Collapse

We find that aerosol cooling, and thus climate sensitivity, are understated in the best estimate of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As a result, shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely within the next 20-30 years.

The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies.

The argument set out by Thallinger in a LinkedIn post begins with the increasingly severe damage being caused by the climate crisis: “Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time.”

“We are fast approaching temperature levels – 1.5C, 2C, 3C – where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many of these risks,” he said. “The math breaks down: the premiums required exceed what people or companies can pay. This is already happening. Entire regions are becoming uninsurable.”

“This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry,” he said. “The economic value of entire regions – coastal, arid, wildfire-prone – will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice, rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like.”

https://archive.ph/gc27x

Abstract

Bitcoin mines—massive computing clusters generating cryptocurrency tokens—consume vast amounts of electricity. The amount of fine particle (PM2.5) air pollution created because of their electricity consumption and its effect on environmental health is pending. In this study, we located the 34 largest mines in the United States in 2022, identified the electricity-generating plants that responded to them, and pinpointed communities most harmed by Bitcoin mine-attributable air pollution. From mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 mines consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity—33% more than Los Angeles—85% of which came from fossil fuels. We estimated that 1.9 million Americans were exposed to ≥0.1 μg/m3 of additional PM2.5 pollution from Bitcoin mines, often hundreds of miles away from the communities they affected. Americans living in four regions—including New York City and near Houston—were exposed to the highest Bitcoin mine-attributable PM2.5 concentrations (≥0.5 μg/m3) with the greatest health risks.

Abstract

Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources. For most of humanity’s evolutionary history, such expansionist tendencies have been countered by negative feedback. However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels reduced many forms of negative feedback, enabling us to realize our full potential for exponential growth. This natural capacity is being reinforced by growth-oriented neoliberal economics—nurture complements nature. Problem: the human enterprise is a ‘dissipative structure’ and sub-system of the ecosphere—it can grow and maintain itself only by consuming and dissipating available energy and resources extracted from its host system, the ecosphere, and discharging waste back into its host. The population increase from one to eight billion, and >100-fold expansion of real GWP in just two centuries on a finite planet, has thus propelled modern techno-industrial society into a state of advanced overshoot. We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence. Climate change is the best-known symptom of overshoot, but mainstream ‘solutions’ will actually accelerate climate disruption and worsen overshoot. Humanity is exhibiting the characteristic dynamics of a one-off population boom–bust cycle. The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.

Keywords: overshoot; exceptionalism; human nature; cognitive obsolescence; exponential growth; ‘K’ strategist; over population; over consumption; climate change; energy transition; dissipative structure; civilizational collapse; population correction

Significance

Pollinators are critical to maintaining terrestrial ecosystem function and the global food supply, but many are in decline. However, we have limited information identifying which species are at elevated extinction risk, limiting efforts to prioritize scarce conservation resources. We assessed the extinction risk of nearly 1,600 species of vertebrate and insect pollinators and found that more than one in five species is at risk of extinction. The major threats are climate change, agriculture, modifications to hydrological and fire regimes, and housing and urban development. These results can inform management actions to help prevent pollinator extinctions.

Abstract

Pollinators are critical for food production and ecosystem function. Although native pollinators are thought to be declining, the evidence is limited. This first, taxonomically diverse assessment for mainland North America north of Mexico reveals that 22.6% (20.6 to 29.6%) of the 1,579 species in the best-studied vertebrate and insect pollinator groups have elevated risk of extinction. All three pollinating bat species are at risk and bees are the insect group most at risk (best estimate, 34.7% of 472 species assessed, range 30.3 to 43.0%). Substantial numbers of butterflies (19.5% of 632 species, range 19.1 to 21.0%) and moths (16.1% of 142 species, range 15.5 to 19.0%) are also at risk, with flower flies (14.7% of 295 species, range 11.5 to 32.9%), beetles (12.5% of 18 species, range 11.1 to 22.2%), and hummingbirds (0% of 17 species) more secure. At-risk pollinators are concentrated where diversity is highest, in the southwestern United States. Threats to pollinators vary geographically: climate change in the West and North, agriculture in the Great Plains, and pollution, agriculture, and urban development in the East. Woodland, shrubland/chaparral, and grassland habitats support the greatest numbers of at-risk pollinators. Strategies for improving pollinator habitat are increasingly available, and this study identifies species, habitats, and threats most in need of conservation actions at state, provincial, territorial, national, and continental levels.

From chronic respiratory problems to cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and dementia, health damage caused by particulate matter air pollution is wide-ranging and serious. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over six million deaths a year are caused by increased exposure to particulate matter.

Measurements taken with the new method reveal that 60% to 99% of oxygen radicals disappear within minutes or hours. Previous analyses of particulate matter based on filter deposition therefore delivered a distorted image.

The older methods of measuring involed collecting particles on a filter, that.filter is then collected days or weeks later, this suggest many of the particles (60%-99%) will be gone by then

Maybe this ahoukd even be cross posted to /c/fuckcars.

