Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20740784

Amid all the bad climate news flowing out of the Trump administration, you might have missed a quiet new consensus congealing in think tanks and big business. The targets set out by the Paris climate agreement, they argue—to limit global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—are a lost cause. It’s time to prepare for a world warmed by at least three degrees Celsius.

Owing to “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a research report last month, they “now expect a 3°C world.” The “baseline” scenario that JP Morgan Chase uses to assess its own transition risk—essentially, the economic impact that decarbonization could have on its high-carbon investments—similarly “assumes that no additional emissions reduction policies are implemented by governments” and that the world could reach “3°C or more of warming” by 2100. The Climate Realism Initiative launched on Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations similarly presumes that the world is likely on track to warm on average by three degrees or more this century. The essay announcing the initiative calls the prospect of reaching net-zero global emissions by 2050 “utterly implausible.”

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Related: Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?

(Previous climate models have underestimated the cooling effect of aerosol pollution and the climate's sensitivity to rising carbon dioxide levels.)

In the summer of 2023, a dozen people willingly walked into a steel chamber at the University of Ottawa designed to test the limits of human survival. Outfitted with heart rate monitors and temperature probes, they waited in temperatures of 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, while the humidity steadily climbed, coating their bodies in sweat and condensation. After several hours, their internal body temperatures began ratcheting upward, as the heat cooked them from the outside in.

“Few people on the planet have actually experienced temperatures like this,” said Robert Meade, a postdoctoral researcher in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who led the study. “Imagine moisture condensing on the skin like a glass of water on a hot day. That’s how hot it was, compared to skin temperature.”

Their experiment tested the body’s ability to cope with extreme heat by exposing participants to temperatures at which they could no longer cool themselves. Their study confirmed that this dangerous threshold is much lower than scientists had previously thought: a so-called wet-bulb temperature, which accounts for heat and humidity, of 26 to 31 degrees C.

https://archive.ph/Lj16Y

Some six million students lost up to two weeks' worth of classroom learning last year as temperatures hit a record 38.8 degrees Celsius (101.4 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the education department.

Schools reported cases of heat exhaustion, nose bleeds and hospitalisations as students struggled through lessons in classrooms without air conditioning.

Scientists say that extreme heat is a clear marker of climate change, caused largely by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Last year's heat was further exacerbated by the seasonal El Nino phenomenon.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20680602

The number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. is increasing. A recent report says FEMA made a disaster declaration somewhere in the U.S. every four days, on average, in 2024

Unmanaged abandonment I guess ?

The memo, shared with The Grocer, warns food businesses are woefully unprepared for challenges including soil degradation, extreme weather events, global heating and water scarcity and that yield, quality and predictability of food supply are all at severe risk.

It goes on to claim that companies’ risk mitigation strategies are being assured by major audit and assurance firms and giving false confidence to investors, whereas the true threat to the supply chain is far greater than companies have acknowledged.

As President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders Tuesday aimed at keeping coal power alive in the United States, he repeatedly blamed his predecessor, Democrats, and environmental regulations for the industry’s dramatic contraction over the past two decades.

But across the country, state and local officials and electric grid operators have been confronting a factor in coal’s demise that is not easily addressed with the stroke of a pen: its cost.

For example, Maryland’s only remaining coal generating station, Talen Energy’s 1.3-gigawatt Brandon Shores plant, will be staying open beyond its previously planned June 1 shutdown, under a deal that regional grid operator PJM brokered earlier this year with the company, state officials, and the Sierra Club.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19706595

2024 climate trends should be a "wake-up call that we are increasing the risks to our lives, economies and to the planet,” said Celeste Saulo

In Egypt alone, the report found that cases have jumped by 609 percent since 2010.

In Central Texas, a bitter fight over a $1 billion water project offers a preview of the future for much of the state as decades of rapid growth push past the local limits of its most vital natural resource.

