Crop harvests for direct food use insufficient to meet the UN’s food security goal

the current global military buildup could represent a situation whereby many nations are entering, unconsciously or perhaps because there seems to be no other option, into a new type of mutually assured destruction (MAD) scenario, or even the Homo sapiens death spiral.

climate and environment change (CEC) hyperthreat

Schools and other public buildings in Italy will be forbidden from setting their air conditioning to any setting lower than 25C from next month, under a scheme intended to help the country dodge an energy crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.

The flotsam and jetsam of our digital queries and transactions, the flurry of electrons flitting about, warm the medium of air. Heat is the waste product of computation, and if left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilization. Heat must therefore be relentlessly abated to keep the engine of the digital thrumming in a constant state, 24 hours a day, every day.

Because of the invasion in Ukraine, “people are reminded of the problem, but then they resort to sort of quick fixes, which are not really for the long term,” says Rolf Wüestenhagen, director of the Institute for Economy and the Environment at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

At a global climate meeting Monday, Ukraine’s representative, Svitlana Krakovska, pointed out the connection: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots—fossil fuels—and our dependence on them,”

If humans, some humans, start making bad decisions and start destroying the institutions that kept the peace, then we will be back in the era of war with budgets, military budgets going to 20, 30, 40 percent. It can happen. It's in our hands.

I hope, for the sake of everybody -- Ukrainians, Russians and the whole of humanity -- that this war stops immediately. Because if it doesn't, it's not only the Ukrainians and the Russians 00:11:39 that will suffer terribly. Everybody will suffer terribly if this war continues. BG: Explain why. YNH: Because of the shock waves destabilizing the whole world. Let’s start with the bottom line: budgets. We have been living in an amazing era of peace in the last few decades. And it wasn't some kind of hippie fantasy. You saw it in the bottom line. 00:12:06 You saw it in the budgets. In Europe, in the European Union, the average defense budget of EU members was around three percent of government budget. And that's a historical miracle, almost. For most of history, the budget of kings and emperors and sultans, like 50 percent, 80 percent goes to war, goes to the army. 00:12:31 In Europe, it’s just three percent. In the whole world, the average is about six percent, I think, fact-check me on this, but this is the figure that I know, six percent. What we saw already within a few days, Germany doubles its military budget in a day. And I'm not against it. Given what they are facing, it's reasonable. For the Germans, for the Poles, for all of Europe to double their budgets. And you see other countries around the world doing the same thing. 00:12:58 But this is, you know, a race to the bottom. When they double their budgets, other countries look and feel insecure and double their budgets, so they have to double them again and triple them. And the money that should go to health care, that should go to education, that should go to fight climate change, this money will now go to tanks, to missiles, to fighting wars. 00:13:25 So there is less health care for everybody, and there is maybe no solution to climate change because the money goes to tanks. And in this way, even if you live in Australia, even if you live in Brazil, you will feel the repercussions of this war in less health care, in a deteriorating ecological crisis, 00:13:48 in many other things. Again, another very central question is technology. We are on the verge, we are already in the middle, actually, of new technological arms races in fields like artificial intelligence. And we need global agreement about how to regulate AI and to prevent the worst scenarios. How can we get a global agreement on AI 00:14:15 when you have a new cold war, a new hot war? So in this field, to all hopes of stopping the AI arms race will go up in smoke if this war continues. So again, everybody around the world will feel the consequences in many ways. This is much, much bigger than just another regional conflict.

This is a moment that we should seize, in all seriousness, in order to take on the two huge existential plagues that face us this morning: the climate crisis, outlined in this new IPCC report, and the fact that we have a madman with nuclear weapons who’s used the revenues from oil and gas to intimidate and terrify the entire world.

(For comparison, most organizations can’t avert a metric ton for less than $2. The average American causes around 16 metric tons of emissions per year.)

The Founders Pledge report used countries’ climate targets and projected policies to estimate how many metric tons of carbon can be saved by avoiding various lifestyle choices.

