https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/climate/ocean-heat-records.html

Die französische Regierung plant die Anpassung an eine Temperatursteigerung um 4° bis zum Ende des Jahrhunderts. Die Libération gibt einen Überblick darüber, wie Frankreich dann aussehen wird.

Bei einer Hitzewelle in der Antarktis lag die Temperatur 38,5° über dem Durchschnittswert. Dieser enorm hohe Wert schockiert Forschende und ist bisher nicht erklärbar. Der Guardian stellt den Kontext ausführlich dar und hat dazu mehrere Fachleute befragt. Eine neue Publikation spricht von einem regime shift beim antarktischen Sommer-Meereis. Er gefährdet u.a. den Krill und die Kolonien der Kaiserpinguine. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/06/simply-mind-boggling-world-record-temperature-jump-in-antarctic-raises-fears-of-catastrophe

Studie: https://journals.ametsoc.org/configurable/content/journals$002fclim$002f37$002f7$002fJCLI-D-23-0479.1.xml?t:ac=journals%24002fclim%24002f37%24002f7%24002fJCLI-D-23-0479.1.xml

Interview mit dem Sea Shepherd-Leiter Peter Hammerstedt. Die industriell betriebene Fischerei ist ein Beispiel für die Erschöpfung der Ressourcen des Planeten aus Profitgier. Die Methoden von Sea Shepherd zeigen, dass radikaler Aktivismus wirksam ist. man er fährt in dem Interview unter anderem, dass das Mittelmeer nur noch 10% der ursprünglichen Fischbestände hat, und das für Nahrungsergänzungsmittel in arktischen Gewässern in einem Ausmaß Krill gefischt wird, das für die Biodiversität eine weitere Gefahr bedeutet.. https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000210873/kapitaen-und-aktivist-wenn-sie-thunfisch-essen-beteiligen-sie-sich-am-toeten-der-haie

Die weltwetterorganisation WMO fast in ihrem Bericht über 2023 die Daten verschiedener Services zusammen und kommt zu dramatischen Aussagen über die Entwicklung der Temperatur auf der Erdoberfläche insbesondere insgesamt und besonders an der Oberfläche der Meere. Gleichzeitig ergibt eine Studie der BU Wien dass die Prognosen vieler, darunter großer starken über die Entwicklung der Emissionen deutlich zu optimistisch sind. https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000212370/weltwetterorganisation-zeichnet-duesteres-bild-vom-klima-des-letzten-jahres

Die Gründe der Temperaturanomalien des vergangenen Jahres und auch des vergangenen Februars sind nach wie vor klimawissenschaftlich nicht geklärt. Die Temperatursteigerung blieb auch angesichts Treibhausgasgehalts der Atmosphäre und des inzwischen abklingenden El Niño innerhalb des Bereichs der Vorhersagen, aber ihr Tempo war statistisch gesehen extrem unwahrscheinlich. Der Guardian-Artikel enthält Statements mehrerer Klimaforschender dazu. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/16/scientists-divided-record-heat-acceleration-climate-crisis

Seit dem 7. März 2022 – seit genau einem Jahr – werden an über der Oberfläche des Nordatlantik Rekordtemperaturen gemessen, seit dem 14. März über den Weltmeeren insgesamt. Auch der Standard-Artikel geht auf verschiedene Erklärungsversuche (u.a. weniger Schiffsemissionen, El Niño, Vulkanausbruch) ein, die aber nicht ausreichen, um das Ausmaß der Anomalie zu verstehen. Der Meeresspiegel steigt derzeit auch wegen der Ausdehnung durch Erwärmung um 5 cm pro Jahrzehnt. https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000210458/weltmeere-verzeichnen-au223ergew246hnliche-w228rmerekorde

Chart bei Climate Reananalyzer: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_monthly/

Das Tempo der Temperaturerhöhung an der Oberfläche der Ozeane ist auch für erfahrene Forschende schockierend. Besonders hoch ist es im Nordatlantik, dessen Erwärmung zu schwereren Hurricans führen könnte. Aber auch der Südatlantik und damit das antarktische Meereis sind betroffen. Die Ursachen sind nicht geklärt; das El Niño-Phänomen reicht zur Erklärung nicht aus. Es könnten Feedback-Mechanismen eine Rolle spielen. Die New York Times hat mehrere Wissenschaftler befragt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/climate/scientists-are-freaking-out-about-ocean-temperatures.html

Infografik: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/02/07/multimedia/27cli-newsletter-02/2024-02-07-sst-hottest-january-index-superJumbo-v2.png?quality=75&auto=webp

Der vergangene Februar war mit einer 1,7 Grad höherer Durchschnittstemperatur als in der vorindustriellen Zeit der wärmste Februar der messgeschichte. In Europa lagen die Temperaturen 3,3° über den Werten von 1991 bis 2020.In den letzten Jahren in den letzten 12 Monaten lag die Durchschnittstemperatur der Erdoberfläche 1,56° über dem vorindustriellen Niveau. Die Temperatur an der Meeresoberfläche erreichte mit 21,06° ebenfalls einen neuen Rekordwert. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/07/february-warmest-on-record-globally-copernicus-climate-change-service

Bulletin: https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-february-2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/climate/sea-level-rise-east-coast-sinking-land-flooding.html

https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000210168/metropolen-an-der-us-ostkueste-sinken-mit-beunruhigendem-tempo

Grönland erhitzt sich 5-7mal schneller als der Durchschnitt des Planeten – an manchen Stellen in 10 Jahren um 2,7°. Das Meereis verschwindet schneller als je zuvor; gleichzeitig beschleunigen sich die Methanemissionen durch das Schmelzen des Permafrosts. Die Repubblica berichtet ausführlich über die Jahrestagung des italienischen Programms zur Erforschung der Arktis. https://www.repubblica.it/green-and-blue/2024/02/23/news/artico_ghiaccio_marino_riduzione_record-422193100/

Presseaussendung zur Tagung: https://www.cnr.it/it/nota-stampa/n-12540/

https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/larctique-pourrait-etre-prive-de-glace-de-mer-en-ete-des-2030-une-decennie-plus-tot-que-les-projections-du-giec-20230606_NOXVJMVYQJAHXCA6XUDU3RE6J4/

Study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38511-8

Im Februar setzen sich die Messungen von Rekordtemperaturen fort. Dabei stellt seit über einem halben Jahri die Zahl dieser Meldungen selbst bisherige Rekorde ein. In den ersten beiden Wochen wurden an 140 Stellen der Erde die höchsten Monats-temperaturen der Aufzeichnunggsgeschicht festgestellt. Noch beunruhigender sind die Anomaliee bei den Meerestemperaturen. Guardian-Artikel mit SInfografiken und tatements von Klimawissenschaftler:innen, die von dieser Entwicklung alarmiert sind. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/17/february-on-course-to-break-unprecedented-number-of-heat-records

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/13/climate/flooding-sea-levels-groundwater.html

In Großbritannien wird die Erschließung eines großen weiteren Nordsee-Ölfelds vorangetrieben. Das Land erhält drei Viertel seiner Energie aus fossilen Quellen. Hintergrund-Bericht im Guardian, der auch Zahlen zum hohen CO2-Fußabdruck von LNG enthält: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/does-the-uk-really-need-to-drill-for-more-north-sea-oil-and-gas

