“Where did I go wrong?” The scientist who tried to raise the climate alarm

Climate scientist Dr. Graeme Pearman at his home in Bangholme, Victoria. On warning the world about abrupt climate change, he laments, “I often wonder: where did I go wrong? Why didn’t people respond? Is that my responsibility?” Photo: Nadir Kinani / The Guardian

December 4, 2023

“Where did I go wrong?” The scientist who tried to raise the climate alarm

By Graham Readfearn 20 November 2023 (The Guardian) – “I often wonder: where did I go wrong?” Graeme Pearman says. “Why didn’t people respond? Is that my responsibility?” When Guardian Australia meets him at his home on the outskirts of Melbourne, the veteran climate scientist is frustrated. “If you go through the whole process and […]

Screenshot from “Honest Government Ad: COP31 🇦🇺 & the Pacific”, by The Juice Media, showing the rapid, record-breaking decline of Antarctic sea ice in 2023. Photo: The Juice Media

December 3, 2023

Video: Honest Government Ad: COP31 🇦🇺 and the Pacific – “Let this major fossil-fuel exporter that’s cockblocked climate action for decades co-host a crucial summit with the most climate-vulnerable nations in the world while ignoring their pleas to stop harming them”

1 August 2023 (The Juice Media) – Hello. Bonjour. Ciao stronzi. Namaste. Ham maadarachod hain. I’m from the Australien Government with a message to the world. As cities bake, fires rage, reefs die, jet streams weaken, and 6-Ligma events cause climate scientists to shit their dacks, many are wondering if we’ve finally broken our favourite […]

Map of ensemble mean trends in ocean temperature and ice-shelf basal melting in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) for the Paris 2°C scenario. Temperature is averaged over the depth range 200–700 m. Trends are calculated at each point using annually averaged fields from 2006–2100. White regions indicate no significant trend. The Amundsen Sea region visualized here (latitude–longitude projection) is outlined in red in the inset map of Antarctica (polar stereographic projection). The black dashed line shows the 1,750 m depth contour of the continental shelf break and the blue dashed line outlines the continental shelf region used for analysis. Labels denote ice shelves (G, Getz; D, Dotson; Cr, Crosson; T, Thwaites; P, Pine Island; Co, Cosgrove; A, Abbot). Graphic: Naughten, et al., 2023 / Nature

November 10, 2023

The climate contradiction that will sink us – “We already have a refugee crisis; I shudder to think what would happen if everyone living within two meters of sea level would be displaced.”

By Zoë Schlanger 10 November 2023 (The Atlantic) – You’d be forgiven for thinking that the fight against climate change is finally going well. The clean-energy revolution is well under way and exceeding expectations. Solar is set to become the cheapest form of energy in most places by 2030, and the remarkable efficiency of heat pumps is driving their own uptake […]

The Trinity test fireball, 25 thousandths of a second after its detonation at the Alamogordo bombing range in New Mexico at 5:29 a.m. Mountain time on 16 July 1945. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory

September 10, 2023

The atomic bomb laid down the marker for humanity’s era of catastrophic change – “An observable, unambiguous change in the physical properties or fossil content of the strata”

By Stephen Trimble 3 September 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – Christopher Nolan believes J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. “By unleashing nuclear power,” the film director concludes, “he gave us the power to destroy ourselves.” Nolan might exaggerate, but Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s hit movie, is surely worthy of the […]

Estimated energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2021 and 2050 by sector, in billions of metric tons. Data: IPCC AR6 Scenarios Database hosted by IIASA release 1.0 average / IPCC C3: “Likely below 2°C” scenarios; ExxonMobil analysis. Emissions do not contain industry process emissions or land use and natural sinks Graphic: ExxonMobil

September 3, 2023

ExxonMobil predicts climate efforts will fail – “Fossil fuels remain the most effective way to produce the massive amounts of energy needed to create and support the manufacturing, commercial transportation, and industrial sectors that drive modern economies”

By Maggie Harrison 1 September 2023 (Futurism) – According to Exxon Mobil, oil giant and one of the more prominent architects of our planet’s fossil fuel-laden doom, humanity is likely to fail its climate goals of halting a global temperature rise of two degrees Celsius by 2050. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Exxon published its grim prediction in […]

