This thread is just to post interesting news, thoughts, opinions about climate change.
Hurricane force winds in some locations. Seriously, thought my wall moved during a gust yesterday.
It may have. Look for a fine filtering of dust from the upper corners, from the shifting drywall. Like in an earthquake. Dead giveaway.
Stay safe.
How many of the 38 environmental protests staged in museums in 2022 can you remember? How many of the more recent ones only generated widespread outrage? Did any of them lead to tangible change? The protesters’ cause is serious, the threat is very real, the message is important and urgent. But is it not getting through to the public?
Sixty years ago, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and multiplied Marilyn Monroe screen-prints exposed modern repetition as an ideal of mindlessness – an inescapable capitalist pattern ingrained in the oversaturated modes of production and consumption that distract and overwhelm while nurturing an irreducible sense of modern apathy. How many times is too many? Repetition is a complex phenomenon: it can deepen or hollow out experiences depending on how it is deployed. Repeated ad libitum anything shocking quickly becomes commonplace. Aware of the risk, good artists try not to repeat themselves; instead they strive to constantly reinvent. From Friedrich Nietzsche to Søren Kierkegaard, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Mark Fisher, Frantz Fanon, Robert Hughes, and Amia Srinivasan, modern thinkers have dwelled extensively on the all-pervasive pacifying powers of unwitting repetitiveness. The shock of the new quickly melts into the air.
Tomato soup splashed on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and mashed potatoes hurled at Monet’s Haystacks – the activists of Last Generation and Just Stop Oil want us to listen. Their objective is to save us from succumbing to the mundane, capitalist-induced apathy that has distorted our value scale. “What is more important? Art or the right to healthy, sustainable food?” shouted two Riposte Alimentaire protesters after splashing the Mona Lisa with pumpkin soup last month.
But the infamous protests involving glue, paint, and food-throwing are just the tip of the iceberg. These activist groups routinely engage in genuinely significant endeavours, much of which is disregarded by the media for lack of sensationalism. Protest after protest, awareness of this media bias has led anticapitalist demonstrators into an attention-seeking trap: they are now caught in the same repetitive cycles of capitalist-induced torpor that they sought to release us all from.
A study by Apollo Academic Surveys in 2023 showed that while disruptive tactics can certainly aid some causes, they often fall short of generating change when there are issues with high awareness but low support. Look no further than the endless stream of vilifying comments on social media platforms to witness how these protests have negatively affected public opinion. And, since fighting the climate crisis is a collective effort, the seriousness of this public alienation should not be underestimated. A study published by climatologist Michael E Mann in 2022 showed that, as a result of the protests, most people felt less inclined to join environmental efforts than before.
The wind was really strong in northern California. It was not unlike southern California's santa ana winds. (except frigid and wet instead of warm desert winds)
The rain was erratic: partially sunny, drizzle, torrential down pour. At times, it cycled between them every 5 minutes.
Pockets of neighborhoods lost power. The typical fallen trees were all over the place.
Yes, the Los Angeles River is dramatically full. But it’s just ‘doing its job’
When newspapers across the world wanted to visualize this week’s torrential California storms, they chose the same image: a shot of the brown, choppy waters of the Los Angeles River, seemingly about to fully swallow the trunks of local trees.
Photos and video of the river dominated the homepages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and even the Guardian. On Monday, “LA River” was trending on X.com (formerly Twitter), with more dramatic videos of rising waters.
But as many Angelenos know, during periods of heavy rainfall, this is pretty much what the LA River is supposed to look like. Those trees seemingly drowning in the high waters? A lot of them are willows and cottonwoods, floodplain plants that spread their seeds through floodwater, as Jon Christensen of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, told me.
“As long as the river doesn’t go over its banks and flood the surrounding neighborhoods, this is the modern LA River doing its job,” Christensen said.
You mean it's job isn't filming car chases for movies?
Atlantic Ocean circulation nearing ‘devastating’ tipping point, study finds
The circulation of the Atlantic Ocean is heading towards a tipping point that is “bad news for the climate system and humanity”, a study has found.
The scientists behind the research said they were shocked at the forecast speed of collapse once the point is reached, although they said it was not yet possible to predict how soon that would happen.
Using computer models and past data, the researchers developed an early warning indicator for the breakdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a vast system of ocean currents that is a key component in global climate regulation.
They found Amoc is already on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the world.
Amoc, which encompasses part of the Gulf Stream and other powerful currents, is a marine conveyer belt that carries heat, carbon and nutrients from the tropics towards the Arctic Circle, where it cools and sinks into the deep ocean. This churning helps to distribute energy around the Earth and modulates the impact of human-caused global heating.
Don't worry, we'll have another climate conference in two years hosted by another oil CEO where thousands of people spew millions of tons of pollution to attend! We have already tried everything except holding corporations accountable, we're out of ideas!