On one side: Georgetown, the fastest growing city in America for three years straight, which in 2023 signed a contract with an investor-funded enterprise to quickly begin importing vast volumes of water from the Simsboro Formation of the Carrizo Wilcox Aquifer, 80 miles to the east.

On the other side: the cities atop the Simsboro that rely on its water. Bryan, College Station and the Texas A&M University System, a metro area with almost 300,000 people, have sued a local regulator to stop the project. A trial is set for the first week of May.

District manager Alan Day feels for the cities of Bryan and College Station. To an extent, he said, they are right. The more pumping from the aquifer, the sooner everyone will reach conditions of scarcity, though he doesn’t think it will happen as quickly as city leaders say.

At the same time, he said, “Bryan can’t claim the water.” Groundwater is a private property right in Texas as sacred as any other. Everyone is allowed to pump whatever their land produces.

“Water is the new oil,” said Day, a former ranch manager of 27 years. “They have a commodity that can be sold and they have every right to sell it.”

The White House is weighing an executive order that would fast-track permitting for deep-sea mining in international waters and let mining companies bypass a United Nations-backed review process, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the deliberations.

If signed, the order would mark U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to tap international deposits of nickel, copper and other critical minerals used widely across the economy after recent efforts in Greenland and Ukraine. Trump earlier this month also invoked emergency powers to boost domestic minerals production.

The International Seabed Authority - created by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the U.S. has not ratified - has for years been considering standards for deep-sea mining in international waters, although it has yet to formalize them due to unresolved differences over acceptable levels of dust, noise and other factors from the practice.

Trump’s deep-sea mining order is likely to stipulate that the U.S. aims to exercise its rights to extract critical minerals on the ocean’s floor and let miners bypass the ISA and seek permitting through the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s mining code. The plans are under discussion and could change before Trump signs the order, the sources said.

https://archive.ph/5w0z0

More than 1,900 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine signed an open letter warning Americans about the “danger” of the Trump administration’s attacks on science. The letter comes amid the administration’s relentless assault on US scientific institutions which has included threats to private universities, federal grant cancelations and ideological funding reviews, mass government layoffs, resignations and censorship.

“We see real danger in this moment,” the letter states. “We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”

“The administration is slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration,” the letter states. “The funding cuts are forcing institutions to pause research (including studies of new disease treatments), dismiss faculty, and stop enrolling graduate students – the pipeline for the next generation’s scientists.”

The letter continued: “The quest for truth – the mission of science – requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests. The administration is engaging in censorship, destroying this independence. It is using executive orders and financial threats to manipulate which studies are funded or published, how results are reported, and which data and research findings the public can access. The administration is blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yields results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends.”

Scientific institutions have seen major upheaval since the beginning of this Trump administration and there are fears that the cuts are in preparation for privatization.

https://archive.ph/YM3g1

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20327401

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We have all been sucked in by those videos circulating online of “My $200 Shein Haul” or “Everything I bought for less than $5 from TEMU Review”, but who actually are the two new giants on the ultra fast fashion scene?

In a world where it seemed the general consensus had shifted towards more environmental and ethical consumption, how have these two brands established a global network reaching 150 countries worldwide, and what is at stake if they continue to grow unchecked?

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How Are They So Cheap?

• Labour: The general rule is if you are paying an unbelievably low price for a product, the person making it has been paid an unfair wage for their labour. Often this means involvement of forced, child or penal labour and workers are subjected to awful conditions and chemicals. US lawmakers have previously warned of an ‘extremely high risk’ that Temu and Shein were using forced labour – for Shein this would look like as part of their supply chain manufacturing and Temu for offering products on their e-commerce site.

• Materials: Another huge sacrifice Shein and Temu make in a bid to keep prices extremely low yet profits up is with the quality, in particular the materials they use. The low-quality materials used and assemblage of items with little attention to longevity means the products often deteriorate and/or break quickly. But this is good news for Shein and Temu! Throwaway culture is how these platforms thrive, as they rely on our constant need to consume.

