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Climate Change

COP29 Must Not Be Another Greenwashing Event

Countries must find real solutions for climate action and climate finance and reject false solutions such as biomass energy, says the Biomass Action Network as the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) to the UN Climate Convention is set to open in Baku, Azerbaijan, on 11 November. COP29 will focus on finance, as did the Biodiversity COP16 which was suspended last weekend due to the lack of agreement. Developed countries refuse to commit to sufficient financial support for developing countries. Instead, they promote false solutions like centralised (large scale) biomass energy.

Congress Failed To Allocate Relief Funding Ahead Of Hurricane Helene

The US South is contending with the trail of destruction left by Hurricane Helene, which devastated the region over the past few days, including the states of North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, across the Central Gulf Coast and reaching into the southern Appalachian region. The extent of damage is only beginning to be revealed as the death toll climbs to at least 130 people, with hundreds more still missing. Some of the most impoverished areas of the US are now having to contend with what could amount to between USD 145 billion and USD 160 billion in damages and economic loss according to AccuWeather. Over one million people are still without power.

Sponge Cities Are The Future Of Urban Flood Mitigation

“When it rains, it pours” once was a metaphor for bad things happening in clusters. Now it’s becoming a statement of fact about rainfall in a changing climate. Across the continental U.S., intense single-day precipitation events are growing more frequent, fueled by warming air that can hold increasing levels of moisture. Most recently, areas north of Houston received 12 to 20 inches (30 to 50 centimeters) of rain in several days in early May 2024, leading to swamped roads and evacuations. Earlier in the year, San Diego received 2.72 inches (7 centimeters) of rain on Jan. 22 that damaged nearly 600 homes and displaced about 1,200 people.

Michael Mann Wins $1 Million Verdict In Defamation Trial

In a victory for climate scientists, jurors in Michael Mann’s defamation case against Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn awarded Mann $1 million in punitive damages for defamatory comments made in 2012. In a unanimous decision, jurors agreed that both Simberg and Steyn defamed Mann in blog posts that compared Mann to convicted sex offender Jerry Sandusky, former assistant football coach at Penn State University. They announced that Simberg will pay $1,000 in punitive damages and Steyn will pay the larger $1 million. Standing in front of the courthouse smiling with his legal team after the verdict was read, Mann told DeSmog that he trusted the jury to see through the “smoke and mirrors” that the defense used during the trial.

After 12 Years, Trial Against Alleged Defamers Begins For Climate Scientist

A defamation lawsuit 12 years in the making brought by climate scientist Michael Mann opened January 18th in Washington, D.C. Superior Court. The two conservative commentators accused of defamation mounted separate defenses, and both continued to disparage Mann during the first day of this long-anticipated trial. The case centers around statements made in 2012 by right-wing blogger Rand Simberg and Fox TV personality Mark Steyn that attacked Mann, a scientist and professor who holds a doctorate from Yale. Simberg is an analyst at the far-right think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has a long track record of platforming climate science denialists.

What We Can Learn From One Florida Community About Climate Resilience

The health and safety we enjoy as individuals and the opportunities for employment, education, and recreation available to us are shaped to a large degree by the built environment in which we live. For the past 70 years, the vast majority of new housing development has followed the example of Levittown, New York. The city now serves as the poster child for a seemingly endless wave of car-dependent greenfield suburban sprawl developments that not only helped to generate the carbon emissions that contribute to the climate crisis we now face but also modeled a form of growth that provided opportunity for wealth creation for some households and not others.

Study: US Forests Struggling To Adapt Fast Enough To Climate Change

Rising sea levels, accelerated coastal erosion, severe flooding and drought, rapid melting of Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense wildfires are all symptoms of climate change that are changing our planet’s landscape. In some places, these changes are happening too fast for plants and animals to keep up. A recent study by researchers at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and the United States Forest Service have uncovered warning signs that forests in the Western U.S. are struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing climate. “If you’re concerned about forest health then one thing you want to observe is whether the rate at which forest composition changes is roughly equivalent to the rate at which the climate changes,” said lead author of the study Kyle Rosenblad

‘What Really Keeps Me Up At Night’: A Climate Scientist’s Call To Action

We’re running out of time to get things right. With the final installment in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report released this week, the world’s leading climate scientists have offered a stark warning that we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 or face a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” This will require an abrupt about-face as emissions continue to rise despite the massive body of scientific literature affirming the dire risks of proceeding with business as usual.