அண்மையில், The Tallest Story, Can the novel handle a subject as cataclysmic as climate change?  என்ற கட்டுரை படித்தேன். நான் உங்கள் தளத்தை தொடர்ந்து படித்து வருவதால் உங்கள் வாசகர்கள் விரும்பிப் படிப்பார்கள் என்று தோன்றியது. என்னுடைய மூலத்தை சற்று மாற்றிய சுமாரான தமிழ் வடிவம்:  வைகுண்டம் https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_fiction வானிலைப்புனைவு – [cli-fi The Tallest Story] 

Markets are politically regulated institutional processes far removed from idealized, perfect competition, and prices are negotiated between small numbers of powerful brokers (84) involving hidden subsidies, e.g., for infrastructure

If booksellers like to blame publishers for books not being available, publishers like to blame printers for being backed up. Who do printers blame? The paper mill, of course.

In comparison, the average household energy use for gas heating in Belgium – which has a moderate climate – is 20,000 kWh per year. Assuming that the average Belgian heating system is used for six months per year, daily energy use corresponds to 109.6 kWh per day. This energy could heat roughly 900 water bottles per day – enough to keep the whole neighbourhood comfortable.

Cryptocurrencies are not only an apocalyptic ecological disaster

Extinction Rebellion has been at the forefront of a fundamentally new message which is if a government doesn't change, it's your right and as we've identified, your duty, if you're not going to be complicit, 00:34:43 to go into a rebellion a nonviolent civil disobedience against the government in order to fundamentally reduce carbon emissions. It's not actually that complicated, Is it? If you ask the average person who controls the economy, right? They know it's the banks, the big banks, right? And we had the banks, I think they did it pretty deliberately ten years ago. 00:35:12 They pulled our chain and we had the most massive transfer of wealth that the world has ever seen the bank bailout, right? Trillions and trillions of dollars. We're seeing the same thing now with covid and the banks have got to be behind it, right? If the banks wanted and decided that emissions have to decline from today 00:35:36 fast in a matter of years, the banks can do it, right? Because the banks hold the strings. All governments now are in a massive amount of national debt . we have an axis of evil if you want, we have the big banking corporations. We have the big fossil fuel corporations and we have the compliant government.

for example arctic char the fish species that's already 00:09:00 all across the arctic region living at its temperature level about 24 degrees celsius in freshwater ecosystems one fraction of a decree further and we 00:09:13 will enter into a cycle of fish death events that will cascade in food security loss of culture and many other things of this keystone species on the aquatic ecosystems for 00:09:25 communities and nature alike

she pointed out that climate finance to small island states declined by 25 percent in 2019 but she also offered 00:22:36 what she called a sword that can cut down this gordian knot of finance and she reminded us that 25 trillion dollars of quantitative easing has been produced in the last 13 years and that 9 trillion 00:22:49 of that was just in the last 18 months alone in order to deal with the covet crisis an annual increase in special drawing rights of 500 billion dollars a year for 20 years putting trust to finance the 00:23:01 transition is what she suggested is the real gap that we need to close not the 50 billion being proposed for adaptation and she concluded by saying if 500 billion sounds big it's just two percent 00:23:14 of that 25 trillion dollars that has already been created through quantitative easing so my question is is actually not an economic question it's more of a political question really what are the barriers to using that mechanism for the 00:23:28 enormous threat of climate change in the way it's been used for the frankly lesser threat of of covid and what can be done to build support for it

i 00:35:57 think that's really important but i want to come back to a bigger issue which is the lack of the hundred billion dollars and also loss and damage and i think that actually goes back to a lack 00:36:09 of knowledge and education in the developed world about our history and i think this is incredibly important that we need to think not just about the science but actually educating people 00:36:20 about colonization about how much we've actually admitted i think that if we can get the developed world to actually understand uh the crimes of our past to 00:36:32 be able to understand why there is this trust issue i think that's actually critical and it sounds really strange to deal with history to actually save the planet to deal with climate change but 00:36:44 i've become more convinced having heard politicians who supposedly studied history and politics at university must admit it was a very strange small oxford university you know they're not very 00:36:56 good but again i think we really have that whole education piece to do before we can acknowledge those crimes and move forward

if the trust equation is undermined then there is little hope that the 00:15:22 integrity of the carbon equation will be maintained

arctic fox is now gone it's no longer nesting in in 00:09:38 finnish army and arctic areas and uh its habitats are overtaken by red fox more southern and boreal species so the species on the move is one of the factors that's really altering the kind 00:09:51 of life that we know here

