fail to adapt to a completely destabilized climate.
Mass fish die-off in Vietnam as heat wave roasts Southeast Asia
Hundreds of thousands of fish have died in a reservoir in southern Vietnam’s Dong Nai province, with locals and media reports suggesting a brutal heat wave and the lake’s management are to blame.
Like much of Southeast Asia—where schools have recently been forced to close early and electricity usage has surged—southern and central Vietnam have been scorched by devastating heat.
And yet cities in the Southwest are still growing. The delusional thinking about the future is off the charts.
Megadrought forces end to sugarcane farming in parched Texas borderland | The Guardian
In February, the cooperative announced that it would close its 50-year-old sugarcane processing mill, the last remaining in the state, by the end of this spring. It didn’t even make it to the end of the season, with most workers employed until 29 April. Ongoing megadrought meant there wasn’t enough water to irrigate co-op members’ 34,000 acres of sugarcane, and that effectively puts an end to sugarcane farming in the south Texas borderlands.
…Increasingly dry farms find themselves vying with other farms, cities, industries and mining operations for dwindling resources. In 2022, drought decimated Texas cotton and forced California growers to idle half their rice fields. Water disputes are also on the rise as decreased flows in the Colorado River and other vital waterways pit state against state, states against native nations and farmers against municipalities.
And it will get much, much worse. We are in the earliest days food systems disruption.
Rest assured, we’ll continue to do nothing to solve the problem.
Worst wine harvest in 62 years blamed on ‘extreme’ weather and climate change | Euronews
The International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) says the drink hit its lowest level since 1962. This intergovernmental organisation has 50 member states, representing 75 per cent of the world’s vineyard area.
Experts blame “extreme environmental conditions” including droughts and fires that have been driving the downward trend in production.
I first watched Koyaanisqatsi sometime around 1990 and I was left speechless. I cried while I watched it and after.
Without words it tells the story of modern industrial human societies, particularly those of the Global North. A story of alienation, cruelty and destruction that was well underway at the time it was filmed and which we’ve seen continue at increased pace in the 40 years since. And, in 2024, it would seem that it is a story we will not deviate from.
Five translations of the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi:
“crazy life"“life in turmoil"“life out of balance"“life disintegrating"“a state of life that calls for another way of living”
In the years since I’ve watched it again several times as a kind of ongoing acknowledgement meditation. We are racing into oblivion.
“These films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people. It’s been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it’s not the effect of, it’s that everything exists within [technology]. It’s not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe …”
The trailer.
The inquiry was instigated by Colombia and Chile, which together asked the court to set out what legal responsibilities states have to tackle climate change and to stop it breaching people’s human rights.
Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era - The Washington Post
The heat fell upon Mali’s capital like a thick, smothering blanket — chasing people from the streets, stifling them inside their homes. For nearly a week at the beginning of April, the temperature in Bamako hovered above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The cost of ice spiked to ten times its normal price, an overtaxed electrical grid sputtered and shut down.
With much of the majority-Muslim country fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, dehydration and heat stroke became epidemic. As their body temperatures climbed, people’s blood pressure lowered. Their vision went fuzzy, their kidneys and livers malfunctioned, their brains began to swell. At the city’s main hospital, doctors recorded a month’s worth of deaths in just four days. Local cemeteries were overwhelmed.
Arctic permafrost is now a net source of major greenhouse gases | New Scientist
Areas of permanently frozen ground in northern regions are now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb, causing the planet to heat even further, according to the first Arctic-wide estimate of all three major greenhouse gases.
Frozen ground, or permafrost, which underlies 15 per cent of the northern hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, has shrunk in area by an estimated 7 per cent in 50 years as it thaws.
It was 85°F here yesterday (mid-Missouri). Forecast to be 83° today and 82° tomorrow. According to the Apple weather app this is 13° above average. Summer is going to be fun. 🥵
Our rapidly heating planet is regularly shattering records these days. December through February was so warm — in fact, the hottest winter on record in the U.S. — it’s been described by some climate experts as a “lost winter.” Last year also set new records for global surface temperature, hottest summer and ocean heat content. Perhaps most ominously, the world averaged temperatures 1.4º C higher than pre-industrial levels during those 12 months.
As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species.