Der Standard informiert über zwei Studien, die unter anderem den Zusammenhang von Stadtentwicklung und globaler Erhitzung betreffen. Vor allem in den USA wird für die Mehrzahl der großen Städte eine Schrumpfung vorausgesagt, verstärkt durch die Folgen der Erhitzung. Die Studie verwendet ist Szenarien des IPCC. Unter anderem ergibt sich daraus die Forderung, die Stadtplanung nicht mehr vor allem an der Vorstellung von wachsenden Städten auszurichten. https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000203501/tausende-us-staedte-koennten-bis-2100-zu-geisterorten-werden

Norwegen erteilt in diesem Jahr 62 Lizenzen für die Exploration von Öl- und Gasfeldern, gegenüber 47 im vergangenen Jahr. Die Steigerung geht auf das Interesse von Öl- und Gasgesellschaften zurück. Gegen den Widerstand von NGOs betreibt Norwegen weiterhin eine Ausweitung der Öl- und Gasproduktion, die zu jahrzehntelanger Förderung führen soll. Stark gewachsen ist dabei das Interesse an der Barents Sea. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/norway-increases-number-new-oil-gas-drilling-permits-including-arctic-2024-01-16/

In einigen Zonen des Mittelmeers steigt der Meeresspiegel dreimal so schnell wie bisher angenommen. Italien, vor allem das Veneto und die Emilia Romagna. ist davon besonders betroffen. Einer neuen Studie zufolge könnten die Schäden durch Bedrohung von Küstengebieten in Europa bis 2100 827 Milliarden Euro kosten, wenn die globale Temperatur um 4° bzw. der Meeresspiegel um 75 cm steigt. https://www.repubblica.it/green-and-blue/2024/01/19/news/crisi_clima_innalzamento_mari_effetti_pil_costi_regioni-421918563/

Studie: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad127e

Das norwegische Parlament hat gestern Forschungen zur konkreten Möglichkeit von Tiefseebergbau in einer Zone des norwegischen Kontinentalsockels erlaubt. Norwegen ist eines der ersten Länder, die Tiefseebergbau in der näheren Zukunft vorbereiten. Die Regierung hatte aber mit ihrem Plan bereits die Ausbeutung dieser Zone zu beschließen, keinen Erfolg. eEne internationale Kampagne kämpft gegen den Start des Tiefseebergbaus in Norwegen https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/norvege-feu-vert-du-parlement-a-la-prospection-miniere-des-fonds-marins-20240109_32OH3J2GUJEBBFGXXQMSP36XGQ/

Der kommissarische Vorsitzende des britischen Climate Change Commitee hat Finanzminister Jeremy Hunt öffentlich widersprochen. Die britische Regierung erteilt weitere Lizenzen für die Ausbeutung von Öl und Gasfeldern in der Nordsee. Hunt hatte faktenwidrig behauptet, das sei mit dem britischen Klimazielen vereinbar, und sich dabei auch auf das Climate Change Commitee berufen. Der frühere konservative Minister Chris Skidmore hat wegen der Öl- und Gaslizenzen sein Parlamentsmandat zurücklegt https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/07/hunts-net-zero-target-claims-criticised-by-climate-advisors

Das norwegische Parlament hat den Weg zum Tiefseebergbau frei gemacht. Es geht vor allem um die Förderung von Mineralien für erneuerbare Energien. Die Entscheidung fiel gegen den Rat sehr vieler Fachleute und trotz eines internationalen Moratoriums. Tiefseebergbau ist mit extremen Risiken für die Biodiversität verbunden. Ausführliches Interview mit der Aktivistin Camille Etienne. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/biodiversite/camille-etienne-si-la-norvege-vote-lexploitation-des-fonds-marins-elle-va-creer-une-nouvelle-industrie-mortifere-pour-le-climat-20240109_FHGG6UF745EPTK3AFNING4TUH4/

Bangladesch ist dem Climate Risk Index zufolge das am siebtstärksten von den Folgen der globalen Erhitzung betroffene Land. Bis zur Mitte des Jahrhunderts wird dort mit 20 Millionen Binnenflüchtlingen aufgrund der Erhöhung des Meeresspiegels gerechnet. Die Regierung vertritt die Interessen der wirtschaftlichen Elite und reagiert zunehmend mit harter Repression auf Opposition. Reportage über junge AktivistInnen in Bangladesch anlässlich der Wahlen, an denen die wichtigsten Oppositionsparteien nicht teilnehmen. https://www.repubblica.it/green-and-blue/2024/01/05/news/bangladesh_elezioni_cambiamento_climatico-421819356/

Einer neuen Studie zufolge wird der Anstieg des Meeresspiegels bis 2150 in einigen Regionen des Mittelmeer, unter anderem durch geologische Prozesse, dreimal so hoch sein wie bisher angenommen. Damit sind 38.500 Quadratkilometer, davon 10.000 in Italien, von Überschwemmungen bedroht. https://www.greenandblue.it/2023/12/29/news/mediterraneo_coste_rischio_inondazione-421776898/

Studie: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad127e

Zusammenfassender Artikel über Studien zu Klimafolgen in der Antarktis und zu dafür relevanten Ereignissen. 2023 sind Entwicklungen sichtbar geworden, die erst für wesentlich später in diesem Jahrhundert erwartet worden waren. Der enorme und möglicherweise dauerhafte Verlust an Merreis ist dafür genauso relevant wie die zunehmende Instabilität des westantarktischen und möglicherweise inzwischen auch des ostantarktischen Eisschilds. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/31/red-alert-in-antarctica-the-year-rapid-dramatic-change-hit-climate-scientists-like-a-punch-in-the-guts

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/25/emperor-penguins-thousands-of-chicks-in-antarctica-likely-died-due-to-record-low-sea-ice-levels

Ein Strömungssystem im südlichen Ozean, das man mit dem Golfstrom im nördlichen Atlantik vergleichen kann, hat seit den 90er Jahren um 30% Intensität verloren. Die Folgen dieser Entwicklung können dramatisch sein, unter anderem für die Nahrungsversorgung von Lebewesen im Meer und für die Erhöhung des Meeresspiegels. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/25/slowing-ocean-current-caused-by-melting-antarctic-ice-could-have-drastic-climate-impact-study-says

Die dänische Firma Ørsted investiert in die größteOoffshore-Windfarm der Welt. Hornsea 3 vor der britischen Ostküste soll ab 2027 2,9 Millionen Gigawatt liefern. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/le-plus-grand-parc-eolien-offshore-du-monde-sortira-de-leau-au-large-de-langleterre-fin-2027-20231220_R5KQ3GIH6ZBBPAPWYCMGUCQBUA/

• for: visualizations - sea level rise at 3 Deg C

• comment

  • Look to canal cities like Venice or Amsterdam for inspiration because if it cities are salvagable, parts of them will become canal cities.