Trans Mountain said there have not been any oil leaks due to the flooding, which has triggered an emergency shutdown of the pipeline lasting longer than any previous stoppage in its nearly 70-year-history.

The climate catastrophe we're facing is the result of three issues, three processes.

we believe that knowledge must be shared in order for humanity to survive and thrive—and that it is essential to help fight climate change.

The open movement must develop a clear and deep relationship of collaboration with the climate movement, most importantly because the latter is the locus of political renewal and connection of an intersectional approach to action and change.

What resources are powering our projects and how do we manage those resources? Are we willing to approach our work with a set of values that centers several generations after us? And how do we do that?What protections do we need to fight for in the workplace to hold companies accountable around climate justice goals?How do we measure our impact on the climate crisis?Are we willing to sundown projects if mitigating their negative impact on the environment is impossible or creates little impact?

ns often accounting for the highest

Poultry scientists have also succeeded in selecting for parthenogenesis, increasing the incidence in Beltsville small white turkeys more than threefold, to 41.5 percent in five generations. Environmental factors—like high temperatures or a viral infection—also seem to trigger poultry parthenogenesis.

Lowering these risks and adapting to those we can no longer avoid will require a mobilisation of resources on the scale of a war economy.

e.g. Idea from Yuval Harari’s Sapiens that Europe and Asia developed better civilisation than Americas because Americas span vertically lot of climates making it harder to share agriculture progress between different climates.

there’s a group of us who are figuring out what this Centre for Climate Justice is going to be and what its scope is going to be.

A recent survey found that only 14% of people they surveyed in the United States talk about climate change. A previous Yale study found that 35% either discuss it occasionally or hear somebody else talk about it. Those are low for something that over 70% of people are worried about.

For a talk at one conservative Christian college, Dr. Hayhoe – an atmospheric scientist, professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy – decided to emphasize how caring about climate change is in line with Christian values and, ultimately, is “pro-life” in the fullest sense of that word. Afterward, she says, people “were able to listen, acknowledge it, and think about approaching [climate change] a little differently.”

I was speaking in Iowa, and I was asked, “How do you talk to people in Iowa about polar bears?” I said, “You don’t; you talk to them about corn.” If we begin a conversation with someone with something we already agree on, then the subtext is: “You care about this, and I care too. We have this in common.”

I am frequently shamed for not doing enough. Some of that comes from the right side of the [political] spectrum, but increasingly a larger share of that shaming comes from people at the opposite end of the spectrum, who are so worried and anxious about climate impacts that their response is to find anyone who isn’t doing precisely what they think they should be doing and shame them.

When we practice active hope, when we look at what people are doing, and we share those stories with others and talk about what we can do together, then we realize that the boulder is already at the top of the hill and is rolling down in the right direction, and has millions of hands on it. It’s just not going fast enough.

Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance andimportance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitiveshortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and respondingto climate change (152),including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physicallyremote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview(153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangiblethreat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does notpresent itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events.

The fossil fuel industry helped to create the PR industry, and publicists came up with disinformation and manipulation tactics that they deployed for oil, tobacco, and chemical companies for decades.

The climate of Japan is predominantly temperate but varies greatly from north to south. The northernmost region, Hokkaido, has a humid continental climate with long, cold winters and very warm to cool summers. Precipitation is not heavy, but the islands usually develop deep snowbanks in the winter.[85]

Global air traffic is expected to double to 8.2 billion passengers in 2037, according to IATA, which predicts that aviation's 2019 emissions peak of around 900 million metric tons of CO2 will be exceeded within the next two to three years.At the same time, the window to cut the world's reliance on fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic changes to the climate is closing rapidly. The International Energy Agency forecasts that aviation's share of global carbon emissions will increase to 3.5% by 2030 from just over 2.5% in 2019 in the absence of efforts to further decarbonize.

