Experimenting with ways to live a low impact life in a tiny house in the woods. Graphic and web design at Beardy Guy Creative . I often write about the Climate Emergency, Apple and the iPad. Living on the traditional territory of: O-ga-xpa Ma-zhoⁿ (O-ga-xpa) (Quapaw), Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Kaskaskia, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo)
Global heating will drive billions of people out of the “climate niche” in which humanity has flourished for millennia, a study has estimated, exposing them to unprecedented temperatures and extreme weather.
The world is on track for 2.7C of heating with current action plans and this would mean 2 billion people experiencing average annual temperatures above 29C by 2030, a level at which very few communities have lived in the past.
As climate change continues warming the planet, a new and invisible killer is emerging: extreme wet bulb temperatures. This refers to a potentially lethal combination of heat and humidity that, until now, have appeared somewhat infrequently around the world. But models predict that they are likely to become an increasingly big problem in the coming years.
This will be increasingly important to understand and consider.
Tragically, this will continue because the kind of protest needed to stop it is too much effort, too inconvenient. Easier to feel awful for a moment then watch TV while browsing social media.
This is how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart
Asia is experiencing weeks of “endless record heat”, with sweltering temperatures causing school closures and surges in energy use.
Record April temperatures have been recorded at monitoring stations across Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, as well as in China and South Asia.
4 weather stations in Myanmar matched record monthly temperatures, with Theinzayet reaching the highest, at 43C (109.4F). Bago, north-east of Yangon, reached 42.2C, matching the record previously set in May 2020 and April 2019.
Chapter 20 of the Ministry for the Future begins with a description of the Gini coefficient.
From Wikipedia:
In economics, the Gini coefficient, also known as the Gini index or Gini ratio, is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality or the wealth inequality or the consumption inequality within a nation or a social group. It was developed by statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini.
In 2021, net electricity consumption worldwide amounted to over 25,000 terawatt-hours, an increase of more than 30 percent in comparison to a decade earlier. When compared to 1980, global electricity consumption more than tripled. On the generation side, the world is still strongly dependent on fossil fuels. Despite the world's renewable energy capacity quintupling in the last decade, coal and gas combined still accounted for almost 60 percent of global electricity generation in 2021.
I'm thinking about per capita electricity consumption this morning. According to Statista, the US is 12,314 kWh. A nice chart at the link below. I've not compared to other sources. But
TO CALL WHAT’S happening in the oceans right now an anomaly is a bit of an understatement. Since March, average sea surface temperatures have been climbing to record highs.
Since this record-keeping began in the early 1980s—the other squiggly lines are previous years—the global average for the world’s ocean surfaces has oscillated seasonally between 19.7 and 21 degrees Celsius (67.5 and 69.8 Fahrenheit). Toward the end of March, the average shot above the 21-degree mark and stayed there for a month. (The most recent reading, for April 26, was just a hair under 21 degrees.) This temperature spike is not just unprecedented, but extreme
Last year, the United States incurred over $2bn in costs due to 20 climate-related extreme weather events, from Hurricane Ian to heatwaves and drought. Lumber, cotton, tomatoes, wheat and energy – and the products they generate, from denim jeans to your Italian takeout dinner – were all affected by these events and are now more expensive than this time last year. Climate-driven extreme weather and disasters are now more frequently responsible for production shortages, supply chain disruptions...
Madeleine Finlay hears from correspondent Sandra Laville about how plastics are made, the environmental and health impacts of the process and what needs to be done to get a handle on plastic pollution
It’s possible to stop using plastic, but it does require effort and limits choices. I have cut back plastic intake by 95% over the past couple of years. Anyone can make the same choice. If we insist on continuing purchasing products that are packaged in plastic we are a part of the problem.
A brief summary of recent actions and future plans of Extinction Rebellion and other climate activists in the UK. I especially like call for citizens assemblies as a strategy for building longer term community, direct democracy into the movement.
The 2000-watt society is an environmental vision, first introduced in 1998 by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zurich), which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) by the year 20502050, without lowering their standard of living.
The concept addresses not only personal or household energy use, but the total for the whole society, including embodied energy, divided by the population.
Two thousand watts is approximately the current world average rate of total primary energy use. This compared, in 2008, to averages of around 6,000 watts in western Europe, 12,000 watts in the United States, 1,500 watts in China, 1,000 watts in India, 500 watts in South Africa and only 300 watts in Bangladesh. Switzerland itself, then using an average of around 5,000 watts, was last a 2000-watt society in the 1960s.
Cofounder of Greenpeace and writer of the Deep Green column Rex Weyler helps us transcend the idea that we can fix the environment – or anything else – so we can finally learn to participate as members of a living world.
An excellent discussion between Rex Weyler and Douglass Rushkoff on the current episode of the Team Human Podcast.
An excellent video of Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion. Stark, difficult, plain, honest. The response of the crowd seems to be somewhere between terrified and disbelief.
Climate change is going to cause a slow grind, much like an ever increasing tax, where it costs agriculture more to output the same amount. It’s easy for humans to ignore the changes within the habitats of other species. However, in our own habitat, the first area we will see indicators in is agricultural products. Which we are beginning to experience now.
Where damaging weather patterns don’t interrupt the crop cycle, the supply chain will.
As we inch closer and closer to the precipice of a climate apocalypse, a new film, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” lands with a rageful conviction about the necessary obliteration, by any means, of the greedy systems that may soon kill us all.
When Xochitl aptly explains that “this is an act of self-defense,” what she is so vehemently protecting is the chance at a collective future. Their fight then is just as much our fight.
In 2021, a Texas intelligence command center disseminated a bulletin warning its law enforcement partners about activists interested in sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure. The report detailed no specific threat, but instead linked to an interview with Andreas Malm, a Swedish professor of human ecology, on a New Yorker podcast in which he advocated for the destroying or “neutralizing” new fossil fuel projects like pipelines using nonviolent methods.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) synthesis report recently landed with an authoritative thump, giving voice to hundreds of scientists endeavouring to understand the unfolding calamity of global heating. What’s changed since the last one in 2014? Well, we’ve dumped an additional third of a trillion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere, primarily from burning fossil fuels. While world leaders promised to cut global emissions, they have presided over a 5% rise.