Eine neue Studie ergibt, dass sich das Abschmelzen des westantarktischen Eisschilds selbst dann fortsetzen wird, wenn die Erderhitzung auf 1,5° begrenzt wird. Das Schelfeis stellt ein Kipppelememt dar. Der Abschmelzvorgang verstärkt sich selbst und führt zu einer unaufhaltsamen Erhöhung des Meeresspiegels, weil er den Weg für das hinter dem Schelfeis gelegene Gletschereis frei macht. https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000192327/meterhoher-meeresanstieg-durch-abschmelzen-des-westantarktischen-eisschelfs

Studie: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01818-x

Mehr zur Studie: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%27report%3A+Unavoidable+future+increase+in+West+Antarctic+ice-shelf+melting%27

Der westantarktische Eisschild wird in diesem Jahrhundert dreimal schneller abschmelzen als im vergangenen, selbst wenn es gelingt, die globale Erhitzung auf 1,5 Grad zu begrenzen. Einer neuen Studie zufolge wurde einer der Kipppunkte, unterhalb derer das Klimasystem stabil bleibt, überschritten. Dadurch wird es zu einem so großen Anstieg des Meeresspiegels kommen, dass mehrere Küstenstädte aufgegeben werden müssen. Die Studie stützt sich nur auf eine einzige Modellierung, wird aber von den Ergebnissen anderer Untersuchungen ergänzt. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/23/rapid-ice-melt-in-west-antarctica-now-inevitable-research-shows

Studie: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01818-x

Zwei neue Studien zeigen, dass in Grönland sowohl kleinere Gletscher außerhalb des großen Eisschilds als auch das Schelfeis viel schneller abschmelzen als im vergangenen Jahrhundert. Das Schelfeis s im Norden Grönland hat seit 1978/35% seines Volumens verloren. Wenn Abschnitte des shelf Eis kollabieren, was in diesem Jahrhundert bereits dreimal der Fall war, verdoppelt sich die Abschmelzgeschwindigkeit der Gletscher dahinter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/climate/greenland-glaciers-ice-melt.html

https://theconversation.com/antarctic-tipping-points-the-irreversible-changes-to-come-if-we-fail-to-keep-warming-below-2-207410

Die britische Fossilindustrie wird ihr offizielles Ziel, die Emissionen bis zum Ende des Jahrzehnts zu halbieren, nur duch ein deutlich entschlosseneres Vorgehen erreichen, wie aus einer Warnung der industriefreundlichen britischen Regulierungsbehörde für die Nordsee hervorgeht. Gemeint sind dabei nur die produktionsbedingten Emissionen. Sie machen 3% der britischen Gesamtemissionen aus. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/05/uk-oil-and-gas-sector-must-do-more-to-meet-2030-emissions-target

Dass mehr als um die Antarktis erreicht im September seine größte Ausdehnung. Die von Eis bedeckte Fläche dort war nie so gering wie in diesem September. Im Vergleich zu der Periode zwischen 1981 und 2010 ging sie etwa um die Fläche von Alaska zurück. Diese Entwicklung ist auch deshalb beunruhigend, weil sie erst 2016 einsetzte und das antarktische Meereis offenbar insgesamt in einen anderen Zustand geraten ist. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/04/climate/antarctic-sea-ice-record-low.html

Studie: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00961-9

Infografik: https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2023-10-03-antarctica-sea-ice-update/99fb25d0-943d-43a5-9fe3-86257558db32/_assets/antarctic-sea-ice-chart-335.png

Vier NGOs haben den französischen Öl- und Gaskonzern TotalEnergies vor einem französischen Strafgerichtshof wegen des Pipeline-Projekts EACOP in Ostafrika verklagt. Das Vorgehen des Konzerns habe Ökozid-Qualitäten. Die Kläger berufen sich u.a. auf die Forderung der IEA, keine neuen fossilen Projekte mehr zu entwickeln. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/totalenergies-vise-par-une-plainte-au-penal-pour-son-mega-projet-petrolier-en-ouganda-et-en-tanzanie-20231002_NBNQ6FM2XNA2PBSACL4VY6EZDM/

Das schnelle Zurückgehen des antarktischen Meereises gefährdet Kaiserpinguine und Glattwale. Katastrophale Folgen für die Kaiserpinguine hatte in diesem Jahr das fast völlige Abschmelzen des Eises der -ellingshausen See. Der Standard informiert über Hintergründe und Forschungen. https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000188794/der-gefaehrliche-wandel-der-antarktis

Das Meeeis um die Antarktis bedeckt in diesem September so wenig Ozean Fläche wie in keinem September der Messgeschichte. Im September erreicht es seine maximale Ausdehnung. In diesem diesem Jahr liegt sie 1,75 Millionen Quadratmeter Kilometer unter dem langjährigen Durchschnitt und eine Million Quadratmeter unter dem bisher niedrigsten September-Maximum. Im Februar wurde auch bei der geringsten Ausdehnung des antarktischen Meereises ein Rekord verzeichnet. Ob und wie diese Entwicklung mit der globalen Erhitzung zusammenhängt ist noch unklar. Die obersten 300 m des Ozeans um die Antarktis sind deutlich wärmer als früher. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/26/antarctic-sea-ice-shrinks-to-lowest-annual-maximum-level-on-record-data-shows

Die Hochseefischerei hat 2018-2022 um 8,5% zugenommen. In den Gebieten , die dem neuen Internationalen Meeresschutzabkommen zu Folge unter Schutz gestellt werden sollen, steigerte sie sich sogar um 22%, wie eine neue Studie von Greenpeace darstellt.Greenpeace begründet mit der Studie die Forderung, den Meeresschutzvertrag schnellstmöglich umzusetzen. https://www.repubblica.it/green-and-blue/2023/09/14/news/pesca_overfishing_trattato_oceani_greenpeace-414483446/

Greenpeace-Bericht: https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-italy-stateless/2023/09/bca4703b-30x30-from-got-to-protection-at-sea-full-report.pdf

Reportage der New York Times über die awkwatch Expedition des deutschen Forschungsschiffs Polarstern. Das Schiff ist ungefähr zu dem Zeitpunkt am Nordpol, an dem das mehr als die niedrigste Ausdehnung hat. Seit 1980 ist das Eis ihre Dekade um etwa 13% zurückgegangen. Zitate von Antje Boetius über die vergangene und zu erwartende Transformation der Arktis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/climate/arctic-sea-ice-minimum.html

https://taz.de/Klimawandel-bedroht-Nord--und-Suedpol/!5956492/

Der Sturm Daniel in Libyen Tausende von Todesopfern gefordert, 27 davor in Europa und der Türkei. Der Attributions-Spezialist Davide Faranda stellt ihn im Interview mit der Libération in den Kontext der um 3-4° erhöhten Meerestemperatur und mediterranen HItzewelle im Juli und später Hitzewellen im August und September. Hitzewellen wie Medikane intensivieren sich. Dringend sei eine europaweite Planung von Anpassungsmaßnahmen. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/evenements-climatiques-extremes-en-mediterranee-cet-ete-on-a-vecu-dans-le-futur-20230912_O7A53XIZKZDPZC2NH4RD355GNA/

Eine Koalition kleiner Inselstaaten hat beim internationalen Seegerichtshof eine Aussage zur Belastung der Ozeane durch Treibhausgase beantragt. Wenn diese als Verschmutzung im Sinne des Seerechts anerkannt wird, lassen sich damit Klagen gegen die Industriestaaten auf Einschreiten gegen die globale Erhitzung begründen. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/pollution/des-etats-insulaires-intentent-une-action-en-justice-pour-proteger-les-oceans-20230911_ATZV3N2EAZCMXEWEKUZ32ACL4Q/

