Desdemona Despair – Page 42 – Blogging the End of the World™

Climate activist Greta Thunberg of Sweden listens as Vanessa Nakate of Uganda speaks at a press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on 19 January 2023. The activists urged attendees to give less power in the climate-change fight to oil companies. Photo: AP

January 21, 2023

Greta Thunberg: It’s “absurd” to think oil companies causing the climate crisis have a solution to it – “As long as they can get away with it, they will continue to invest in fossil fuels, they will continue to throw people under the bus”

By Rachel Koning Beals 19 January 2023 (MarketWatch) – Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, age 20 and arguably the face of a generation that wants to roll back decades of reliance on oil and gas by means of alternative energy sources, had a message Thursday as she mingled with the corporate and political bigwigs meeting […]

Summary of all global warming projections (nominal scenarios) reported by ExxonMobil scientists in internal documents and peer-reviewed publications (gray lines), superimposed on historically observed temperature change (red). Solid gray lines (and asterisked numerical labels) indicate global warming projections modeled by ExxonMobil scientists themselves; dashed gray lines indicate projections internally reproduced by ExxonMobil scientists from third-party sources. Shades of gray and numerical labels scale with model start dates, from earliest (1977: lightest, “1”) to latest (2003: darkest, “12”). Numerical labels correspond to panels in Fig. 1, which displays all original graphical projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists. Observations reflect the smoothed annual average of five historical time series. Graphic: Supran, et al., 2023 / Science

January 21, 2023

Exxon disputed climate findings for years. Its scientists knew better. “ExxonMobil scientists knew about this problem to a shockingly fine degree as far back as the 1980s, but company spokesmen denied, challenged, and obscured this science.”

By Alice McCarthy 12 January 2023 (The Harvard Gazette) – Projections created internally by ExxonMobil starting in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on climate change were very accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists, according to an analysis published Thursday in Science by a team of Harvard-led researchers. Despite those […]

The sun rises behind a lignite excavator at the Garzweiler lignite coal mine near the village of Luetzerath, Erkelenz, Germany, Tuesday, 10 January 2023. The village of Luetzerath was to be demolished to expand the Garzweiler lignite coal mine near the Dutch border. Photo: Michael Probst / AP Photo

January 10, 2023

German police drag away activists protesting coal mine expansion – “We are peaceful, what are you? We’re here for your children too.”

LUETZERATH, Germany, 10 January 2023 (Reuters) – Police on Tuesday began dismantling barricades and dragged away activists staging a sit-in protest against the expansion of an opencast lignite mine that has highlighted tensions over Germany’s climate policy during an energy crisis. The demonstrators, many wearing masks or balaclavas, have for weeks been protesting against the […]

U.S. billion-dollar climate disaster events, 1980-2022. Storms, floods, wildfires and droughts caused a total of $165 billion in damages in the US last year, $10 billion more than the 2021 total and the third most costly year since records of major losses began in 1980, according to new US government data. With 18 disasters costing at least $1 billion in damages, 2022 was only marginally behind 2020 and 2021 in terms of the number of severe events. A total of 474 people died last year from these major calamities. Graphic: NCEI / NOAA

January 10, 2023

Extreme weather left 474 people dead and cost $165 billion in the U.S. in 2022 – “It does not seem likely that these trends will reverse. Perhaps we need to be more prepared for a future that has rapidly become our present.”

By Oliver Milman 10 January 2023 (The Guardian) – The US endured a particularly painful year as communities wrestled with the growing impacts of the climate crisis, with 18 major disasters wreaking havoc across the country as planet-heating emissions continued to climb. Storms, floods, wildfires and droughts caused a total of $165 billion in damages […]

Yearly change in life expectancy in the U.S. and 30 other countries, 1901-2022. Data: Schöley, et al., 2022. Graphic: Fortune

January 10, 2023

The first global decline in life expectancy since World War II poses a major threat to the economy

By Matthew Heimer and Nicolas Rapp6 December 2022 (Fortune) – COVID’s devastation shows up starkly in life expectancy data: The pandemic’s peak marked the first time since World War II that LE (as demographers call it) declined across the globe. The graphic above is based on a data set that focuses mostly on Europe, but similar […]

Global average surface temperature compared to a preindustrial baseline, 1940-2022. Data: Copernicus / ECMWF. Graphic: The New York Times

January 10, 2023

The last 8 years were the hottest on record – “The rare event now would be to see a really cold year”

By Henry Fountain and Mira Rojanasakul 10 January 2023 (The New York Times) – The world remained firmly in warming’s grip last year, with extreme summer temperatures in Europe, China, and elsewhere contributing to 2022 being the fifth-hottest year on record, European climate researchers said on Tuesday. The eight warmest years on record have now […]

Police officers stand guard as activists protest on 8 January 2023. Protesters oppose the destruction of the hamlet of Luetzerath, Germany for the expansion of the Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine by Germany’s utility RWE. Photo: Thilo Schmuelgen / REUTERS

January 9, 2023

German police prepare to clear climate activists from condemned coal village

9 January 2023 (DPA) – German police will soon move to evict climate activists from a deserted village in the west of the country before its demolition for opencast coal mining, a senior officer said Monday. Energy giant RWE intends to demolish Lützerath in order to mine the area. Residents have left, but climate activists […]

The atmospheric river hitting California on 9 January 2023 simulated by the high-resolution HRRR weather model. Graphic: WeatherBell

January 9, 2023

California’s deadly floods won’t break the megadrought – “We are in the middle of a flood emergency and also in the middle of a drought emergency”

By Neel Dhanesha 6 January 2023 (Vox) – A “river” more than 100 miles wide is gushing through the air high above California, bringing with it heavy rain, winds, and snow. It’s the third in a series of weather systems known as atmospheric rivers — long, heavy columns of water vapor in the sky — to hit the state in the […]

Cyrille Honoré, head of the WMO Disaster Risk Reduction and Public Services Branch. Photo: Stanley Honoré

January 9, 2023

“Brutal” temperature changes are the new normal, says UN meteorological agency – Interview with Cyrille Honoré

6 January 2023 (UN News) – The rapid 10-degree Celsius rise in temperature across large parts of Europe before Christmas was “brutal” but it could be the shape of things to come, the UN Meteorological Organization WMO, said on Friday. In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, Cyrille Honoré, head of the UN agency’s […]

Regional glacier mass change and contributions to sea level rise from 2015 to 2100. Discs show global and regional projections of glacier mass remaining by 2100 relative to 2015 for global mean temperature change scenarios. Discs are scaled based on each region’s contribution to global mean sea level rise from 2015 to 2100 for the +2°C scenario by 2100 relative to preindustrial levels, and nested rings are colored by temperature change scenarios showing normalized mass remaining in 2100. Regional sea level rise contributions >1 mm SLE for the +2°C scenario are printed in the center of each disc. The horizontal bars below each disc show time series of area-averaged annual mass balance from 2015 to 2100 for +1.5°C (top bar) and +3°C (bottom bar) scenarios. The colorbar is saturated at −2.5 m w.e., but minimum annual values reach −4.2 m w.e. in Scandinavia. Graphic: Rounce, et al., 2022 / Science

January 7, 2023

Half of glaciers will be gone by 2100 even under Paris 1.5C accord, study finds

By Phoebe Weston 5 January 2023 (The Guardian) – Half the planet’s glaciers will have melted by 2100 even if humanity sticks to goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, according to research that finds the scale and impacts of glacial loss are greater than previously thought. At least half of that loss will happen […]