wolfyvegan

joined 4 months ago
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/24710049

The collapse of a crucial network of Atlantic Ocean currents could push parts of the world into a deep freeze, with winter temperatures plunging to around minus 55 degrees Fahrenheit in some cities, bringing “profound climate and societal impacts,” according to a new study.

There is increasing concern about the future of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — known as the AMOC — a system of currents that works like a giant conveyor belt, pulling warm water from the Southern Hemisphere and tropics to the Northern Hemisphere, where it cools, sinks and flows back south.

Multiple studies suggest the AMOC is weakening with some projecting it could even collapse this century as global warming disrupts the balance of heat and salinity that keeps it moving. This would usher in huge global weather and climate shifts — including plunging temperatures in Europe, which relies on the AMOC for its mild climate.

“What if the AMOC collapses and we have climate change? Does the cooling win or does the warming win?” asked René van Westen, a marine and atmospheric researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and co-author of the paper published Wednesday in the Geophysical Research Letters journal.

This new study is the first to use a modern, complex climate model to answer the question, he told CNN.

The researchers looked at a scenario where the AMOC weakens by 80% and the Earth is around 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the period before humans began burning large amounts of fossil fuels. The planet is currently at 1.2 degrees of warming.

They focused on what would happen as the climate stabilized post-collapse, multiple decades into the future.

Even in this hotter world, they found “substantial cooling” over Europe with sharp drops in average winter temperatures and more intense cold extremes — a very different picture than the United States, where the study found temperatures would continue to increase even with an AMOC collapse.

Sea ice would spread southward as far as Scandinavia, parts of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, the research found. This would have a huge impact on cold extremes as the white surface of the ice reflects the sun’s energy back into space, amplifying cooling.

The scientists have created an interactive map to visualize the impacts of an AMOC collapse across the globe.

AMOC Scenario Visualization

Archive : https://archive.ph/kZXcu

 

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23851669

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23851499

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Farmers require 88 million hectares more land to grow current levels of food than they would have absent global warming

In a study published [recently] in Nature Geoscience, an international team of researchers from the University of Minnesota, Project Drawdown, and several other institutions elucidate and quantify a worrying climate feedback loop in which global warming hampers crop efficiency, leading to more land use for comparable amounts of food, which then releases yet more greenhouse gas emissions.

archived (Wayback Machine):

Food and agriculture account for around one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily due to land use.

If "agriculture" in this context includes raising and killing animals, then it's actually much more than that.

 

JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on June 13, just six months after its U.S. subsidiary, Pilgrim’s Pride, made a $5 million donation to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the single largest contribution to the event. The Brazil-founded company has sought a U.S. listing for more than a decade, and in its latest attempt faced a nearly two-year delay imposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a federal agency responsible for regulating the stock market, amid pressure from civil society groups over the company’s history of corruption and its role in Amazon deforestation. The NYSE listing is “a catastrophe for the planet,” Alex Wijeratna, senior director at the U.S.-based environmental nonprofit Mighty Earth, one of the main signatories of letters raising concerns to the SEC, said in a statement following the listing. “Giving JBS access to billions of dollars of new funding will serve to supercharge its climate-wrecking operations and war on nature.”

archived (Wayback Machine)

 

JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on June 13, just six months after its U.S. subsidiary, Pilgrim’s Pride, made a $5 million donation to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the single largest contribution to the event. The Brazil-founded company has sought a U.S. listing for more than a decade, and in its latest attempt faced a nearly two-year delay imposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a federal agency responsible for regulating the stock market, amid pressure from civil society groups over the company’s history of corruption and its role in Amazon deforestation. The NYSE listing is “a catastrophe for the planet,” Alex Wijeratna, senior director at the U.S.-based environmental nonprofit Mighty Earth, one of the main signatories of letters raising concerns to the SEC, said in a statement following the listing. “Giving JBS access to billions of dollars of new funding will serve to supercharge its climate-wrecking operations and war on nature.”

archived (Wayback Machine)

 
  • Nepal’s Supreme Court struck down a 2024 law permitting infrastructure in protected areas in January 2025, but the government continues to approve such projects as the full ruling remains unpublished.
  • Despite the ruling, the government approved the 57.6 billion rupee ($416 million), 81-kilometer (50.3-mile) Muktinath cable car touted as the world’s longest line, which will pass through the Annapurna Conservation Area, raising concerns about environmental and cultural impacts.
  • The government has also signaled interest in opening up protected areas to private investment, including commercial extraction of timber, gravel and stones.

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[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Fun fact: people grow durian in Zanzibar.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 month ago

Each instance having its own identity is one of the key advantages of federated platforms like this. (Broadly speaking, it's true of decentralised movements and organisations too; each group can have its own unique identity and focus without compromising on what all such groups have in common.) Finding people who appreciate the focus of a particular instance enough to choose it over another may be the challenge, but as you wrote, it's important in order to avoid stagnation and to be able to keep the instance going. It's possible that the unique aspects of an instance may be what draws in certain people who otherwise wouldn't participate at all, making instance integrity/identity beneficial to outreach in such cases, not at odds with it. As we saw with lemm.ee, appealing to a general audience doesn't tend to attract the "extremists" with motivation to keep things going.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 month ago

If historically unforested land is artificially forested, then that might be worth crediting to humans, but that has never happened on a meaningful scale, and realistically, I don't know if it could. If deforested land grows back (at whatever rate), then that is just nature cleaning up the mess as it always has, and the amount of carbon dioxide sequestered on that land is always going to be less than what would have been sequestered had humans not slashed and burned the vegetation in the first place. The forest has to recapture the amount of carbon dioxide released by deforestation just to "catch up" before it can continue where it left off, so to speak.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

My understanding is that they want to consider only the effect that human activities are having on the climate, and so they account for all sources of humans' emissions, but the amount of photosynthesis currently happening would happen even in the absence of human activity. Including photosynthesis in the accounting for humans' emissions therefore doesn't make sense, whereas accounting for deforestation is crucial, as that is a real change due to human activity; even if deforested land reforests itself, the initial emissions would not have occurred if not for humans' actions.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago

Is a fruitarian someone who only eats fruit?

Yes.

Do these people exist?

Yes, though not many of them as far as I know.

Do they have normal bathrooms?

Most probably poop outside or in a bucket, at least if their situation allows.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago

Free software and community-led projects are crucial for addressing the climate crisis. Capitalist control of infrastructure is what got us into this mess. CoMaps has its role to play!

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It will depend on the exact conditions (temperature, sunlight) and how well you manage soil fertility and watering, but yes, it should be possible. Owari satsuma and Fukushu kumquat come to mind as options. Get a large pot though.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I second that. Either one would be fitting.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 months ago

Very tasty! Not on the level of something like durian or chempedak, but very creamy and savoury and satisfying. Fairly easy to make a meal of them. It's a bit of an acquired taste, not in the sense that isn't appealing from the start, but in the sense that it gets better and better each time that you eat it. Highly recommend.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 months ago

...That Markdown table really rendered nicely.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago (6 children)

I'm not saying that that comment did those things, but someone might become wary of you after reading something like that. Again, I cannot speak for the current mod or her intentions.

[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago (8 children)

I can't speak for Sunshine, but your comments like this one may have had something to do with it. Stating that "chickens are only relevant to the extent that it impacts how people relate to one another" definitely reads like speciesism.

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