Since about 70% of water delivered from the Colorado River goes to growing crops, not to people in cities, the next step will likely be to demand large-scale reductions for farmers and ranchers across millions of acres of land, forcing wrenching choices about which crops to grow and for whom — an omen that many of America’s food-generating regions might ultimately have to shift someplace else as the climate warms.

No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before.

rare for lightning to strike at all in Iqaluit.

Limiting warming to 1.5°C implies reaching net zero CO2 emissions globally around 2050 and concurrent deep reductions in emissions of non-CO2 forcers, particularly methane (high confidence). Such mitigation pathways are characterized by energy-demand reductions, decarbonization of electricity and other fuels, electrification of energy end use, deep reductions in agricultural emissions, and some form of CDR with carbon storage on land or sequestration in geological reservoirs.

Pathways that aim for limiting warming to 1.5°C by 2100 after a temporary temperature overshoot rely on large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) measures, which are uncertain and entail clear risks.

Limiting warming to 1.5°C depends on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the next decades, where lower GHG emissions in 2030 lead to a higher chance of keeping peak warming to 1.5°C (high confidence). Available pathways that aim for no or limited (less than 0.1°C) overshoot of 1.5°C keep GHG emissions in 2030 to 25–30 GtCO2e yr−1 in 2030 (interquartile range). This contrasts with median estimates for current unconditional NDCs of 52–58 GtCO2e yr−1 in 2030.

Ultimately, having access to the top political decision makers and using biased studies, the industrial lobbies have managed to sabotage the reforms the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat called for. A context and tactic we are only too familiar with.

the climate movement is also structurally vulnerable to doomist intellectuals who claim that science supports their ideas.

71% of global emissions can be traced back to 100 companies,

C.1.3. Limiting global warming requires limiting the total cumulative global anthropogenic emissions of CO2 since the pre-industrial period, that is, staying within a total carbon budget (high confidence).1414By the end of 2017, anthropogenic CO2 emissions since the pre-industrial period are estimated to have reduced the total carbon budget for 1.5°C by approximately 2200 ± 320 GtCO2 (medium confidence). The associated remaining budget is being depleted by current emissions of 42 ± 3 GtCO2 per year (high confidence).

Right now, most of the blockchain mining in the world happens in China, where provinces with the cheapest energy set up mining operations to do the ‘proof of work’ calculations that the dominant paradigm of blockchain requires. Factories that ostensibly make other things now acquire significant computing hardware and dedicate energy in order to, essentially, print money that’s then stored offshore. A recent study shows that 40% of China’s mostly bitcoin mining is powered by coal-burning. We also already know that non-blockchain server farms in cheap energy countries consume so much energy they distort national grids, and throw off huge amounts of heat that then need cooling for the servers to operate, creating a vicious cycle of energy consumption

Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term “climate emergency” in its coverage of climate change

Despite important agricultural advancements to feed the world in the last 60 years, a Cornell-led study shows that global farming productivity is 21% lower than it could have been without climate change. This is the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases since the 1960s.

In der 30-jährigen Geschichte der Klimapolitik gab es bislang zwei Phasen, in denen das Thema dominiert hat. Beide wurden von einer noch akuteren Krise jäh beendet.

The owners of coal-burning power stations in the UK have not obtained the consent of everyone who owns a lake or a forest in Sweden to deposit acid rain there.

a simple and coherent explanation of why libertarianism is so often associated with climate change denial, and the playing down or dismissal of other environmental issues.

Manmade CO2 Does Not Cause Measurable Warming

after many online called for her firing over a social media post that likened the experience of Jews during the Holocaust to the U.S. political climate

The study, published in Nature Food, presents EDGAR-FOOD – the first database to break down emissions from each stage of the food chain for every year from 1990 to 2015. The database also unpacks emissions by sector, greenhouse gas and country.