Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

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A place to share news, experiences and discussion about the continuing climate crisis, societal collapse, and biosphere collapse. Please be respectful of each other and remember the human.

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Useful Links:

DISCORD - Collapse

Earth - A Global Map of Wind, Weather and Ocean Conditions - Use the menu at bottom left to toggle different views. For example, you can see where wildfires/smoke are by selecting "Chem - COsc" to see carbon monoxide (CO) surface concentration.

Climate Reanalyzer (University of Maine) - A source for daily updated average global air temps, sea surface temps, sea ice, weather and more.

National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center (US) - Information about ENSO and weather predictions.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) Global Temperature Rankings Outlook (US) - Tool that is updated each month, concurrent with the release of the monthly global climate report.

Canadian Wildland Fire Information System - Government of Canada

Surging Seas Risk Zone Map - For discovering which areas could be underwater soon.

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founded 2 years ago
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  • A rising number of young Americans are disconnected from work, school, and a sense of purpose.
  • Disconnection rates have been increasing since the 1990s, affecting young people's futures.
  • Poor mental health and a lack of a financial safety net contribute to rising disconnection.
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Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11415277

Here is the data (pdf).

Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) also revealed that a further 40 countries generate at least 50% of their electricity from renewable energy technologies like wind, water, or solar.

The data, which refer to the years 2021 and 2022, have been compiled by Professor Mark Z. Jacobson from Stanford University in the U.S.

The top ten countries are:

  1. Albania
  2. Buthan
  3. Nepal
  4. Paraguay
  5. Ethiopia
  6. Iceland
  7. Congo
  8. Costa Rica
  9. Norway
  10. Namibia
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Victims of climate change will be telling their stories this week to a panel of judges in Barbados during the first part of a historic hearing on climate change by the inter-American court of human rights.

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.

The detailed request seeks clarity on many issues, including children’s and women’s rights, environmental defenders, and common but differentiated responsibilities – the idea that all countries have a role to play in tackling climate change but some should bear a bigger burden. As well as mitigating and adapting to climate change, it asks how states should tackle the inevitable loss and damage.

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For $5 million dollars, Louisiana’s flagship university will let an oil company help choose which faculty research projects move forward. Or, for $100,000, a corporation can participate in a research study, with “robust” reviewing powers and access to resulting intellectual property.

Those are the conditions outlined in a boilerplate document that Louisiana State University’s fundraising arm circulated to oil majors and chemical companies affiliated with the Louisiana Chemical Association, an industry lobbying group, according to emails disclosed in response to a public records request by The Lens.

Records show that after Shell donated $25 million in 2022 to LSU to create the Institute for Energy Innovation, the university gave the fossil-fuel corporation license to influence research and coursework for the university’s new concentration in carbon capture, use, and storage.

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Large parts of Guangdong province have been soaked by torrential rain since Thursday, swelling major rivers and waterways in the Pearl River Delta.

The region is one the most densely populated parts of China with more than 127 million inhabitants and is also home to China's manufacturing hub.

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Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11244556

China's rapid urbanisation in recent decades means far more water is now being drawn up to meet people's needs, scientists say. In coastal cities, this subsidence threatens millions of people with flooding as sea levels rise.

China has a long history of dealing with subsiding land, with both Shanghai and Tianjin showing evidence of sinking back in the 1920s. Shanghai has sunk more than 3m over the past century. In more modern times, the country is seeing widespread evidence of subsidence in many of the cities that have expanded rapidly in recent decades.

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Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11220385

Heavy thunderstorms have lashed the United Arab Emirates (UAE), dumping more than a year and a half’s rain on the desert city-state of Dubai in just a few hours and flooding major highways and its international airport.

The rains began late on Monday, soaking the sands and roads of Dubai with some 20mm (0.79 inches) of rain, according to meteorological data collected at Dubai International Airport. The storms intensified at about 9am (05:00 GMT) on Tuesday and continued throughout the day, dumping more rain and hail onto the overwhelmed city.

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Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11209517

A seasonal thermal energy storage will be built in Vantaa, which is Finland’s fourth largest city neighboring the capital of Helsinki.

