$800,000 tuna to be turned into sushi at Michelin-starred restaurant

The most expensive tuna sold at the first auction in 2024. The "Near Threatened" fish sold for 114.2 million Japanese yen, or nearly $800,000, at Tokyo’s largest fish market and is set to be served at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Japan. The 525-pound fish, caught off of the coast of Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan, fetched the fourth-highest price since records began in 1999. Photo: Kiyoshi Ota / Bloomberg

January 7, 2024

$800,000 tuna to be turned into sushi at Michelin-starred restaurant

By Nathan Rennolds 6 January 2024 (Business Insider) – A bluefin tuna sold for 114.2 million Japanese yen, or nearly $800,000, at Tokyo’s largest fish market is set to be served at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Japan. The 525-pound fish, caught off of the coast of Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan, fetched the fourth-highest price […]

Percentage of documented and undocumented mines, by country. More than half of the global mining areas (56 percent) visible from satellite images have no production information available listed in a global compilation from the S&P Capital IQ Pro database. The total worldwide mining land use for mining in 120,000 km2, with 67,000 km2 undocumented. Graphic: Nature

January 3, 2024

Impacts for half of the world’s mining areas are undocumented – 56 percent of global mining areas visible from satellite images have no production information available

By Victor Maus and Tim T. Werner 3 January 2024 (Nature) – Mining is a crucial industry — from iron and copper to gravel and sand, we depend on it for the basic building blocks of the modern world. It is a fast changing sector, as the clean energy transition and digitalization boost demand for […]

Aerial view of the Donnie Creek wildfire in northeastern British Columbia in May 2023. The massive blaze ripped across more than 1.44 million acres of land throughout the late spring and summer, making it the largest wildfire on record for the Canadian province. Photo: BC Wildfire Service

December 30, 2023

Ten “you must be kidding” weather and climate facts of 2023

By Bob Henson and Jeff Masters 26 December 2023 (Yale Climate Connections) – The drumbeat of record weather and climate phenomena — hottest, wettest, fieriest, fiercest, and so on — can sometimes fade into the background, like the repetitive backdrop to a mournful dirge. Then there are those sharp moments, like a cymbal crash, when […]

Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2021 and trend since 2000, including inventory-based Land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) CO2 in GtCO2e (top) and Per capita GHG emissions in 2021 and trend since 2000, including inventory-based LULUCF CO2 in tCO2e/capita (bottom). Graphic: UNEP

December 29, 2023

Petrostates planning huge expansion of fossil fuels, says UN report – “These plans throw humanity’s future into question. Governments must stop saying one thing and doing another.”

By Damian Carrington 8 November 2023 (The Guardian) – The world’s fossil fuel producers are planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over, a UN report has found. Experts called the plans “insanity” which “throw humanity’s future into question”. The energy plans of the petrostates contradicted their climate policies and pledges, the report said. […]

A map of the world plotted with some of the most significant climate events that occurred during November 2023. Graphic: NOAA/NCEI

December 29, 2023

NOAA reports 2023 hottest year on record, so far – “We will look back at 2023 and think of it as: remember that year that wasn’t so bad?”

By Lauren Sommer 28 December 2023 (NPR) – As 2023 draws to a close, it’s going out on top. “It’s looking virtually certain at this point that 2023 will be the hottest year on record,” says Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit that analyzes climate trends. Though temperature records from December have […]

A church is surrounded by water in a flooded neighborhood in Kherson, Ukraine, following the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka / Associated Press

December 28, 2023

Water increasingly at the center of conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East – “It’s very disturbing that in particular attacks on civilian water infrastructure seem to be on the rise”

By Ian James 28 December 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – Six months ago, an explosion ripped apart Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, unleashing floods that killed 58 people, devastated the landscape along the Dnipro River and cut off water to productive farmland. The destruction of the dam — which Ukrainian officials and the European Parliament blame on Russia, […]

Screenshot of the Human Climate Horizons platform, showing projected sea level rise (cm) in the 2040-2059 time horizon under the intermediate carbon emissions scenario (SSP2-4.5). Australis, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and and the Pacific islands of Oceania are shown. The global average sea level rise is projected to be more than 18 cm. Graphic: UNDP

December 25, 2023

Climate change’s impact on coastal flooding to increase by five times over this century – “The effects of rising sea levels will put at risk decades of human development progress in densely populated coastal zones which are home to one in seven people in the world”

28 November 2023 (UNDP) – According to new data on the Human Climate Horizons platform, a collaboration between the Climate Impact Lab and UNDP, increased coastal flooding this century will put over 70 million people in the path of expanding floodplains. Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, and Small Island Developing […]

U.S. landfill tonnages by waste type, 1960-2018. In 2018, about 146.1 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) were landfilled. Food was the largest component at about 24 percent. Plastics accounted for more than 18 percent, paper and paperboard made up about 12 percent, and rubber, leather and textiles comprised over 11 percent. Other materials accounted for less than 10 percent each. Graphic: EPA

December 25, 2023

I’m appalled by what I learned about recycling. But we can fix it.

By Oliver Franklin-Wallis 29 November 2023 (The New York Times) – It happened again the other night: Washing up after dinner, I went to throw out a packet of just-eaten instant tortellini and was flummoxed. It was plastic, sure. But what kind? There was no resin code or recycling symbol on the package. Nothing on […]

Dilshad Bano, 51, sits on the floor near her house which was damaged after a Glacial Lake Outburst Flooding (GLOF) incident, in Hassanabad village, Pakistan, 9 October 2023 Photo: Akhtar Soomro / REUTERS

December 2, 2023

Mountain villages fight for future as melting glaciers threaten floods – “Until 1978, this whole place was a glacier. The pool of water came later.”

By Charlotte Greenfield 22 November 2023 (Reuters) – On the steep slope of a glacier jutting through the Hunza valley in Pakistan’s mountainous far north, Tariq Jamil measures the ice’s movement and snaps photos. Later, he creates a report that includes data from sensors and another camera installed near the Shisper glacier to update his […]

Global mean surface temperature anomaly, 1970-2023. The average global temperature in 2023 was 1.32°C above that during the pre-industrial baseline period of 1850 to 1900, surpassing the previous record of 1.29°C that was set from October 2015 to September 2016. Data: Climate Central. Graphic: Nature

November 10, 2023

Earth had its hottest year on record in 2023 – “This is the hottest temperature that our planet has experienced in something like 125,000 years”

By Carissa Wong 10 November 2023 (Nature) – The past 12 months were the hottest on record. Some 7.3 billion people worldwide were exposed, for at least 10 days, to temperatures that were heavily influenced by global warming, with one-quarter of people facing dangerous levels of extreme heat over the past 12 months, according to a report […]

Desdemona Despair

Category: Asia