Don't worry, we'll have another climate conference in two years hosted by another oil CEO where thousands of people spew millions of tons of pollution to attend! We have already tried everything except holding corporations accountable, we're out of ideas!
but are you turning the heat down 2 degrees?
Nearly 15% of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, study finds
I was shocked by this headline, but mostly because I thought the number would be much higher.
It's been driven down in the last decade by lived experience.
I bet of those who believe it's real a much higher percentage believe it's not man made or there's nothing we can do about it.
I bet of those who believe it's real a much higher percentage believe it's not man made or there's nothing we can do about it.
And probably an even larger percentage that just don't care since it's not going to truly impact them in their lifetime.
Farmers are in revolt and Europe’s climate policies are crumbling. Welcome to the age of ‘greenlash’
Ursula von der Leyen surrendered to angry farmers last week faster than you could shake a pitchfork or dump a tractor-load of manure outside the European parliament. The European Commission president, expected to announce her candidacy for a second term heading the EU executive next week, told lawmakers that the commission was withdrawing a bill to halve the use of chemical pesticides by 2030 and would hold more consultations instead.
The proposed measure was a key plank in the commission’s European Green Deal and its Farm to Fork strategy, intended to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050, make agriculture more environmentally friendly and preserve biodiversity.
Von der Leyen’s sudden U-turn on one of her signature policies was not just an attempt to defuse a spreading continent-wide rural revolt over rising fuel costs, burdensome environmental regulations, retailers’ price squeezes and cheap imports. It was also a sign of growing panic among the EU’s mainstream parties over the seemingly inexorable rise of far-right nationalists ahead of the June elections.
Von der Leyen, a former German defence minister, is vying to lead the centre-right European People’s party’s campaign for the elections even though she is not herself seeking a European parliament seat. Her coronation at a party congress on 6-7 March as the EPP’s Spitzenkandidaten (lead candidate) to run the commission from 2024 to 2029 is a formality, since there is no other contender. But she has had to water down her green policies to placate a party so spooked by the “greenlash” against net zero legislation that it is rushing to reposition itself as the voice of gradual adaptation at a pace that citizens can accept and afford.
EU leaders tried to take another contentious issue off the table by agreeing in December on a long-stalled migration pact that includes stricter external border controls, faster procedures for processing asylum seekers and expelling those whose applications are rejected, and sharing the burden of the refugee crisis among EU countries. But populists such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, continue to rail against being forced to choose between admitting unwanted migrants and paying for other countries to take them in under the new system.
I have seen unpublished opinion polling conducted for the European parliament in January that showed Eurosceptic, sovereigntist or populist parties have taken the lead in eight of the 27 EU members, and are in second place in four more. Moreover, the countries where the far right is polling most strongly include those with the most seats in the legislature – Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands.
This is getting scary, and events such as the farmers’ furore are playing into the hands of populists such as France’s Marine Le Pen, Germany’s Alice Weidel and Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, who thrive on grassroots grumbling against the metropolitan elites.
“The (pesticides) proposal has become a symbol of polarisation,” von der Leyen admitted to parliament in Strasbourg. “To move forward, more dialogue and a different approach is needed.” She may have been slamming the stable gate after the horse has bolted.
Farmers have traditionally voted for mainstream conservative and Christian Democratic parties, while the socialists and social democrats had their bastions in industrial urban areas. Remember former president Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist farmers’ friend, jovially slapping the hindquarters of cows in his southwestern Corrèze constituency or at the annual Paris agricultural fair. Nowadays, those voters are more likely to vote for Le Pen’s National Rally, recent polls suggest.
In France, the centre-right Republicans, Chirac’s heirs, are polling at barely 8%, while the National Rally stands above 30% in latest surveys, and anti-Islam ideologue Éric Zemmour’s even further right Reconquest! bags another 6-8%. Le Pen’s list is led by the charismatic 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, already an MEP and party president, while Zemmour’s is topped by Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, 34, a favourite of US far-right political strategist Steve Bannon.
In the Netherlands, farmer discontent over curbs on nitrogen emissions led to the sudden rise of the Farmer-Citizen Movement, a party that came from nowhere to win the most votes in regional elections last March. Many of those protest voters have since switched to Wilders’ Freedom party, which topped the poll in a general election in November and has gained more ground since then.
Appeasing rural revolt may stop farmers blockading motorways or burning bales of hay outside government offices, but it is unlikely to herd them back towards the mainstream centre-right, given the depth of their discontent.
Let the grumpy farmers sign an agreement that lifts all environmental restrictions on them, in exchange for zero government assistance when the profitability of their farms is threatened by climate change.
