Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

UN GEO report says ending this harm key to global transformation required ‘before collapse becomes inevitable’

During the last global coral bleaching event in 2023 and 2024 , the Great Barrier Reef experienced the highest temperatures for centuries and widespread bleaching. With bleaching events becoming more frequent, the very existence of coral reefs is under threat.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/environment/p/1554071/its-two-years-since-we-were-told-the-age-of-fossil-fuels-will-end-when-will-australia-g

A recent report by Oil Change International found Australia led the world in expanding its oil and gas industries between 2015 and 2024, increasing production by 77%.

On coal, Australia is shipping more of the thermal stuff than it was a decade ago. And the Albanese government has approved at least 32 fossil fuel developments and expansions since its election in 2022, overwhelmingly for export

#Vote Green

Climate change will make the world “much nastier place”

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/51255216

A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.

The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012.

“This is absolutely the wrong place to be digging for gold,” says Amanda Hurowitz, who coordinates the forest commodities team at Mighty Earth, a conservation nonprofit monitoring developments at the open-pit mine. “And for what? So mountains of gold bullion bars can sit in the vaults of the world’s richest countries.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46910935

Archived

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China’s dominance in the renewable energy supply chain—especially in rare earth minerals, copper and lithium processing—has led to massive industrial expansion in Tibet. While promoted internationally as sustainable climate action, many projects have instead resulted in water contamination, ecosystem collapse, cultural displacement, and intensified political repression.

“Under the guise of green energy development, Tibet is being reshaped to fuel China’s economic and geopolitical ambitions,” said Tempa Gyaltsen Zamlha, Deputy Director of the Tibet Policy Institute, in his welcome address. “These mines and mega-dams are marketed as climate-friendly, but they have devastated Tibet’s rivers, grasslands, wildlife habitats, and traditional communities.”

The Tibetan Plateau, often called the Third Pole, contains the world’s largest reserve of freshwater outside the polar regions. Its rivers support nearly 1.9 billion people across Asia. Yet, scientists have warned that the plateau is warming at nearly twice the global average, accelerating glacial melt and causing irreversible environmental instability.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54616699

Paul Beckwith shows off the very cool Climate Trace tool and explains why it is such an awesome source of emissions data. Not a totally new tool or anything, but I think this video is a great reminder the tool exists and is friendly introduction to a powerful tool for exploring the data around global emissions to see for yourself what the numbers actually show on these things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMJS1PWP4Aw

https://climatetrace.org/

Climate crisis and overfishing contributed to loss of 95% of penguins in two breeding colonies in South Africa, research finds

Right now, an estimated 130 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the air, water, soil, and human bodies every year. By 2040, that number will jump to 280 million metric tons—about a garbage truck’s worth every second, according to a new report from The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Archaeologists find evidence that a wave of mass brutality accompanied the collapse of the first pan-European culture 

As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine, and the risk of mass displacement, the World Meteorological Organization warned Thursday.

The 22 Arab region countries covered in the WMO’s new State of the Climate report produce about a quarter of the world’s oil

“The risk doesn’t go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability,” Eby said. “Families discover after a flood that they should have purchased flood insurance, or discover after the sale that wildfire insurance is unaffordable or unavailable in their area.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54187689

Back in April, scientists read the tea leaves — or, more accurately, heaps of data — and predicted an above-average hurricane season over the summer and autumn, with nine or 10 named storms, four of which could grow to major strength. Yet hurricane season ended Sunday without even one of them making landfall in the United States for the first time in a decade. That was extraordinary in a good way, but the season was also extraordinary in many bad ways.

So how did the U.S., which was walloped by Hurricane Helene and four other tropical cyclones last year, escape disaster even as the Caribbean suffered mightily from Melissa in September?

First off, forecasters could make those predictions in April by considering a few factors. Hurricanes are atmospheric engines fueled by warm water, and the Atlantic Ocean has been downright hot of late, meaning more juice for bigger storms. “The main consideration going into the season was just very, very warm ocean temperatures, either record-breaking in parts, or close to record-breaking,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane scientist at the University of Miami.