Küsten-Ökosysteme können sich nur eingeschränkt an eine schnelle Erhöhung des Meeresspiegels anpassen. Über 90% der Mangrovenwälder, Korallenriffe und Gezeitensümpfe würden bei einen Temperaturanstieg um 3° nicht mit dem schnellen Anstieg des Meeresspiegels Schritt halten und damit die Fähigkeit verlieren, CO2 zu binden, wie eine neue Studie prognostiziert. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/biodiversite/rechauffement-climatique-les-ecosystemes-cotiers-risquent-detre-noyes-par-la-montee-des-eaux-20230830_OHOQ4F5XRRA4RCJLRZEWHTJYRE/

In der tasmanischen See südlich von Australien könnte es Prognosen zufolge im kommenden Sommer eine Hitzewelle mit Temperaturanomalien geben, die alle bisherigen Messergebnisse bei weitem übertreffen. Es werden schwere Schädigungen der Ökosysteme befürchtet. Die Tangwälder in diesem Gebiet sind bereits zu 95% zerstört.

Infografik: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ddf428fc0e08ac5eaf81daf3d2c25c1fa2727962/0_0_3253_1617/master/3253.jpg?width=465&dpr=2&s=none

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/27/south-east-australia-marine-heatwave-forecast-to-be-literally-off-the-scaler

Der Verlust des antarktischen Meereises, der sich in diesem Jahr beschleunigt hat, könnte schon in den folgenden Jahrzehnten zum Untergang der Kaiserpinguine führen. Die Biologin Barbara Wienecke, die diese Pinguine schon lange erforscht, schreibt im Guardian über den drohende Ende einer ikonischen Art.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/28/emperor-penguin-extinction

Hintergrundartikel zum möglicherweise bald beginnenden Tiefseebergbau, dessen ökologische Folgen enorm sein dürften und wissenschaftlich noch nicht eingeschätzt werden können. Zentrales internationales Konfliktthema ist die Rolle der internationalen Meeresbodenbehörde ISA: Die Metalle, die in der Tiefsee abgebaut werden können, sind vor allem für Erzeugung und Speicherung erneuerbarer Energien interessant.

https://monde-diplomatique.de/artikel/!5943456

In Hobart treffen sich Antarktis-Forschende zu einem Symposion, bei dem die neuesten Daten zum antarktischen Meereis und den Temperaturen der die Antarktis umgebenden Ozeane besprochen werden. Im Juli nahm das Meereis um die Antarkris 15% weniger Fläche ein als 1981-2010. Die Abnahme begann 2016 und hat wie die Temperatursteigerungen der Ozean ein dramatisches Ausmaß erreicht. Die Abnahme kann schwerwiegende Folgen für das Festlandseis und die Meeresströmungen haben.

https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/climat-pourquoi-la-fonte-de-lantarctique-nous-concerne-tous-20230813_F5GVCV32CBACDPWJEAUMZV4WWM/

Die durchschnittliche Oberflächentemperatur der Ozeane erreicht Anfang April mit 21,1° einen neuen Höchstwert. Die Temperaturen sind seit 1980 nahezu linear gestiegen. In diesem Jahr dürften sie durch das El Niño-Phänomen noch weiter ansteigen, sodass u.a. mehr marine Hitzewellen zu befürchten sind. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/08/headed-off-the-charts-worlds-ocean-surface-temperature-hits-record-high

Beim Treffen des Rats der Internationalen Meeresbodenbehörde kam es nicht zu einer Einigung über den Tiefsssebergbau. Einige Staaten, darunter Deutschland, wollen ein Moratorium durcchsetzen, haben damit aber weinig Aussicht auf Erfolg. Viele Firmen wollen in der Tiefsee Mineralien gewinnen, die für die Produktion erneuerbarer Energien verweendet werden können. Tiefseebergbau würde die Biodiversität in größtenteils unerforschten Ökosystemen enorm schädigen. https://taz.de/Bergbau-auf-dem-Meeresboden/!5946114/

Systematische Bestandsaufnahme der CO2-Emissionen durch Schleppnetze. Sie sind größer als die Emissionen Deutschland oder des Luftverkehrs. Veröffentlichen in Nature im Vorfeld der Biodiversitätskonferenz in China, Verweis auf ein paralleles Projekt zu terrestrischen Systemen.

Tiefseebergbau ist noch nicht rentabel, und es ist unklar, ob und wann er rentabel werden wird. Interview mit Matthias Haeckel zur Erforschung der biologischen Folgewirkungen, zur internationalen Regelung des Zugangs und zu den möglichen Profiteuren. https://taz.de/Umweltfolgenforscher-ueber-Tiefseebergbau/!5929507/

BP und TotalEnergies zahlen insgesamt 12,6 Milliarden Euro an die deutsche Bundesnetzagentur, um neue Windparks in Nord- und Ostsee errichten zu können. Die Stiftung Offshore Windenergie beklagt die Tendenz zur Bildung eines Oligopols auf den deutschen Markt für Offshore-Windenergie.

https://taz.de/Windkraft-wird-zum-lukrativen-Geschaeft/!5945033/

Wie eine Untersuchung der NGO Uplift zeigt, werden die Öl- und Gasfelder, deren Ausbeutung in Großbritannien geplant ist, die Energiesicherheit des Landes kaum vergrößern. Es ist davon auszugehen, das Öl und Gas aus diesem Feldern größtenteils exportiert werden. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/11/new-north-sea-oil-and-gas-fields-will-not-meet-uks-energy-needs

Für eine neue Studie wurden die Klagen gegen climate washing, also gegen falsche Angaben von Unternehmen und Organisationen über die von ihnen verursachten Emissionen, erfasst. Global haben diese Prozesse in den letzten Jahren enorm zugenommen, wobei die Zahl der Prozesse etwa zum Ende der Amtszeit von Donald Trump in den USA am schnellsten wuchs. Die Verurteilungen, zu denen es bereits gekommen ist, führen aufgrund der mit ihnen verbundenen Kosten zu Veränderungen bei den Unternehmen.

https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/de-plus-en-plus-de-plaintes-contres-des-entreprises-et-des-gouvernements-pour-leurs-engagements-climatiques-trompeurs-ou-insuffisants-20230629_B447RVPNDFADBDY44XDJR2KDDI/

The high sea opens up new possibilities of connecting. This passage of the chapter follows a moment of solid and fixed textual memory. After managing the recitation of two terzine from Inferno 26 that initiate the encounter with Ulysses, Levi indicates his frustration at his inability to translate, but also points to Jean’s ability to connect from afar, from a cultural and linguistic remove. Then a gap in memory, a struggle to recall. Half phrases finally crystallise in a well-remembered line, ‘Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto’ (Inf. 26, 110). This line first prompts Levi to play the role of teacher, explaining to Jean how ‘misi me’ is not the same as the French ‘je me mis,’ but rather something bolder (see also this annotation). In doing so, in envisioning the liberatory potential of breaking a boundary, a chain, putting oneself beyond a barrier, Levi sees a precious and telling connection between himself and Pikolo: ‘noi conosciamo bene questo impulso’. There is a flattening of difference here, a forging of a bond between two men that stretches across the Mediterranean, across a linguistic and poetic divide. Levi is no longer explaining, translating, teaching; instead, they have found a connection in seeking to go beyond, to break out and be free.