It's way more complicated than that, BadKen. After the loss of 20% of farms between 2010 and 2020, and the imminent retirement of many more farmers than there are workers to replace them, the farmers are facing higher agricultural diesel costs. But the 2018 law that requires agribusinesses to compensate them for higher production costs has been widely ignored, simply not implemented. (The food chain producers are supposed to adjust trade prices and, presumably, raise prices for consumers, but apparently this is not happening, so the farmers lose money, but those further up the chain don't share the pain as they are legally required to.) Also, the Common Agricultural Payment from the EU, which is another tool to offset price increases, was not actually paid last year. So they have legitimate grievances.
The bottom line for me is that it is an argument based on someone's bottom line. And frankly, raising a stink about money, with the looming threat to the species, is... specious. It's the exact same kind of thing that has prevented any momentum whatsoever in the US. Moneyed interests have the government on a leash.
But hey, what do I care, I'll be dead in twenty years. (That is emphatically not how I feel, but I'm super frustrated by this topic recently.)
I expect we're going to start seeing food shortages equivalent to power brownouts in the economies of the world that have mostly been insulated from famines in the modern era.
It will start as temporary enough situations that people will mostly write them off as freak circumstances at first. However, as the frequency and severity of food shortages increase over the next couple decades, food security is going to be come a bigger source of sociopolitical contention everywhere.
Then nationalists can blame filthy immigrants for eating "our" food.
Oh you know that's coming 
Winter heat waves are now a thing. Here’s how to make sense of them.
After last year was the warmest on record, 2024 is already off to a ripping hot start.
January 2024 was the warmest January ever measured, and February is likely to follow.
Many parts of the world are experiencing unprecedented heat — both in the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s summer, and in the Northern Hemisphere, where it’s winter.
The list of countries is varied and far-reaching: Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand, Australia, and Spain have all experienced extreme or record-breaking temperatures in the past few weeks. The US, which experienced a bitter cold snap across much of the country in January, is now setting new highs in the Midwest and the South. Wildfires have ignited in Texas, Colorado, and Nebraska, sending smoke plumes toward the East Coast. There are even wildfires burning underground in Canada that initially erupted during the record-wildfire season last year.
Even the oceans are at never-before-seen temperatures, which portends more danger for corals and could fuel more intense hurricanes.
If the current conditions seem to echo the extreme weather storylines of 2023, that’s because many of the factors behind them remain in place. The world is still in the grips of El Niño, the warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle. El Niño tends to amplify warming around the world, particularly between November and March — and this El Niño is especially strong. The warm ocean water near the equator, which has been about 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the average, also leads to more evaporation and thus more rainfall, energizing the atmospheric rivers that have drenched the West Coast and triggered floods this year.
And underneath it all, humans are continuing to pump heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere at an alarming rate by burning coal, oil, and natural gas, lifting carbon dioxide concentrations up to levels never seen by humans and not experienced on Earth for millions of years.
The warm weather we’re seeing now is directly in line with what scientists expect as the planet heats up, and conditions once seen as extreme will become far more common in the coming decades.
Yeah, I've hit my limit on how many times I can hear people say "oh I love this weather, we need more of this!" every time we're terrifyingly above average temperatures in the winter in the past few years. Anymore, I always respond with "but climate change is a HOAX!!!" in an insultingly sarcastic tone.
Eventually people will learn to making such stupid comments around me. Yes, I'm being insufferable. It's intentional, because I have nearly crippling anxiety about the collapse of our biosphere at times, so people need to f*ck off with their ignorant complacency.
Largest wildfire in Texas history kills thousands of cattle
Thousands of cattle have been killed in a raging Texas blaze, the second largest wildfire in US history.
That fire, which spans over 1.1 million acres, has melted light posts, destroyed homes and left a blackened landscape in its wake.
Two people have been confirmed dead in the blaze, which is only 5% contained.
North Texas residents have been warned the wildfire may worsen over the weekend, fuelled by low humidity and high winds.
Fire weather watches have been issued in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle from Saturday through to midnight on Sunday as firefighters rush to contain the conflagration.
The bulk of the Texas fires - including the massive Smokehouse Creek Fire - are in the Texas Panhandle, the northern region of the state that is home to vast cattle ranches.
The land is not densely populated and millions of cows, calves, steers and bulls are raised in the area.
Thousands of animals are believed to have died, the Texas agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, said on Thursday.
"Just my prediction, but it will be 10,000 that will have died or we'll have to euthanise," he said.
I hope it moves the needle if even just a little.
Somehow I suspect it will devolve into "the solution is more guns" for whatever reason.
I hope it moves the needle if even just a little.
Somehow I suspect it will devolve into "the solution is more guns" for whatever reason.
For the last couple years any large forest fire gets blamed on satellite-based energy weapons by the fringe right, and the claim has been quickly gaining popularity. During the Maui fires even some Fox talking heads were suggesting it. Give it another year or so and I guarantee it’ll be the mainstream conservative explanation for many climate disasters.
I'm sure meat producers will see it as an opportunity to raise prices.
Everything is an opportunity to raise prices.
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