• Mode of production: Both Shein and Temy rely on high levels of consumption, to drive high levels of production, with a streamlined mode of production. This requirement for overconsumption is evident in marketing efforts on both brands’ platforms. Users are constantly bombarded with micro-advertisements on social media outlets such as Tiktok and Instagram, and even on their individual apps, there are offers, games and gambling opportunities to keep users addicted to buying.

What Are the real costs?

• Carbon Emissions: It is no secret that the fast fashion industry is one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions, responsible for approximately 10% of all global emissions every year. Global supply chains, manufacturing of textiles, assembling of garments and transportation all add up towards a brands carbon footprint. Shein and Temu, more than ever, prioritize and even encourage throwaway culture (buy, throwing away, buying again) for profit.

• Toxic Chemicals and Pollution: Dying and treating textiles in the fashion industry is a huge contributor to water pollution globally, especially when regulation is poor/poorly enforced by authorities. This affects the quality of water for people locally and also for aquatic life. Furthermore, a recent investigation carried out by authorities in South Korea found carcinogenic substances (promoting the development of cancer) hundreds of times over the legal limit in Shein clothing. Similarly, a European investigation into toys, baby products, electronics and cosmetics sold on Temu that breach European regulation, with one toy tested containing phthalates 240 times above the legal limit. (Phthalates can affect the function of organs and long-term can affect pregnancy, child growth and development and affect reproductive systems in both children and adolescents).

• Excessive Demand for Raw Materials and Textile Waste: The world consumes approximately 80 billion new clothing items every year – that is a lot of new clothes! Brands like Shein and Temu rely on this constant consumption to continue to make a profit, however there is only so much resource on Earth, and everything has to go somewhere. Estimates predict Shein alone produces nearly 200,000 new items each day. One of the ways countries have dealt with ultra fast fashion consumption is by shipping textiles overseas. Ghana receives 150,000 tonnes of used clothes dumped every year, with approximately half of these unusable. The clothing is commonly dumped and burnt, polluting local ecosystems with dangerous industrial chemicals, and damaging freshwater sources for local people. This exportation of textile waste is a new wave of ‘clothing colonization’, in which exponential consumption in the ‘Global North’ flows to the ‘Global South’.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20078756

A new study warns that global declines in soil moisture over the 21st century could mark a “permanent” shift in the world’s water cycle.

related: Animal Agriculture Uses Most of Earth's Freshwater

One of the most extended U.S. flood episodes of recent years is on tap to begin late Wednesday, April 3, and stretch into the following weekend. The NWS Weather Prediction Center has issued four consecutive days of moderate flood risk for Wednesday through early Sunday.

The threat of tornadoes, destructive winds, and damaging hail will peak from Wednesday afternoon, April 2, into early Thursday. Then comes the deluge — perhaps a foot or more of rain, adding up to what could be some of the heaviest three- or four-day totals ever recorded in what is normally a moist region notorious for flooding.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20272919

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Climate models have a history of underestimating the cooling effect of aerosol pollution.

Related: Will Brazil’s President Lula wake up to the climate crisis? (commentary)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20232516

Note that climate models have a history of underestimating the cooling effect of aerosol pollution:

Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? (2025)

More than 3,600 households displaced from their homes alongside the site of an oil pipeline under construction in Uganda have rightfully complained of being inadequately rehoused or compensated, a report published by Haki Defenders Foundation, a Kampala, Uganda-based rights group, and the University of Sheffield in the UK, has found.

The EACOP project is a joint venture between the governments of Uganda and Tanzania with French oil company TotalEnergies, and China National Offshore Oil Corporation.

While the project has been touted by project owners as important for the region’s economy, the Haki Defenders Foundation, led by Executive Director Leah Munokoh, and the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, say the $5 billion project, has raised significant concerns due to community displacement, environmental damage, and human rights violations.

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