Climate

This is a great up to date visualization of the relevant sea surface temperature anomalies and currents to El Nino.

While emissions in the EU have dropped by nearly 40 per cent since 1990, imported emissions represented 35 per cent of the bloc’s carbon footprint in 2023, according to the Traded Emissions Tracker by the European Climate Foundation (ECF)

Foreign minister Shisir Khanal tells the Guardian the world’s biggest economies need to help Nepal, which contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions

The frustration lies in the fact that the architectural solutions are neither speculative nor imported. They are regional, have been tested over centuries, and were largely abandoned during the past 60 years in favor of building types that depend on continuous mechanical cooling. Floor-to-ceiling heights of four to five meters allow warm air to rise well above the occupied zone, reducing mechanical cooling requirements before a single machine is switched on.

But other resiliency changes on which the M.T.A. spent big are not fixing the city’s current threat of heavy rain; the Sandy-era fabric gate for the A-train tunnel has never been used outside of drills, and that kind of technology isn’t very effective at closing subway openings off from quick, shifting cloudbursts. M.T.A. leaders talk often about “multihazards,” how a host of climate horrors will shape the subway. This summer, some of the city’s flash floods occurred after extreme heat or days of wildfire smoke from Canada that hovered uneasily over New York. Those forces test the subway, too. Covering sidewalk vents with heavy mats may keep water out, but should be “temporary,” Wilson says, while people like him work toward more complicated architectural solutions. Covered vents mean less circulation — and more heat.

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Indian Point already possesses something extraordinarily valuable that cannot simply be recreated overnight: an established high-capacity connection to the electric grid in the heart of the Lower Hudson Valley.

archived copy of the article & mdash; has text but not the animation

archived copy of the article

No archive.is link becasue Hearst.

Nigel Farage’s party is welcoming polluting interests and radical pressure groups to its annual gathering.

archived copy of the article

Brown University researchers found that a small amount of testimony from fossil fuel lobbyists opposing polluter pay laws has had greater power than massive public support.

An archived copy should eventually show up here

The condition, linked to heat on a warming planet, is affecting immigrants from Central America and Mexico. As scientists race to track the growing epidemic, its victims have been driven further into the shadows.

archived copy of the article

Duration - 2:44 [a video about Cuba from the news collective Belly Of The Beast]

The paper is here

Archived copy of the article

Security experts are urging the Philippines to use China’s environmental damage in the West Philippine Sea as a basis for international legal action, arguing that Beijing’s environmental claims conflict with the destruction attributed to its maritime activities.

A Queensland open-cut mine will be able to keep digging until 2055 as Anthony Albanese denies tensions with Pacific leaders over fossil fuels

It proposed a new goal of limiting the “overshoot” of rising temperatures and eventually figuring out how to undo the temperature gains, a highly uncertain path.

It’s an example of a compound event, when environmental-related catastrophes overlap or occur in quick succession.

The catastrophic Tibet-Nepal flood, which has left hundreds dead and thousands missing, has drawn renewed attention to the risks of living in mountain regions with glaciers, as all indications suggest that the disaster was triggered by the collapse of one of these ice masses. The phenomenon is known as a GLOF, or glacial lake outburst flood, a sudden flood caused by the breaching of a glacial lake.

The US Defense Department is still the single largest energy user and institutional greenhouse gas emitter in the country. And that is before we account for all the national security related emissions that are counted as emissions in other departments. Indeed, as I show below, there are significant military related emissions that are essentially under or uncounted.

This is an interactive multimedia piece which doesn’t archive well. You need to register and turn on JavaScript to access it.

Is it unreasonable to ask our neighbours to engage in meaningful climate action through a regional legal arrangement?

“The true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment, the size of its income, or even the statistics of its productivity, but the good health of the land,” wrote [Wendell] Berry…in 1977.

archived copy of the article

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The paper is here

…focus on the image at the top of this newsletter, taken by a Chinese mountaineer…that shows the collapse—that’s the stream in the center of the picture that looks like a waterfall. And what I want you to notice is how much ice is still there—to the naked eye it looks like 99% of the glacier remains. And this is just one glacier of perhaps 50,000 across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. My point is: There is infinitely more damage to be done, or to put it another way there is infinitely more damage we might still be able to forestall…

The country is seeking urgent help from a special U.N. climate fund, but the program lacks money because the United States and others have been reluctant to contribute.

“For years we have known that air conditioning protects people from extreme heat, but we could only guess by how much because the available data told us who owned an air conditioner, not who could actually afford to run one,” said Kai Chen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.

Secretive state begins repairs on ageing facilities after being revealed as worst country for leaks of potent greenhouse gas

Archived copy of the article

A Tibetan advocacy group says hundreds of homes were destroyed on the Tibetan side of the border in last week’s deadly floods, raising questions about Beijing’s official account of the scale of the disaster.

Archived

A lot of great pictures, infographics and data visualizations on this one!

Dutch people cycle an average of 2.6 kilometres each per day. If this pattern was replicated worldwide, the study suggests, annual global carbon emissions would drop by 686 million tonnes.

An excerpt:

Title and subtitle come from the article version of this newsletter

A glacier unleashed a deadly flood earlier this week. For local trekking guides and climbers, the mountains were already changing.

Archived copy of the article

Archived copy of the article

Basically, it’s a unique enough kind of event that people don’t have the the pre-peer-reviewed attribution models for it in the way we have for heatwaves and rainfall. So while it seems really obvious what the root cause is, it’s not quite as certain as a lot of other events, where people did the scientific legwork in advance.

When Lorde, Little Simz and Wet Leg stride on to stages in Bristol this weekend, they will not only be entertaining tens of thousands of festivalgoers but taking part in what is being billed as a world-first clean power project.

How a front for fossil fuel is using affordability fears, former Democratic officials, and dubious polling to turn establishment Democrats against the climate left.

In a closed system, deterministic dynamics perfectly retains information about the state of the atmosphere, assumed to be perfectly known at the initial time, suggesting infinite predictability. In reality, incoming solar radiation, however, injects variance with unknown quantum characteristics that act as noise, destroying information first on the smallest scales. Through the upscale propagation of energy, noise eventually affects all parts of the system. When the total energy in the atmosphere is entirely replaced, any predictability as defined above is completely exhausted.

Ghanaian authorities are promising to punish Chinese nationals involved in illegal gold mining as the government tries to reduce the environmental and societal damage being caused by the small-scale mining known as galamsey.

Our findings indicate that Australia is a significant emitter, producing approximately 4487.30 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e). China follows closely with 4251.21 million tonnes CO2e. Brazil and India also contribute notably, with emissions of around 2121.96 million tonnes and 1328.53 million tonnes CO2e, respectively.

Glaciers and permafrost in the Himalayas are melting faster as temperatures rise, though scientists are still studying the exact causes of this week’s landslide.

Borrowing a tactic from the United States, New Zealand will adopt a law authored by industry to give legal immunity for tort claims against fossil fuel producers and big emitters.

Title and subtitle from the article version of this newsletter

Archived copies of the article: * web.archive.org * ghostarchive.org — click ‘continue’

The paper is here