Subjects Archives: Climate Change

New research reveals that rising insurance costs, reckless building, regulatory inaction, and big banks’ fossil fuel investments are driving a dangerous cycle that jeopardizes homeowners—and financial stability for everyone.

What is your morning routine? Wake up, maybe make coffee, tea, or other morning beverage or meal, check the weather.

What new worlds can science fiction imagine? From clean energy to ecological transitions, this newsletter explores how Global South writers and policymakers alike imagine–and create–futures beyond colonialism, pollution, and environmental destruction.

The collective energy demand of data centres in the United States is so high that Microsoft recently reached a deal to reopen Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear accident in American history.

Ocean temperatures were rising at a rate of 0.06 °C per decade, whereas now they are increasing by 0.27 °C every ten years.

UNICEF said the world’s schools and education systems were “largely ill equipped” to deal with the effects of extreme weather.

In January 2024, the World Economic Forum predicted that by 2050 climate change will cause 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in damage.

Game-changing fires destroyed Paradise, California, in 2023, and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2024—clear warnings, if any were still needed, that the climate catastrophe had arrived.

World’s wealthiest 1% have already burned through their share of the entire annual carbon limit, Oxfam warns.

In this excerpt from Mike Davis’s classic book ‘The Ecology of Fear’, he explores the tinderbox of the wealthy “Los Angeles frontiers” and the massive public resources dedicated to keep it from igniting.

Firefighters are being flown in from neighboring states like Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, as local resources have been depleted. This shortage can be directly attributed to recent budget cuts signed by Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, with the Los Angeles Fire Department seeing a $17.6 million reduction, while the police department received a $126 million increase.

How much above this warming target and for how long overshoot persists will determine the likelihood of emergence of dangerous tipping points in the climate system.

Any time we use to debunk the irrational ideological arguments of privileged people in privileged societies is time lost for serious exploration for how to respond to reality.

“This exceptional year of extreme weather shows how dangerous life has already become… and highlights the urgency of moving away from planet-heating fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”

Do not buy the fossil-fuel industry’s hype about carbon-capture technology, even the schemes that work cannot be scaled up to the necessary levels, explains John Clarke.

A fast track effort underway since 2022 aiming to forge a global Treaty to control plastic pollution by regulating all aspects of the life cycle failed at the fifth, and hoped for last, UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee Meeting (INC-5) held in Busan, South Korea, on 25 November – 1 December 2024 under the aegis of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP).

It’s so fitting that just after the 75th anniversary of China’s revolution on Oct. 1, a milestone in China’s efforts to deal with greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) has emerged in the narrative surrounding global warming.

The main issue was how much would the rich countries hand over to the poor countries to pay for the measures to mitigate global warming and handle the damage caused by rising ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions.

There’s a new trend in the world that’s working against the planet, you know, the one you’re standing on.

In a new study, led by the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and published today (18 November) in Nature, an international group of authors who developed the science behind net zero demonstrate that relying on ‘natural carbon sinks’ like forests and oceans to offset ongoing CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use will not actually stop global warming.