Forecasters also considered the way that the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America switches between anomalously warm (El Niño) and cold (La Niña) cycles, or remains neutral, as was the case this hurricane season. An El Niño pattern usually reduces hurricane activity by creating vertical wind shear over the Atlantic, which prevents the storms from spinning up, while La Niña encourages them by reducing those winds.

But as hurricane season unfolded, nature dealt a wild card. High in the atmosphere, air currents blow in something called a jet stream, which has waves in it. The part of the wave that humps up is called a ridge, and it is associated with more benign weather. The part that dips down south is called a trough, which is associated with stormy weather.

In August, September, and October — when hurricane season is really ramping up, because oceans are warming throughout the summer — there was less of a ridge than normal around the southeastern U.S. In fact, it looked more like a trough. That created counterclockwise motion in the winds in the mid-level of the atmosphere, where hurricanes are spinning. This, in turn, acted as a kind of force field that pushed hurricanes away from the mainland and back out to sea. “As they approached the East Coast, we had this anomalous influence this hurricane season, where they were more or less steered to the north by that anomalous trough,” McNoldy said.

The island nations of the Caribbean, however, were not so lucky. Hurricane Melissa killed at least 45 people in Jamaica, before marching across Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. As it moved slowly across the Atlantic, it fed on warm waters made up to 900 times more likely by climate change, increasing its wind speeds by 10 mph (which might not sound like much, but increases the potential damages exponentially.) In addition, a hurricane is such a powerful force that it churns the sea, bringing colder waters to the surface, which would normally reduce the amount of fuel. But the region that Melissa was traveling across was also anonymously warm at greater depths, so what the storm dragged to the surface still supercharged it.

Read NextAfter Hurricane Melissa, Jamaica’s climate resilience plan faces its biggest test yetRebecca Egan McCarthy

All this fuel helped the storm rapidly intensify, defined as an increase in maximum sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in a day. In fact, Melissa underwent a phenomenon called extreme rapid intensification, doubling from 70 to 140 mph in just 18 hours. Topping out at 185 mph, it’s tied for the second most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record, and tied for first place for the strongest when making landfall.

This is where the 2025 hurricane season gets exceptional. While only five Atlantic hurricanes formed — half the number predicted — four of those, including Melissa, reached major strength. (The average number of named hurricanes in a season is seven.) That means 80 percent of the storms managed that feat this year, compared to the average of 40 percent. So while this was the first year since 2015 that a hurricane didn’t make landfall in the U.S., it’s only the second year in recorded history to have produced three or more Category 5 storms.

This is the worrying signal of climate change: The hotter the oceans get, the more fuel to supercharge storms. Yes, in some years that atmospheric force field might help the U.S. dodge landfall, but the hurricanes that do make it ashore will only get more powerful and more destructive from here.

The dust blowing from the dry bed of the Great Salt Lake is creating a serious public health threat that policymakers and the scientific community are not taking seriously enough, two environmental nonprofits warn in a recent report.

The Great Salt Lake hit a record-low elevation in 2022 and teetered on the brink of ecological collapse. It put millions of migrating birds at risk, along with multimillion-dollar lake-based industries such as brine shrimp harvesting, mineral extraction, and tourism. The lake only recovered after a few winters with above-average snowfall, but it sits dangerously close to sinking to another record-breaking low.

Around 800 square miles of lake bed sit exposed, baking and eroding into a massive threat to public health. Dust storms large and small have become a regular occurrence on the Wasatch Front, the urban region where most Utahns live.

The report from the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and the Utah Rivers Council argues that Utah’s “baby steps” approach to address the dust fall short of what’s needed to avert a long-term public health crisis. Failing to address those concerns, they say, could saddle the state with billions of dollars in cleanup costs. “We should not wait until we have all the data before we act,” said Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, in an interview. “The overall message of this report is that the health hazard so far has been under-analyzed by the scientific community.”