The total thermal capacity of the fully charged seasonal thermal energy storage is 90 gigawatt-hours. This capacity could heat a medium-sized Finnish city for as long as a year. Broken down into smaller energy units, this amount of energy is equivalent to, for example, 1.3 million electric car batteries.

The project cost is estimated to be around 200 million euros, and it has already been awarded a 19-million-euro investment grant from Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment. Construction of the storage facility’s entrance is expected to start in summer 2024. The seasonal thermal energy storage facility could be operational in 2028.

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Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11211250

Scientists from Mali, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom collaborated to assess to what extent human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the extreme heat across the Sahel.

The recent heatwave coincided with Ramadan (fasting) and power cuts, which compounded the risk for vulnerable groups and even those not traditionally considered vulnerable, the scientists say.

Even minimum temperatures, overnight, remained relatively high, making it so that people did not get a break from the heat. The power cuts further made it difficult for those who did have access to mechanical cooling to use it, thus reducing their coping capacity.

Even in today’s climate, that has warmed by 1.2°C since pre-industrial times due to human activities, the extreme heat observed over the Mali/Burkina Faso region is still rare. While the daily temperatures were extreme, with a return time of about 100 years, the 5-day maximum temperatures were particularly unusual with a return time of 200 years. Minimum temperatures were less extreme but still rare with a return time of 20 years over Mali/Burkina Faso. For the Sahel region the return time of the 5-day maximum temperatures are 30 years.

Critical infrastructure such as electricity, water, and healthcare systems needs to be strengthened to adapt to the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme heat, requiring increased investment to ensure reliable access and service delivery.

[Edit typo.]

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Experts like Dana Miller, director of strategic initiatives at the nonprofit Oceana, would like Amazon to reduce plastics “because of a moral responsibility … to reduce their impact on the environment.” But the company has been slow to respond to moral appeals from customers and shareholders, including three shareholder resolutions since 2021 invoking plastics’ damages to marine ecosystems and human health. The resolutions, which each received more than 30 percent of shareholder votes, asked Amazon to cut plastics use globally by one-third by 2030. When announcing that it had cut plastics use globally by 11.6 percent, Amazon did not make a quantitative or time-bound commitment to further reductions.

Instead, Amazon seems to have taken its biggest steps to reduce plastic packaging in response to stringent plastic regulations, or the threat of them. “Amazon is a clever company,” Miller said. “They see things in the pipeline and they want to move early.”

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Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11155296

The private sector arm of the World Bank is facing claims that it contributes to global heating and the undermining of animal welfare by providing financial support for factory farming, including the building of pig farming tower blocks in China.

A coalition of environmental and animal welfare groups is calling on the World Bank to phase out financial support for large-scale “industrial” livestock operations. More than $1.6bn was provided for industrial farming projects between 2017 and 2023, according to an analysis by campaigners.

Kelly McNamara, a senior research and policy analyst at Friends of the Earth US, said there was a “mismatch” between the World Bank’s commitments on the climate crisis, sustainable development and animal welfare, and its financing of intensive farming. “Expanding industrial livestock production is a threat to climate, sustainable development and food security,” she said, adding that investing in such projects put smallholders out of business and increased meat consumption, fuelling global heating.

In June last year, the IFC approved a $47.3m (£37.4m) loan to the Chinese company Guangxi Yangxiang providing capital for four multistorey industrial pig-rearing complexes and a feed mill. “There are big advantages to a high-rise building,” a company manager told Reuters during early construction of the blocks at Yaji Mountain in southern China in 2018. “The land area is not that much, but you can raise a lot of pigs.” The farms, known as “hog hotels”, can be 13 floors high.

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Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13171230

Here is the study: Ghost roads and the destruction of Asia-Pacific tropical forests

Researcher have shown that illicit, often out-of-control road building is imperilling forests in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. The roads do not appear on legitimate maps why they call them “ghost roads”.

Once these roads are bulldozed into rainforests, illegal loggers, miners, poachers and landgrabbers arrive. Once they get access, they can destroy forests, harm native ecosystems and even drive out or kill indigenous peoples. This looting of the natural world robs cash-strapped nations of valuable natural resources. Indonesia, for instance, loses around A$1.5 billion each year solely to timber theft.