Importantly, this oceanic connection privileges Jean’s experience over Primo’s technical knowledge. It is by no means the same as the disdain for intellectuals shown by Alex at the beginning of the chapter. Rather, this emphasis on Pikolo’s experience - ‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire…’ - is a way to privilege what might be gained through the perspective of the cultural outsider. Jean has been on the sea; he apparently knows what Primo describes as that feeling of freedom when there is nothing left but the aroma of the ocean. Has Primo not had that? (Perhaps only in the pages of books, by Salgari, Conrad?) Is he thus able to have a wholly different, more potent experience of Inferno 26 as a result of this ‘non-native’ reading? Earlier in the chapter, the ‘leggero odore’ of paint and tar have - strangely, almost paradoxically - brought to Levi’s mind ‘qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’, but this is of another order. Primo’s experience seems to have been shore-bound; Jean has truly sailed.

Because Pikolo knows (and the use of ‘sapere’ is telling here, in contrast to the ‘canoscenza’ of Ulysses’ dictum to follow), Primo can convey with both precision and lyricism that mode of apprehension and feeling of emancipation: ‘è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare’. He is envisioning and embodying the possibilities of freedom, of being unbound and certainly not being inundated by odours of a very different kind, such as the paint and tar evoked earlier. The image of the horizon closing in on itself stands in stark contrast to the end of both Dante’s Inferno 26 and the end of this chapter, when it is the sea that closes over Ulysses and his companions, and - by implication and association - over Primo and Jean once more as well. The use of the verb ‘rinchiudere’ in that final moment is also striking, almost as if to imply that there are moments such as this one that open out to the world at large but there is the inevitable return to the horror of the camp that once more closes over them. Here, though, the sea is freedom: it is a simple, straight line of the horizon that connects these individuals together in their desire to escape.

In that exquisite, bittersweet phrase ‘dolci cose ferocemente lontane,’ there is something not just Ulyssean (‘né dolcezza di figlio…’), not just hybrid (‘dulcis’ and ‘ferox’ together, which also resonates with the ‘viver come bruti’ to come), but also a channeling of Purgatorio. One might think in particular of the opening of Purgatorio 8: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio | ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core | lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio…’. Here, too, the sweet memory of things left behind is made bitter by their absence and separation across the sea. Such a way of thinking Ulysses and the ocean voyage across the Commedia is almost a banality; it nonetheless serves to give us some impetus to thinking about Levi as a reader of not just Inferno, but of other parts of the poem as well.

And it serves to have us perhaps think about this powerful moment of Mediterranean connectivity a little differently, to take that insight of valorising Jean’s non-native perspective out to the world at large. In his 1990 work Poetics of Relation, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant espouses Relation as a means to connect globally and valorise the multilingual, multicultural nature of the Caribbean as a model for global culture that is rhizomatic and not tied to a single, Western line of becoming. Glissant sees the Mediterranean as an enclosed sea, ‘a sea that concentrates’, while the Caribbean is ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts’. In this moment of SQ, I wonder if we might find the Caribbean model as one that resonates more with the Primo-Jean dynamic, as Jean’s experience of the open sea asks us to see Dante’s text as one that is not enclosed but rather must be opened up to the global reader. Indeed, Glissant himself characterises Dante’s Commedia as a work that is committed to cultural mixing, dwelling on how ‘one of the greatest monuments of Christian universalisation stresses the filiation shared by ancient myths and the new religion linking both to the creation of the world’. Perhaps this moment of connection, of seeing the liberatory possibilities in the open sea that beckons, is not just a way to palpably feel the strength of Primo and Jean’s new bond, but also to urge us as global readers to embrace the diffractive, rhizomatic potential of a decolonised Dante.

AK

In an August 2013 article in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes how Levi’s account of Auschwitz evokes for him the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Reading SQ, writes Coates, ‘I see my African ancestors here in America, suddenly aware that they will never go back, that they are dead to everyone they have known and loved’. (On the importance of 'here' / 'qui', see also this annotation.)

CLL

In geographic terms, of course, the sea that Ulysses traverses is the broader Mediterranean and, at moments, its inner seas (e.g. the Ionian, Aegean, or Adriatic). As in Homer’s epic, however, ‘mare’ possesses a polyvocality in Levi’s text that far exceeds its cartographic meanings. The Fascist regime famously instrumentalised and misused Italy’s classical heritage. As early as 1918, Mussolini had linked ‘romanità’ with the sea, declaring in a speech at Pavia, ‘Now the mission of Italians is in the Mediterranean’ ('Ora la missione degli Italiani è nel Mediterraneo'). Yet even as the Duce confidently proclaimed that Italy would rule over a revived Mare Nostrum, the sea itself retained a historically ambivalent – at points, even marginal – status within the modern Italian state (Fogu 2020).

In a 1985 Paris Review interview (only published in 1994), Levi spoke of the revelation of reading Melville during the time of Fascism. According to Levi, the fascist censors allowed Cesare Pavese to translate the book as ‘it had no political implications’, a judgement that ignored the work’s entanglements with American narratives of imperialism and race politics. In Levi’s estimation, Pavese’s translation ‘distorted it [Moby Dick], fitted it into the Italian language’ – and thus into an ambivalent Italian imaginary of the sea. Like many Italians, ‘[h]e wasn’t a seaman – Pavese – he hated the sea’, commented Levi.

Such ambivalence towards the sea resonates in Levi’s biography, as well. Like many 20th-century Italians and Europeans more generally, Levi was familiar with the seaside as a place for recreation and tourism. Indeed, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi claimed that Rudi, the Blockführer in Auschwitz, liked Italy and wanted to learn Italian; this desire dated back to a month-long holiday in Liguria before the war, a vacation presumably spent along the shore. In the chapter, Levi likewise refers to ‘una qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’. Yet in his youth Levi embraced mountain climbing, with one biographer, Ian Thomson, claiming that on the eve of World War II Levi did not even know how to swim. For Levi, the sublimity of the peaks, rather than the sea’s vastness, symbolised freedom. In this, Levi was not alone. The classic terrain of both the Resistance and the civil war was resolutely a landscape (karst, forest, field, mountain) rather than a seascape.

In an indirect way, the project of Mare Nostrum threatened to shipwreck Levi’s own university hopes. In 1937, as Levi prepared for his ‘maturità’ exams, he received a demand to report to the Turin seaplane base. There he was accused of ignoring a draft summons for the Royal Navy. Levi’s sister, Anna Maria Levi, insisted, ‘Maybe my brother’s name was on a Fascist National Service list, but he never received an Italian Royal Navy summons’ (Thomson 2003, 66). A compromise was struck, with Levi expected to enrol in the university branch of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN). Thus, unlike Ulysses, Levi was not destined to set forth on the open sea (in the latter’s case with the Navy). In the end, Levi never served in any branch of the Italian military or fascist militia. Rather, his brief three month career as a partisan played out in the mountain passes of the Valle d’Aosta, after Levi moved out of the Hotel Ristoro where he had initially sought refuge.