After reviewing the report, however, two scientists who regularly study the Great Salt Lake argued the nonprofits’ findings rely on assumptions and not documented evidence.

The report warns that while much of the dust discussion and new state-funded dust monitoring network focus on coarse particulates, called PM10, Utahns should also be concerned about tiny particulates 0.1 microns or smaller called “ultrafines.” The near-invisible pollutants can penetrate a person’s lungs, bloodstream, placenta, and brain.

The lake’s dust could also carry toxins like heavy metals, pesticides and PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” Moench cautioned, because of the region’s history of mining, agriculture, and manufacturing.

“Great Salt Lake dust is more toxic than other sources of Great Basin dust,” Moench said. “It’s almost certain that virtually everyone living on the Wasatch Front has contamination of all their critical organs with microscopic pollution particles.”

If the lake persists at its record-low elevation of 4,188 feet above sea level, the report found, dust mitigation could cost between $3.4 billion and $11 billion over 20 years depending on the methods used.

The nonprofits looked to Owens Lake in California to develop their estimates. Officials there used a variety of methods to control dust blowing from the dried-up lake, like planting vegetation, piping water for shallow flooding, and dumping loads of gravel.

Dust blows over the Great Salt Lake on May 12. Trent Nelson / The Salt Lake Tribune

The Great Salt Lake needs to rise to 4,198 feet to reach a minimum healthy elevation, according to state resource managers. It currently sits at 4,191.3 feet in the south arm and 4,190.8 feet in the north arm.

The lake’s decline is almost entirely human-caused, as cities, farmers, and industries siphon away water from its tributary rivers. Climate change is also fueling the problem by taking a toll on Utah’s snowpack and streams. Warmer summers also accelerate the lake’s rate of evaporation.

The two nonprofits behind the report, Utah Physicians and the Utah Rivers Council, pushed back at recent solutions for cleaning up the toxic dust offered up by policymakers and researchers. Their report panned a proposal by the state’s Speaker of the House, Mike Schultz, a Republican, to build berms around dust hot spots so salty water can rebuild a protective crust. It also knocked a proposal to tap groundwater deep beneath the lake bed and use it to help keep the playa wet.

“Costly engineered stopgaps like these appear to be the foundation of the state’s short-sighted leadership on the Great Salt Lake,” the groups wrote in their report, “which could trigger a serious exodus out of Utah among wealthier households and younger populations.”

Bill Johnson, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah who led research on the aquifer below the lake, said he agreed with the report’s primary message that refilling the Great Salt Lake should be the state’s priority, rather than managing it as a long-term and expensive source of pollution.

Bill Johnson’s University of Utah graduate students haul their equipment out onto the playa of the Great Salt Lake in June. Rick Egan / The Salt Lake Tribune

“We don’t want this to become just about dust management, and we forget about the lake,” Johnson said. “I don’t think anybody’s proposing that at this point.”

It took decades of unsustainable water consumption for the Great Salt Lake to shrink to its current state, Johnson noted, and it will likely take decades for it to refill.

Kevin Perry, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah and one of the top researchers studying the Great Salt Lake’s dust, said Utah Physicians and Utah Rivers Council asked him to provide feedback on their report in the spring.

“It’s a much more balanced version of the document than what I saw last March,” he said of the report. “It’s still alarmist.”

Perry agreed with the report’s findings that many unknowns linger about what the lake bed dust contains, and what Utahns are potentially inhaling when it becomes airborne. He said he remains skeptical that ultrafine particulates are a concern with lake bed dust. Those pollutants are typically formed through high-heat combustion sources like diesel engines.

“In the report, they just threw it all at the wall and said it has to be there,” Perry said. “I kept trying to encourage them to limit their discussion to the things we have actually documented.”

The report’s chapter outlining cost estimates for dust mitigation, however, largely aligned with Perry’s own research. Fighting back dust over the long term comes with an astronomical price tag, he said, along with the risk of leaving permanent scars from gravel beds or irrigation lines on the landscape.