FFS :(

The problem with the soft apocalypse is that it is still an apocalypse. It still ends in collapse. We tell ourselves we have time, that the worst is always just ahead, that we will act when we must

This year’s maximum arctic sea ice extent came in 1.31 million square kilometers below the 1981-2010 average maximum. This is the lowest ever.

Abstract

Tropical marine low cloud feedback is key to the uncertainty in climate sensitivity, and it depends on the warming pattern of sea surface temperatures (SSTs). Here, we empirically constrain this feedback in two major low cloud regions, the tropical Pacific and Atlantic, using interannual variability. Low cloud sensitivities to local SST and to remote SST, represented by lower-troposphere temperature, are poorly captured in many models of the latest global climate model ensemble, especially in the less-studied tropical Atlantic. The Atlantic favors large positive cloud feedback that appears difficult to reconcile with the Pacific—we apply a Pareto optimization approach to elucidate trade-offs between the conflicting observational constraints. Examining ~200,000 possible combinations of model subensembles, this multi-objective observational constraint narrows the cloud feedback uncertainty among climate models, nearly eliminates the possibility of a negative tropical shortwave cloud feedback in CO2-induced warming, and suggests a 71% increase in the tropical shortwave cloud feedback.

Editor’s summary

As climate has warmed, precipitation and evapotranspiration changes have affected land surface water fluxes. What impact has that had on terrestrial water storage, the amount of water stored on and in the land? Seo et al. combined soil moisture data from satellites, measurements of sea level, and observations of polar motion to estimate terrestrial water storage over the past four decades, which revealed a dramatic decline (see the Perspective by Samaniego). During the interval from 2000 to 2002, terrestrial water storage decreased by nearly twice as much as Greenland ice mass loss over the same period. —Jesse Smith

Abstract

Rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures have caused substantial changes in terrestrial water circulation and land surface water fluxes, such as precipitation and evapotranspiration, potentially leading to abrupt shifts in terrestrial water storage. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis v5 (ERA5) soil moisture (SM) product reveals a sharp depletion during the early 21st century. During the period 2000 to 2002, soil moisture declined by approximately 1614 gigatonnes, much larger than Greenland’s ice loss of about 900 gigatonnes (2002–2006). From 2003 to 2016, SM depletion continued, with an additional 1009-gigatonne loss. This depletion is supported by two independent observations of global mean sea level rise (~4.4 millimeters) and Earth’s pole shift (~45 centimeters). Precipitation deficits and stable evapotranspiration likely caused this decline, and SM has not recovered as of 2021, with future recovery unlikely under present climate conditions.

At least 24 people have been killed as multiple wildfires continue to ravage South Korea's south-east region. More than 23,000 people have been forced to flee their homes. Similar to other instances of severe wildfires over recent months, these fires are fueled by strong winds and dry weather, uncommon to the area. The current fires are already the deadliest in the country's history, there have been 244 wildfires this year - 2.4 times more than the same period last year.

The insurance industry thinks that climate change will wipe out half of GDP. Mainstream economic thinking has not factored in the climate shock that is coming.

Abstract

In light of uncertainties regarding climate sensitivity and future anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, we explore the plausibility of global warming over the next millennium which is significantly higher than what is usually expected. Although efforts to decarbonize the global economy have significantly shifted global anthropogenic emissions away from the most extreme emission scenarios, intermediate emission scenarios are still plausible. Significant warming in these scenarios cannot be ruled out as uncertainties in equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) remain very large. Until now, long-term climate change projections and their uncertainties for such scenarios have not been investigated using Earth system models (ESMs) that account for all major carbon cycle feedbacks. Using the fast ESM CLIMBER-X with interactive CO2 and CH4 (the latter typically not included in most models), we performed simulations for the next millennium under extended SSP1-2.6, SSP4-3.4 and SSP2-4.5 scenarios. These scenarios are usually associated with peak global warming levels of 1.5 ∘C, 2 ∘C and 3 ∘C, respectively, for an ECS of ∼3 ∘C, considered the best estimate in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. As ECS values lower or higher than this estimate cannot be ruled out, we emulate a wide range of ECS from 2 ∘C to 5 ∘C, defined as the 'very likely' range by the IPCC. Our results show that achieving the Paris Agreement goal of a 2 ∘C temperature increase is only feasible for low emission scenarios and if ECS is lower than 3.5 ∘C. With an ECS of 5 ∘C, peak warming in all considered scenarios more than doubles compared to an ECS of 3 ∘C. Approximately 50% of this additional warming is attributed to positive climate–carbon cycle feedbacks with comparable contributions from CO2 and CH4. The interplay between potentially high ECS and carbon cycle feedbacks could drastically enhance future warming, demonstrating the importance of properly accounting for all major climate feedbacks and associated uncertainties in projecting future climate change.