Smoke from Canadian wildfires enveloped Washington, D.C. in June 2023. Photo: Kenny Holston / The New York Times

August 5, 2023

U.S. Republican energy strategy for 2024 denies climate change, calls for more drilling and less clean energy – “This agenda would be laughable if the consequences of it weren’t so dire”

By Lisa Friedman 4 August 2023 (The New York Times) – During a summer of scorching heat that has broken records and forced Americans to confront the reality of climate change, conservatives are laying the groundwork for future Republican administration that would dismantle efforts to slow global warming. The move is part of a sweeping strategy dubbed […]

Center for Industrial Progress President Alex Epstein speaks at a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing in March 2023. Photo: Francis Chung / POLITICO

July 31, 2023

“It’s called summer”: U.S. Republicans brush off record 2023 heat wave – “Thank God for air conditioning”

By Chris D’Angelo and Igor Bobic 28 July 2023 (Huffington Post) – Unless you’ve been living underground or have a vested interest in turning a blind eye to reality, you know that climate change has sent temperatures soaring to dangerous levels around the planet this summer. Two global climate organizations on Thursday confirmed that July […]

Primary energy global consumption (left) and share of global primary energy by source (right), 2000-2022. Primary energy demand growth slowed in 2022, increasing by 1.1 percent, compared to 5.5 percent in 2021, and taking it to around 3 percent above the 2019 pre-COVID level. Consumption increased in all regions apart from Europe (-3.8 percent) and CIS (-5.8 percent). Renewables’ (excluding hydro) share of primary energy consumption reached 7.5 percent, an increase of nearly 1 percent over the previous year. Fossil fuel consumption as a percentage of primary energy remained steady at 82 percent. Graphic: Energy Institute

July 24, 2023

World energy system struggled in face of geopolitical and environmental crises in 2022 – Coal production reached record high – CO2 emissions reached record level – “We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement”

26 June 2023 (EI) – The Energy Institute (EI) and partners KPMG and Kearney today released the 72nd annual edition of the Statistical Review of World Energy, presenting for the first time full global energy data for 2022. Five key themes emerge from the data EI President Juliet Davenport OBE HonFEI said: “The EI Statistical Review […]

Correlation of significant shifts in or appearances of markers between sites documenting the onset of the Anthropocene. Collectively, the 12 reference sites, via analysis across many sites using similar multiple proxies, show the extent to which the proxies at each site cluster at an approximately coincident level around the mid-20th century, consistent with the Great Acceleration Event Array (GAEA) proposed by Waters et al. (2022). This demonstrates the degree to which the primary marker chosen at a site represents the range of critical changes encompassed by that section. Each site team has identified a level where significant changes cluster, these ranging in age between 1945 and 1968 CE, though for most sites the level chosen dates to the 1950s. Graphic: Waters, et al., 2023 / The Anthropocene Review

July 23, 2023

Canadian lake sediments reveal start of Earth’s Anthropocene epoch – “Clearly, the biology of the planet has changed abruptly. We cannot go back to a Holocene state now.”

By David Stanway 11 July 2023 (Reuters) – Sediment deposited at Crawford Lake, a small but deep body of water in Canada’s Ontario province, provides unmistakable evidence that Earth entered a new human-driven geological chapter – the Anthropocene epoch – some seven decades ago, a team of scientists said on Tuesday. The members of the […]

Graph showing energy generation mix in China in the first four months of both 2019 and 2023. Data: National Bureau of Statistics of China. Graphic: David Stern and Khalid Ahmed

July 23, 2023

China is pumping out carbon emissions in 2023 as if COVID never happened – “China’s new path seems to be less sustainable than before”

By David Stern and Khalid Ahmed 9 July 2023 (The Conversation) – Carbon emissions from China are growing faster now than before COVID-19 struck, data show, dashing hopes the pandemic may have put the world’s most polluting nation on a new emissions trajectory. We compared emissions in China over the first four months of 2019 […]

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Category: fossil fuel