“Yes, we can mitigate the dust using engineered solutions,” Perry said, “but we really don’t want to go down that path if we don’t have to.”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30709087

German scientists warn global warming is accelerating faster than expected, raising the risk of a 3 °C rise by 2050 and forcing Europe to confront unthinkable adaptation plans.

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

Unpaywalled (Web archive)

The strange number lighting up Tawanda Majoni’s phone again and again felt like a warning.

Majoni, one of the Zimbabwe’s most respected journalists, soon learned where the calls were coming from: a federal police unit called Law and Order, notorious for abductions, torture and killings.

When unmarked cars rolled through his neighborhood after a relative was pressed for his location, Majoni packed a bag, tossed his cell phone’s SIM card so he couldn’t be tracked and fled the city, haunted by memories of slain colleagues. One was hurled from a moving vehicle in broad daylight. Another was beaten to death.

He knew he couldn’t run forever. After two weeks, he returned and answered one of the calls. An officer told him to come in: We have a case related to you.

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A few days later, Majoni sat in a small, airless room at Law and Order offices, his lawyer ordered to wait outside. For three hours, officers grilled Majoni about his work, at one point sliding a printout across the desk—a tweet about a speech he’d given on World Press Freedom Day. They accused him of “inciting rebellion,” a treasonous offense.

The questioning made no sense until Majoni noticed a file on the desk: his photograph on top, and beneath it, text written in Mandarin Chinese.

He didn’t need to ask. His newsroom, the Information for Development Trust, had recently published exposes on Chinese mining projects that left open waste pits, poisoned rivers and displaced communities. “I know what this is about,” Majoni said.

The lead officer smiled, then pressed on about the tweet. Majoni walked free that day but stopped writing his weekly column. Later, he said, trusted police contacts confirmed what he already suspected: Chinese investors had been behind the interrogation.

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The Chinese government’s repression of journalists at home is well known. Less visible is how that machinery now reaches far beyond its borders—and what that means for the environment.

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An Inside Climate News investigation has identified more than a dozen journalists who have faced retaliation for reporting on environmental destruction and human rights abuses tied to China’s ventures in African countries, likely a stark undercount. Many of those cases involve projects under Beijing’s $1.3 trillion Belt and Road Initiative, a massive investment effort into mines, ports, railways, pipelines and other infrastructure in mostly poor countries.

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When a project carries political weight for both the Chinese government and local authorities, that’s often when repression happens, according to Sarah Cook, author of the UnderReported China newsletter who has studied the country’s media influence operations for more than 15 years.

“If there are muckraking journalists or whistleblowers who might expose environmental issues, it could potentially be in the interest of both the local actors and the Chinese-linked ones to put a stop to that,” Cook said.

That suppression hides or sanitizes environmental and human rights abuses, even as Chinese President Xi Jinping promotes the Belt and Road Initiative as a model of “green” development and positions China as a global climate leader.

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China’s media influence campaign targets a continent crucial to the planet’s climate and ecological balance. Africa is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, vast carbon-rich peatlands and a quarter of all mammal species, including endangered mountain gorillas, pangolins and chimpanzees. Its degradation threatens not only 1.5 billion Africans, but also Earth itself.

Polluting companies from other nations have been linked to attacks on journalists, too. But China’s role is distinct.

“We’re talking about a nation that is not only highly repressive but also the second-largest economy globally,” said Cook, who worked for years for Freedom House, which defends civil liberties around the globe. “This creates an unprecedented situation.”

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Censorship is only half the story. Journalists across the Global South are regularly flown to China on all-expense-paid trips that function like indoctrination, according to some participants. Chinese officials have also showered underfunded news organizations in other countries with investments and gifts—from computers to cell phones—and later exerted influence to spike stories and promote flattering coverage, journalists and government officials interviewed for this article said.