All nations have some unmapped or unofficial roads, but the situation is especially bad in biodiversity-rich developing nations, where roads are proliferating at the fastest pace in human history.

"Ghost roads, it seems, are an epidemic," writes Bill Laurance, Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University.

"Worse, these roads can be actively encouraged by aggressive infrastructure-expansion schemes — most notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative, now active in more than 150 natiions."

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Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13111385

Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour.

The organization has exposed modern slavery, forced and child labour throughout the renewable energy supply chain, with evidence of state-imposed forced labour of Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim majority groups in China in the making and supply of solar panels and other renewable technologies.

It has also shone a light on the slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cobalt is mined by workers for its use in rechargeable batteries for laptop computers and mobile phones.

"We have an opportunity to build an economy that isn’t coming from colonial lines and yet, right now, a green economy absolutely will be built on forced and child labour," Forrest says.

“So the message really is, you cannot harm people in the name of saving the planet.”

Walk Free's latest Global Slavery Index estimated that 50 million people were living in modern slavery – either in forced labour or forced marriage – on any given day in 2021.

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In 2015, PhD student Christine Figgener was on a small fishing boat off Costa Rica's Pacific Coast examining an olive ridley turtle – when she noticed something strange coming out of its nostril. Curious, she started filming as one of her research colleagues began to investigate the object. At just over eight minutes long, the video documents the uncomfortable process during which they extract a plastic straw, while blood drips from the turtle's nose.

As a marine biologist, Figgener's focus was turtles, not plastics. However, plastic had always been an issue she encountered on the field, having witnessed turtles and other animals stuck in car tires, fishing nets or plastic bags.

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In a landmark decision on one of three major climate cases, the first such rulings by an international court, the ECHR raised judicial pressure on governments to stop filling the atmosphere with gases that make extreme weather more violent.

The court’s top bench ruled that Switzerland had violated rights of a group of older Swiss women to family life, but threw out a French mayor’s case against France and that of a group of young Portuguese people against 32 European countries.

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"I push back on doomism because I don’t think it’s justified by the science, and I think it potentially leads us down a path of inaction,” said Mann during a talk last Thursday at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“And there are bad actors today who are fanning the flames of climate doomism because they understand that it takes those who are most likely to be on the front lines, advocating for change, and pushes them to the sidelines, which is where polluters and petrostates want them.”

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Diana Bell, Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of East Anglua, urges the world to "completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale" and to "make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally".

"The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks."

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Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10267743

In November, the Pacific Institute released a major update to the Water Conflict Chronology, adding more than 350 new verified incidents when water has been a trigger, weapon, target, or casualty of violence.

But new research by the Institute also shows significant opportunities to expand water efficiency and reuse strategies. In turn, these can reduce pressures on water resources—and reduce the risk of conflict.

Research launched last month found there is substantial opportunity to capture more urban stormwater across the United States, thus enhancing communities’ water resilience. The pivotal study found the US average annual urban stormwater runoff exceeds 59.5 million acre-feet (73.5 cubic kilometers) annually, equivalent to 93% of municipal and industrial water withdrawals. This equates to more than 53 billion gallons per day using an annual average!

New approaches like increasing stormwater capture can help urban communities address water scarcity risks, more severe and frequent flooding and drought due to climate change, and constraints on traditional water supplies. Pacific Institute research highlights how such water efficiency and reuse strategies can play a major role—both in the United States and globally—meeting key UN Sustainable Development Goal targets, while reducing pressures on water resources and the risk of conflict.

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Initial research shows that AI has a significant water footprint. It uses water both for cooling the servers that power its computations and for producing the energy it consumes. As AI becomes more integrated into our societies, its water footprint will inevitably grow.

The growth of ChatGPT and similar AI models has been hailed as “the new Google.” But while a single Google search requires half a millilitre of water in energy, ChatGPT consumes 500 millilitres of water for every five to 50 prompts.

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Not sure how to link a Mastodon Post to Lemmy?

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As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the top contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But in an interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not primarily responsible for the climate crisis.

The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too expensive for consumers’ liking.

“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”

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