climate change – Page 16 – Desdemona Despair

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore speaks during an interview with Reuters at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 3 December 2023. Photo: Amr Alfliky / REUTERS

December 3, 2023

Al Gore slams COP28 climate summit host UAE, says its emissions soared – “He should not be taken seriously. He’s protecting his profits and placing them in a higher priority than the survival of the human civilization”

By Valerie Volcovici 3 December 2023 DUBAI (Reuters) – Climate advocate and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Sunday slammed the UAE – host of the COP28 climate summit – saying its position as overseer of international negotiations on global warming this year was an abuse of public trust. The comments, made to Reuters […]

Churchgoers leave Sunday morning service in Kioa, Fiji. Photo: Andrew Quilty / The Guardian

December 3, 2023

Australia offers refuge to Tuvaluans as rising sea levels threaten Pacific archipelago – “We are sinking, but so is everyone else”

By Pauline Rouquette 11 November 2023 (France24) – Canberra announced on Friday that it is offering climate refuge to Tuvaluans, unveiling the terms of a pact that would enable citizens of the 26-square kilometre archipelago – the fourth smallest state in the world – to move to Australia to “live, study and work”. Located near […]

Taylor Swift fans wait for the doors of Nilton Santos Olympic stadium to open for her Eras Tour concert amid a heat wave in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, 18 November 2023. A 23-year-old Taylor Swift fan died at the singer’s Eras Tour concert in Rio de Janeiro Friday night, according to a statement from the show’s organizers in Brazil. Photo: Silvia Izquierdo / AP Photo

December 3, 2023

Brazil hits hottest temperature ever recorded during searing spring heat wave – “I can’t even get up because I’m so tired. It’s even hard to sleep.”

By Rebecca Falconer 22 November 2023 (Axios) – Brazil has sweltered through its hottest day since record-keeping began, as an extreme spring heat wave envelopes the country. By the numbers: The town of Araçuaí, in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, beat the nation’s previous record from November 2005 on Sunday when the temperature reached 44.8°C (112.6°F), per […]

An Ogiek home in Kenya’s Mau Forest that has been set on fire to illegally evict hunter-gatherers from their ancestral lands to profit from carbon offsetting schemes. Photo: OPDP / BBC

December 3, 2023

Kenya’s Ogiek people being evicted for carbon credits – “The Ogiek are on the front line of a false climate solution that is used to justify ongoing evictions and emissions”

By Claire Marshall 9 November 2023 (BBC News) – Kenya’s government is illegally evicting hunter-gatherers from their ancestral lands to profit from carbon offsetting schemes, human rights lawyers say. Hundreds of members of the Ogiek community are being evicted from the Mau Forest, say their representatives. Ogiek leader Daniel Kobei said armed forest rangers were […]

Sultan al-Jaber speaks during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai. Photo: Amr Alfiky / Reuters

December 3, 2023

COP28 president says there is “no science” behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels – UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber says phase-out of coal, oil, and gas would take world “back into caves”

By Damian Carrington and Ben Stockton 3 December 2023 (The Guardian) – The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal. Al Jaber also said a phase-out […]

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 […]

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 […]

Annual hot-hours under (A) 1.5, (B) 2, (C) 3, and (D) 4 °C of warming relative to preindustrial level, (E) population projection in 2050 following the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2, and (F) population subject to accumulated duration of 1 wk to 3 mo of uncompensable heat stress annually under 1–4 °C of global warming (the shaded area corresponds to the 10th to 90th percentiles of CMIP6 model spread). Rectangles in panel a delineate regions where heat exposure increases with global warming are particularly large and will be examined in detail in later sections. Graphic: Vecellio, et al., 2023 / PNAS

October 31, 2023

Climate-driven extreme heat may make parts of Earth too hot for humans – “If temperatures continue to rise, we will live in a world where crops are failing and millions or billions of people are trying to migrate because their native regions are uninhabitable”

By Aaron Wagner 9 October 2023 UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (PennState) – If global temperatures increase by 1 degree Celsius (C) or more than current levels, each year billions of people will be exposed to heat and humidity so extreme they will be unable to naturally cool themselves, according to interdisciplinary research from the Penn State […]

Flood waters ripple through an orchard of dead and dying pistachio trees in Tulare Lake. Photo: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

October 30, 2023

Heat, drought, floods, bad air: Will California’s Central Valley survive climate change? “It’s almost like the forecast for the middle, late century – we’re seeing it right now”

By Hayley Smith 25 October 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – One March morning in the small Central Valley town of Woodlake, Joshua Diaz was getting out of bed when he noticed that his carpet was bubbling and that his tile floor had grown slick. He tried to open his front door but felt pressure and […]