Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The first responsibility of a government is to safeguard the people and their future wellbeing. The ability to do so is increasingly threatened by human-induced climate change, the accelerating impacts of which are driving political instability and conflict globally. Climate change poses an existential risk to humanity which, unless addressed as an emergency, will have catastrophic consequences.
The paper “Mitigation implications of an ice-free summer in the Arctic Ocean”[4] provides estimates for the effect of an ice-free Arctic in the month of September in 2050 and 2040. As the paper comments, the possibility of an early loss in arctic sea ice has not been included in any of the Integrated Assessment Models used to assess the societal impacts of climate change.
Your body makes itself from the matter around you. What you eat, drink, inhale, touch, and experience literally becomes you. You are your environment, and it is you. Releasing toxic substances into the environment means injecting them into bodies, human and non-human. The climate system connects everyone’s environments.
We face a profoundly uncertain future, but all we really need for the road ahead is our moral compass and our deep and abiding love. I am asking you—I am begging you—to think about what that means to you, and what you can do rise to the challenge. My life, and your life, and all the life around us—they’re worth fighting for.
Households in the south-west of England are some of the most carbon intensive in Europe, a new study shows. The paper, published this month in the journal Environmental Research Letters, is the first to break down the embodied greenhouse gas emissions from household consumption across the EU.
This book explores a lot of territory. It discusses climate science, climate policy, and aquifer depletion — as well as mythology, meditation, and beekeeping. These and other topics herein have been written about in greater detail elsewhere. There are entire volumes devoted to backyard chickens. So why mention them here, in a book with “climate” in its title?
Billions of people across the world could see climates they’ve never experienced before by the middle of the century, a new study says. Using a measure of climate ‘familiarity,” the researchers show that the tropics in particular are likely to experience conditions that are virtually unheard of for the region in the present climate.
More importantly, the days spent on crossing by sail put nothing into the atmosphere except the breath of the sailors. Today’s commercial passenger fleet is responsible for 3 to 5 percent of climate forcing, on its way to 15 percent according to some IPCC projections. Clearly it is going in the wrong direction.
“How can we reconcile our desire to save the planet from the worst effects of climate change with our dependence on the systems that cause it? How can we demand that industry and governments reduce their pollution, when ultimately we are the ones buying the polluting products and contributing to the emissions that harm our shared biosphere?”
Proponents call them oil sands while opponents call them tar sands. Whatever they’re called, Alberta’s bitumen reserves are so massive, James Hansen warns that it could be game over for the world’s climate if all are extracted and burned.
There is no insurance policy that will protect us against catastrophic climate change. We cannot get our habitable climate back on any time scale that matters to humans once it’s gone. The insurance policy is us, that is, changes in our behavior and our technology done quickly enough to matter. There is no other hedge that will help us.
Black carbon is a product of incomplete combustion from forest fires and the burning of both wood and fossil fuels, and its influence on the Arctic is like the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.