John Thackara On Designing For Life

John Thackara is one of the brilliant irregulars exploring how humankind can make the transition to a climate-friendly, relocalized, post-capitalist world. You can't pigeonhole him in any occupational category or disciplinary tradition because he is so effortlessly transversal. He blends his broadly international and nonsectarian perspective with the many particular projects that are Building the New. This helps explain why Thackara's work is so appealing: It speaks to us as whole human beings where we live, in distinctive local circumstances. While rigorous and empirical, Thackara isn't constrained by the jargon and norms of a particular discipline or theory. Like so many designers, he lives on the messy creative edge where interesting new things are always emerging. (Check out his website at thackara.com.)

Low-Income Countries Bear Brunt Of Climate Change

Climate change is affecting nations in a disproportionate manner with tropical low-income countries with a lesser share in emissions bearing the brunt in comparison to wealthy nations that are more responsible for global warming. A research paper published in Science Advances recently estimated the economic loss faced by countries due to climate change over a period of 20 years. From 1992 to 2013, the global economy suffered losses amounting to around $5 trillion-$29 trillion due to global warming. But the insurmountable global loss in terms of economy, the research suggests, was not equally shared. Worryingly, the national income of low-income tropical countries declined by around 6.7% while wealthy nations suffered a decline of only about 1.5%.

Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies Rose To Record Levels In G20 Countries

The report found that, not only had emissions rebounded in these countries following the coronavirus pandemic, but fossil fuel subsidies had reached record levels. “Too much public finance for energy in the G20 is still skewed towards the fossil fuel industry. Sixty three percent of G20’s public finance for energy went to fossil fuels in 2019-2020,” ODI senior research fellow and report finance lead Ipek Gençsü said, as BusinessGreen reported. “Last year, the G20 reaffirmed its 2009 commitment to ‘phase out and rationalise, over the medium term, inefficient fossil fuel subsidies,’ but I think we can safely say we are now in that ‘medium term’ and it’s clear the G20 has failed to deliver, instead continuing to use public funds to distort the market in favour of fossil fuels.”

Climate Activists Occupy Parliament After Sunak Announced As New PM

Dozens of climate and energy crisis activists have occupied the Central Lobby in the Houses of Parliament, hours after Rishi Sunak was named the UK’s new prime minister. Activists from Greenpeace and Fuel Poverty Action caused live interviews with MPs to be shut down and unfurled a banner reading: "Chaos costs lives". In a statement they said the action is designed to highlight the cost of living crisis, which has seen energy bills soar, and they are demanding that the next prime minister "starts putting the welfare of the British people before fossil fuel companies by properly taxing oil and gas profits and launching a nationwide home insulation programme to tackle fuel poverty". The protesters have linked arms and are reading testimonies from people struggling with their bills.

The Community Solution to the Climate Crisis

Climate chaos is here right now. It’s not something off in the future like fast food restaurants selling bug patties, emotionally fulfilling sex with robots, or a lab-created dinosaur accidentally getting loose in a shopping mall. New floods, wildfires, and droughts hit communities around the world everyday but the most obvious solutions to this crisis are rarely even discussed. So what can be done? To begin with, the Biden administration could actually fund action on climate change. Congress recently passed $840 BILLION for the war machine. They sent $52 Billion to semiconductor chip manufacturers and President Biden is proposing $37 Billion to fund our impressively brutal police nationwide.

The Terrifying Research Nuclear Powers Don’t Want You To See

Humanity is, according to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” The warning , made at the Tenth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, arrives at a time of alarmingly heightened tensions around the world. Just a few days after Guterres made that statement, Nature Food published a harrowing scientific paper that drove home the UN Secretary General’s message: “Global food insecurity and famine from the reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection.” The paper (which you can read in full here) was written by a handful of leading experts who have spent years studying the potential impact of nuclear war on food supplies. The results are stark.

We Need To Stop Pretending We Can Limit Global Warming To 1.5°C

We are not going to limit global warming to 1.5°C. This means we will soon be entering a much warmer and more dangerous world. The threshold of 1.5°C was the highest ambition of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement. It was arrived at by a realisation that warming beyond this temperature would produce intolerable suffering to those most exposed to global warming. So what can we make of politicians who continue to argue that ‘1.5°C is still alive’? Are they misinformed or are they simply lying?

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