“The Chinese are very good with disseminating their agenda,” said Leo Mutisya, manager of press freedom and advocacy at the Media Council of Kenya, an independent government institution tasked with protecting media independence.

Mutisya pointed to the reach of Chinese state media in Kenya, their sprawling Nairobi offices and their cozy ties with the Kenya Broadcasting Corp., which gives a regular slot to one Chinese network and a radio frequency to another. (The Kenya Broadcasting Corp. did not respond to requests for comment.) Chinese officials also organize private lunches and parties with Kenyan journalists and editors, Mutisya added, and sponsor the country’s annual journalism awards—handing out Huawei smartphones to winners.

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China has cast its overseas mining and other ventures not as a new form of imperialism but as “win-win” partnerships among nations of the Global South—countries, it says, long oppressed by Western exploitation. The message resonates in places like Zimbabwe, where resentment of Western interference runs deep and memories of colonial horrors remain vivid.

After winning independence from Britain in 1980, freedom fighter Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe as a symbol of unity and liberation. But by the late 1990s, his rule had hardened into autocracy—marked by election rigging, repression and state violence. Western nations responded with sweeping sanctions, in part over human rights abuses but also over Zimbabwe’s efforts to redress deep land inequities left by racist colonial rule.

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Beijing’s lending to Zimbabwe has come free from Western pressure to improve democracy and human rights—a hallmark of what Beijing calls its “noninterference” policy.

But that principle, said Richardson, who is also co-executive director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, is “nothing more than words on paper.”

“The Chinese government interferes left, right and center,” Richardson said, adding that Beijing spends “massive amounts of time and money and effort on putting forward and protecting a very particular image of what it is.”

Environmental reporters and researchers across Africa described how that influence plays out in the media.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46173745

Archived

For evidence of China’s prominence at the United Nations climate summit in Brazil, look no further than the convention hall, where China boasts one of the largest pavilions, prominently located in the center next to the host country.

Before a fire tore through part of the Pavilion Hall on Thursday, throngs converged daily at China’s exhibition area to pick up panda-themed tote bags, listen to energy experts and admire displays of China’s global investments in clean energy.

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But behind closed doors in the negotiating rooms at the U.N. summit, where nations are wrestling with how to move away from fossil fuels, China has been mostly quiet.

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Analysts said China was showing little interest in taking up the mantle of global climate leader.

“It is frustrating,” said Natalie Unterstell, the president of Talanoa, a Brazilian climate research organization. “We would like to see a high-ambition China.”

One reason appears to be self-interest.

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In the real world, the Chinese have provided billions of dollars in loans and grants to poorer countries to help them deal with climate change and to transition to renewable energy. But its delegation at Belém objects to any language that might result in the United Nations requiring, or even asking, it to provide such aid.

When it comes to the most contentious issue in Belém, whether nations will enact a so-called road map for transitioning away from fossil fuels, China has been quiet, diplomats said.

Even though China is currently the planet’s biggest polluter, it “has a strongly-held view that climate change is a problem caused by developed countries, and that they should lead the way,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, a vice president at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a nonprofit group that is following the negotiations in Belém.

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China’s own plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions has been criticized as insufficient. The European Union climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, called it “disappointing,” and former Biden administration officials in Belém said it did not do nearly enough to limit dangerous warming.

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China’s top issue in Belém has less to do with leading other nations and more with its own economic interests.

Specifically, China wants to eliminate European and other tariffs it sees as a barrier to selling its solar panels, electric vehicles and other exports to global markets. And, it has argued here that if countries are serious about more quickly bringing down emissions, they should make it easier for China to sell its green products.

“From a soft power perspective I don’t believe China has been ready to play a larger role or even to replace the vacuum left by the U.S.,” said Zou Ji, president of Energy Foundation China, an organization that works with the Chinese government on climate change issues, and a former member of China’s climate negotiating team.

Instead, he said, it is leading by selling solar panels, EVs and batteries cheaper ... than the rest of the world.

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The world bet on collective but voluntary action to keep global warming at a safe level.