During those few months when Levi took up arms against the Fascists, there occurred an incident that profoundly demoralised Levi and his comrades: the execution at Frumy of two partisan brothers-in-arms, Fulvio Oppezzo and Luciano Zabaldano on December 9, 1943. In the estimation of historian Sergio Luzzatto, this episode would continue to haunt not only Levi’s conscience but also his writings (non-fiction, his novel, and poetry) (Luzzatto 2016). The ‘ugly secret’ Levi harboured was that these partisans - long celebrated as the first partisans killed in the Valle d’Aosta - did not fall at the hands of the Fascists but of their comrades, who appear to have punished Oppezzo and Zabaldano for indiscretion and greed. Perhaps it was only fitting that Zabaldono’s nom de guerre was ‘Mare’, given that this partisan’s life – and death – embodied the ambiguity and fluidity of what Levi would later conceptualise as the ‘grey zone’.

PB

Memories of childhood always send a pang through the heart. Not because they are sad. Perhaps they are, but the pang can be deeper when they are good, for they tell us of what is utterly lost and are thus redolent of our relentless passage through time, projected as we are towards death with, so it seems, an increasing rapidity as we get older. Levi passes quickly over this moment of thought of his infancy. But it sets the tone for ‘Il canto di Ulisse’: the tone of something utterly lost and yet completely present. The childhood beach with its peculiar smell of paint and tar is wholly past and yet it is Levi, here, now. In this moment it is everything he is. Just so, the canto is utterly gone, belonging to a different life, the life Levi had before Auschwitz, and yet is here, now, making him this particular individual man with this burden of identity. He is freighted with the memory of the beach as he is with the memory of those lines from Dante.

When I was a child, I was sometimes taken in the summer in my parents’ car to one of the few sandy beaches near to where I grew up. The car park was behind the dunes and was itself a vast expanse of coarse grass worn flat and of impacted sand. The smell of that beach was the smell of the grass and sand mingled with that of the hot interior of the car, leather and metal warmed through, the bench seat offering to my child’s body a kind of place of perfect rest, long enough for me to stretch out on it to warm myself after the coldness of the sea. For me, leather and metal are what paint and tar were to Levi: the odours of these at the beach, suffused with the smell of hot sand.

I cannot think of those odours and all they bring back to me of my childhood without pain, intense but somehow delicious in its melancholy. This is all lost but it is mine and no-one else’s, giving me an acute sense of my individuality. I grasp that Levi had the same sense in remembering that smell of paint and tar from his childhood, even in this dark place. This is why he needs to mention it; this is why he passes over it so rapidly. It is everything and nothing; it is painful and sweetly delicious. This experience of the memory of the beach, surging up out of the nowhere of the camp, is at one with the eruption in Levi’s mind of the canto from Dante. Not everyone can read Dante. But everyone knows of these odours of childhood. Levi is saying: somewhere in this nightmare, in this hell created by some human beings to torture other human beings, there is someone else who, perhaps deprived of culture and learning, ill-educated and uninterested in books, nonetheless has a feeling for his or her childhood as I do for mine. I move from that to Dante; this other person will not. No matter. What binds me to that other, even this side of good and evil where theft is honoured and cheating praised, in this world of remorseless self-concern for the sake of survival, is that he or she too will smell the tar and paint, or some other material, and then be joined again to a moment of childhood. There is a common fellowship after all, a fellowship forged by the fact that that other unknown person and I are both returned to our childhood in some fleeting moment that is saturated in an odour.

Levi then tries to express this in turning to Pikolo and grasping after those fragments from Dante in order to get him to understand these words of a – for Pikolo – foreign language and feel the depth of Levi’s response to Dante. But it is the beach that is at the back of that: the Dante stands proxy for a more universal feeling – that feeling that we can have, says Levi, even here, perhaps especially here, for our lost childhood.

CH

The chapter opens with Levi and his fellow prisoners working below ground in an underground cistern or tank and ends with the quotation from Dante about the sea closing over Ulysses’ and his companions’ heads. These two moments are further connected as the description of the tank – ‘scaletta di corda’ and ‘portello’, literally ‘hatch’ rather than ‘manhole’ – conjures up the image of a ship.

EL

Für die beunruhigende Temperatursteigerung im Nordatlantik gibt es noch keine zufriedenstellende Erklärung. Sie kann u.a. mit dem Rückgang von Aerosolen und Veränderungen der Zirkulation zu tun haben. Es ist möglich, dass auch sie ein Effekt der globalen Erhitzung ist, die bereits zu Rekordtemperaturen der Ozeane geführt hat. Ebenfalls beunruhigend und unverstanden ist das Schmelzen des antarktischen Meereises, das mit anderen Anomalien in Verbindung stehen könnte.

https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/climat/le-rechauffement-de-locean-atlantique-est-inedit-20230615_VL4R3QGTDZDA7FRR7ZG4NYJ27I/

Die Temperatur an der Meeresoberfläche erreicht neue Rekordwerte, die die Prognosen der Klimaforschung noch übertreffen. Der Standard fasst die aktuellen Daten und die Erklärungsversuche zusammem: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000174333/dramatische-entwi

Das Verschwinden des arktischen meereises hat – in Verbindung mit den Spannungen in anderen Regionen – gravierende geopolitische Konsequenzen. Russland ist dabei, die Arktis massiv zu militarisieren. Dabei kooperiert ist mit China. Es will andererseits von den Schiffsrouten durch das eisfreie Nordpolarmeer profitieren. Wissenschaftliche Kooperation in der Arktis findet seit der Invasion der ganzen Ukraine im Februar 2022 nicht mehr statt. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/13/arctic-russia-nato-putin-climate

The chapter opens with Levi and his fellow prisoners working below ground in an underground cistern or tank and ends with the quotation from Dante about the sea closing over Ulysses’ and his companions’ heads. These two moments are further connected as the description of the tank – ‘scaletta di corda’ and ‘portello’, literally ‘hatch’ rather than ‘manhole’ – conjures up the image of a ship.

EL

The chapter opens with Levi and his fellow prisoners working below ground in an underground cistern or tank and ends with the quotation from Dante about the sea closing over Ulysses’ and his companions’ heads. These two moments are further connected as the description of the tank – ‘scaletta di corda’ and ‘portello’, literally ‘hatch’ rather than ‘manhole’ – conjures up the image of a ship.

EL

In geographic terms, of course, the sea that Ulysses traverses is the broader Mediterranean and, at moments, its inner seas (e.g. the Ionian, Aegean, or Adriatic). As in Homer’s epic, however, ‘mare’ possesses a polyvocality in Levi’s text that far exceeds its cartographic meanings. The Fascist regime famously instrumentalised and misused Italy’s classical heritage. As early as 1918, Mussolini had linked ‘romanità’ with the sea, declaring in a speech at Pavia, ‘Now the mission of Italians is in the Mediterranean’ ('Ora la missione degli Italiani è nel Mediterraneo'). Yet even as the Duce confidently proclaimed that Italy would rule over a revived Mare Nostrum, the sea itself retained a historically ambivalent – at points, even marginal – status within the modern Italian state (Fogu 2020).

In a 1985 Paris Review interview (only published in 1994), Levi spoke of the revelation of reading Melville during the time of Fascism. According to Levi, the fascist censors allowed Cesare Pavese to translate the book as ‘it had no political implications’, a judgement that ignored the work’s entanglements with American narratives of imperialism and race politics. In Levi’s estimation, Pavese’s translation ‘distorted it [Moby Dick], fitted it into the Italian language’ – and thus into an ambivalent Italian imaginary of the sea. Like many Italians, ‘[h]e wasn’t a seaman – Pavese – he hated the sea’, commented Levi.

Such ambivalence towards the sea resonates in Levi’s biography, as well. Like many 20th-century Italians and Europeans more generally, Levi was familiar with the seaside as a place for recreation and tourism. Indeed, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi claimed that Rudi, the Blockführer in Auschwitz, liked Italy and wanted to learn Italian; this desire dated back to a month-long holiday in Liguria before the war, a vacation presumably spent along the shore. In the chapter, Levi likewise refers to ‘una qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’. Yet in his youth Levi embraced mountain climbing, with one biographer, Ian Thomson, claiming that on the eve of World War II Levi did not even know how to swim. For Levi, the sublimity of the peaks, rather than the sea’s vastness, symbolised freedom. In this, Levi was not alone. The classic terrain of both the Resistance and the civil war was resolutely a landscape (karst, forest, field, mountain) rather than a seascape.

In an indirect way, the project of Mare Nostrum threatened to shipwreck Levi’s own university hopes. In 1937, as Levi prepared for his ‘maturità’ exams, he received a demand to report to the Turin seaplane base. There he was accused of ignoring a draft summons for the Royal Navy. Levi’s sister, Anna Maria Levi, insisted, ‘Maybe my brother’s name was on a Fascist National Service list, but he never received an Italian Royal Navy summons’ (Thomson 2003, 66). A compromise was struck, with Levi expected to enrol in the university branch of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN). Thus, unlike Ulysses, Levi was not destined to set forth on the open sea (in the latter’s case with the Navy). In the end, Levi never served in any branch of the Italian military or fascist militia. Rather, his brief three month career as a partisan played out in the mountain passes of the Valle d’Aosta, after Levi moved out of the Hotel Ristoro where he had initially sought refuge.

During those few months when Levi took up arms against the Fascists, there occurred an incident that profoundly demoralised Levi and his comrades: the execution at Frumy of two partisan brothers-in-arms, Fulvio Oppezzo and Luciano Zabaldano on December 9, 1943. In the estimation of historian Sergio Luzzatto, this episode would continue to haunt not only Levi’s conscience but also his writings (non-fiction, his novel, and poetry) (Luzzatto 2016). The ‘ugly secret’ Levi harboured was that these partisans - long celebrated as the first partisans killed in the Valle d’Aosta - did not fall at the hands of the Fascists but of their comrades, who appear to have punished Oppezzo and Zabaldano for indiscretion and greed. Perhaps it was only fitting that Zabaldono’s nom de guerre was ‘Mare’, given that this partisan’s life – and death – embodied the ambiguity and fluidity of what Levi would later conceptualise as the ‘grey zone’.

PB

In an August 2013 article in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes how Levi’s account of Auschwitz evokes for him the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Reading SQ, writes Coates, ‘I see my African ancestors here in America, suddenly aware that they will never go back, that they are dead to everyone they have known and loved’.

CLL

The high sea opens up new possibilities of connecting. This passage of the chapter follows a moment of solid and fixed textual memory. After managing the recitation of two terzine from Inferno 26 that initiate the encounter with Ulysses, Levi indicates his frustration at his inability to translate, but also points to Jean’s ability to connect from afar, from a cultural and linguistic remove. Then a gap in memory, a struggle to recall. Half phrases finally crystallise in a well-remembered line, ‘Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto’ (Inf. 26, 110). This line first prompts Levi to play the role of teacher, explaining to Jean how ‘misi me’ is not the same as the French ‘je me mis,’ but rather something bolder. In doing so, in envisioning the liberatory potential of breaking a boundary, a chain, putting oneself beyond a barrier, Levi sees a precious and telling connection between himself and Pikolo: ‘noi conosciamo bene questo impulso’. There is a flattening of difference here, a forging of a bond between two men that stretches across the Mediterranean, across a linguistic and poetic divide. Levi is no longer explaining, translating, teaching; instead, they have found a connection in seeking to go beyond, to break out and be free.

Importantly, this oceanic connection privileges Jean’s experience over Primo’s technical knowledge. It is by no means the same as the disdain for intellectuals shown by Alex at the beginning of the chapter. Rather, this emphasis on Pikolo’s experience - ‘Pikolo ha viaggiato per mare e sa cosa vuol dire…’ - is a way to privilege what might be gained through the perspective of the cultural outsider. Jean has been on the sea; he apparently knows what Primo describes as that feeling of freedom when there is nothing left but the aroma of the ocean. Has Primo not had that? (Perhaps only in the pages of books, by Salgari, Conrad?) Is he thus able to have a wholly different, more potent experience of Inferno 26 as a result of this ‘non-native’ reading? Earlier in the chapter, the ‘leggero odore’ of paint and tar have - strangely, almost paradoxically - brought to Levi’s mind ‘qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’, but this is of another order. Primo’s experience seems to have been shore-bound; Jean has truly sailed.

Because Pikolo knows (and the use of ‘sapere’ is telling here, in contrast to the ‘canoscenza’ of Ulysses’ dictum to follow), Primo can convey with both precision and lyricism that mode of apprehension and feeling of emancipation: ‘è quando l’orizzonte si chiude su se stesso, libero diritto e semplice, e non c’è ormai che odore di mare’. He is envisioning and embodying the possibilities of freedom, of being unbound and certainly not being inundated by odours of a very different kind, such as the paint and tar evoked earlier. The image of the horizon closing in on itself stands in stark contrast to the end of both Dante’s Inferno 26 and the end of this chapter, when it is the sea that closes over Ulysses and his companions, and - by implication and association - over Primo and Jean once more as well. The use of the verb ‘rinchiudere’ in that final moment is also striking, almost as if to imply that there are moments such as this one that open out to the world at large but there is the inevitable return to the horror of the camp that once more closes over them. Here, though, the sea is freedom: it is a simple, straight line of the horizon that connects these individuals together in their desire to escape.

In that exquisite, bittersweet phrase ‘dolci cose ferocemente lontane,’ there is something not just Ulyssean (‘né dolcezza di figlio…’), not just hybrid (‘dulcis’ and ‘ferox’ together, which also resonates with the ‘viver come bruti’ to come), but also a channeling of Purgatorio. One might think in particular of the opening of Purgatorio 8: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio | ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core | lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio…’. Here, too, the sweet memory of things left behind is made bitter by their absence and separation across the sea. Such a way of thinking Ulysses and the ocean voyage across the Commedia is almost a banality; it nonetheless serves to give us some impetus to thinking about Levi as a reader of not just Inferno, but of other parts of the poem as well.

And it serves to have us perhaps think about this powerful moment of Mediterranean connectivity a little differently, to take that insight of valorising Jean’s non-native perspective out to the world at large. In his 1990 work Poetics of Relation, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant espouses Relation as a means to connect globally and valorise the multilingual, multicultural nature of the Caribbean as a model for global culture that is rhizomatic and not tied to a single, Western line of becoming. Glissant sees the Mediterranean as an enclosed sea, ‘a sea that concentrates’, while the Caribbean is ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. A sea that diffracts’. In this moment of SQ, I wonder if we might find the Caribbean model as one that resonates more with the Primo-Jean dynamic, as Jean’s experience of the open sea asks us to see Dante’s text as one that is not enclosed but rather must be opened up to the global reader. Indeed, Glissant himself characterises Dante’s Commedia as a work that is committed to cultural mixing, dwelling on how ‘one of the greatest monuments of Christian universalisation stresses the filiation shared by ancient myths and the new religion linking both to the creation of the world’. Perhaps this moment of connection, of seeing the liberatory possibilities in the open sea that beckons, is not just a way to palpably feel the strength of Primo and Jean’s new bond, but also to urge us as global readers to embrace the diffractive, rhizomatic potential of a decolonised Dante.

AK

Memories of childhood always send a pang through the heart. Not because they are sad. Perhaps they are, but the pang can be deeper when they are good, for they tell us of what is utterly lost and are thus redolent of our relentless passage through time, projected as we are towards death with, so it seems, an increasing rapidity as we get older. Levi passes quickly over this moment of thought of his infancy. But it sets the tone for ‘Il canto di Ulisse’: the tone of something utterly lost and yet completely present. The childhood beach with its peculiar smell of paint and tar is wholly past and yet it is Levi, here, now. In this moment it is everything he is. Just so, the canto is utterly gone, belonging to a different life, the life Levi had before Auschwitz, and yet is here, now, making him this particular individual man with this burden of identity. He is freighted with the memory of the beach as he is with the memory of those lines from Dante.

When I was a child, I was sometimes taken in the summer in my parents’ car to one of the few sandy beaches near to where I grew up. The car park was behind the dunes and was itself a vast expanse of coarse grass worn flat and of impacted sand. The smell of that beach was the smell of the grass and sand mingled with that of the hot interior of the car, leather and metal warmed through, the bench seat offering to my child’s body a kind of place of perfect rest, long enough for me to stretch out on it to warm myself after the coldness of the sea. For me, leather and metal are what paint and tar were to Levi: the odours of these at the beach, suffused with the smell of hot sand.

I cannot think of those odours and all they bring back to me of my childhood without pain, intense but somehow delicious in its melancholy. This is all lost but it is mine and no-one else’s, giving me an acute sense of my individuality. I grasp that Levi had the same sense in remembering that smell of paint and tar from his childhood, even in this dark place. This is why he needs to mention it; this is why he passes over it so rapidly. It is everything and nothing; it is painful and sweetly delicious. This experience of the memory of the beach, surging up out of the nowhere of the camp, is at one with the eruption in Levi’s mind of the canto from Dante. Not everyone can read Dante. But everyone knows of these odours of childhood. Levi is saying: somewhere in this nightmare, in this hell created by some human beings to torture other human beings, there is someone else who, perhaps deprived of culture and learning, ill-educated and uninterested in books, nonetheless has a feeling for his or her childhood as I do for mine. I move from that to Dante; this other person will not. No matter. What binds me to that other, even this side of good and evil where theft is honoured and cheating praised, in this world of remorseless self-concern for the sake of survival, is that he or she too will smell the tar and paint, or some other material, and then be joined again to a moment of childhood. There is a common fellowship after all, a fellowship forged by the fact that that other unknown person and I are both returned to our childhood in some fleeting moment that is saturated in an odour.

Levi then tries to express this in turning to Pikolo and grasping after those fragments from Dante in order to get him to understand these words of a – for Pikolo – foreign language and feel the depth of Levi’s response to Dante. But it is the beach that is at the back of that: the Dante stands proxy for a more universal feeling – that feeling that we can have, says Levi, even here, perhaps especially here, for our lost childhood.

CH

Eine neue Modellierung der Witterung der globalen Erhitzung auf die Gletscher der Arktis i und Antarktis und auf ihreWechselwirkungen mit den Ozeanen ergibt, dass der Meeresspiegel bis Mitte der kommenden Jahrhunderts um anderthalb Meter steigen wird, wenn die Temperatur derbAtmosphäre um mehr als 1,8 Gerade steigt.

Seit dem Beginn von Satelliten-Beobachtungen vor vier Jahrzehnten ist das antarktische Meereis noch nie so geschrumpft wie im Februar 2023.

Rubbish tip, places the author as speaking British English.

Odd that she doesn't specifically reference the Cairo Geniza by name here.

She's also dismissing the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Are there other repositories of older texts missing here?

A great example of the lag that large, complex systems exhibit when responding to significant input changes.

Lag is something that humans are woefully weak at recognizing and understanding. This, and other systems concepts are what we need to add to the curriculum at all levels of education, to change this very significant shortcoming of "common knowledge".

The imagery of exploration and sea travel was a popular subject in the literature of the Elizabethan-Jacobean era. It was the Age of Discovery, and John Donne himself also had experience in sea travel. The heroic adventure stories of the people who fulfilled the Renaissance curiosity through their expedition were fascinating enough to stir the imagination of the writers of the time.

Exploration is a process of understanding a wider world, but Speaker is no more interested in it since he has already found the perfect world in his little room with his lover.

I love the phrasing here as poetry. When one's heart is sick with salt water, it's an indicator that one has been away at sea for far too long.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/26/dead-sea-scroll-deciphered-to-reveal-ancient-calendar

The Qumran calendar had 364 days which made it easily divisible by both four and seven. This means that holidays always fell on particular days and don't cause conflicts with the Sabbath as occurs in the lunar calendar. Because of it's unchanging nature, the exactitude may have indicated to believers the ideas of perfection and holiness in a calendar preordained by God.

Given their focus on dates and calendars, what other evidence of mnemonic traditions might we draw from a culture that was likely near the transition from oral to written transmission?

Would they have had standing stones, stone circles, handheld mnemonic devices?

Ancient scribes sometimes wrote in code even though the topics at hand were well known as a means of showing their status.

That's only for 2006-2015 period. So 许艺炜 & 胡修棉 is bullshiting when they write "自工业革命以来，全球海平面以3.6mm/yr速度上升（IPCC, 2019）"

Salt Immortal Sea quote

These men unfortunately preferred to die and jump over the boat into the treacherous waters of the sea. Equiano also wanted to jump as well, but the ship's crew caught wind of what they were attempting to do and stopped him. This makes me so upset. I cannot imagine ever being in this position and so scared for the unknown future.

Tartary was a vast, cold country in the northern parts of Asia, bounded by Siberia on the north and west. A vast tract of land in northern and central Asia, it stretched from the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains to the west, all the way to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It was inhabited mostly by Mongol peoples.

"Guided by a slight clue," Victor tracks the monster from Geneva along the windings of the Rhone southward to the Mediterranean. He spots the monster hiding in a ship and follows him to the Black Sea, through the wilds of Tartary and Russia. Ultimately, he travels northward into the ice.

Victor sails northeast toward the Black Sea, whose far shore is Russia.

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