73
   

Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

 
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Fri 27 Jun, 2025 03:15 am
A third of Pacific island nation applies for Australian climate change visa
hingehead
 
  1  
Reply Fri 27 Jun, 2025 04:33 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Just FTR - Tuvalu's population is about 9,000. Their islands are expected to be uninhabitable within 50 years due to rising seas. I wonder how Niue is doing (their population is under 2,000)
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2025 09:22 am
Tracking sea ice is ‘early warning system’ for global heating - but US halt to data sharing will make it harder, scientists warn

News comes as research finds record lows of Antarctic sea ice had seen more icebergs splintering off ice shelves.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2025 01:39 pm
The US government website that hosted the federal government’s national climate reports, which are mandated by legislation, went offline this afternoon. The website was also one of the main federal sources of information on climate change.
hingehead
 
  1  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2025 08:16 pm
@Walter Hinteler,
Can't call bullshit without replicable, reliable data - which is the whole point.

Tracking sea ice is ‘early warning system’ for global heating – but the US is halting data sharing
Source
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Jul, 2025 03:58 am
Climate change is threatening the habitat of vanilla plants and could jeopardise global vanilla production in the long term. As researchers from the Belgian University of Leuven and the University of Costa Rica report in the journal ‘Frontiers in Plant Science’, climate extremes are likely to cause the habitats of wild vanilla species and their mostly animal pollinators to shrink increasingly.

Wild Vanilla and pollinators at risk of spatial mismatch in a changing climate
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Sat 12 Jul, 2025 12:56 am
@Walter Hinteler,
The Rhine river could warm by more than 4 degrees by the end of the century. This is based on model calculations. The consequences for the ecology and economy are already being felt and could intensify.

Researchers have simulated the development of the water temperature and carried out model calculations. They expect the water in the Rhine to warm by between 1.1 and 1.8 degrees by the middle of the century. ‘By 2100, the average annual water temperature could even warm by 2.9 to 4.2 degrees - compared to the period 1990 to 2010, which was used as a reference for all calculations.’

Climate change on the Rhine: water temperature expected to rise by up to 4.2 °C by the end of the century
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Sun 20 Jul, 2025 05:30 am
The increasing warming of the oceans due to climate change is disrupting the love life of an endangered shark species. When water temperatures are unusually high, female angel sharks avoid their traditional mating grounds - with potentially dramatic consequences for the survival of the shark species.
This was discovered by an international research team that observed the animals over five years and has now reported on their findings in the scientific journal ‘Global Change Biology’.

Rapid Ocean Warming Drives Sexually Divergent Habitat Use in a Threatened Predatory Marine Ectotherm
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  1  
Reply Tue 22 Jul, 2025 04:08 am
Clearing Gaza rubble could yield 90,000 tonnes of planet-heating emissions

Processing debris from Israel’s destruction of homes, schools and hospitals could take four decades

Quote:
Millions of tonnes of rubble left by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza could generate more than 90,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – and take as long as four decades to remove and process, a study has found.

Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes, schools and hospitals in Gaza generated at least 39m tonnes of concrete debris between October 2023 and December 2024, which will require at least 2.1m dump trucks driving 18m miles (29.5m km) to transport to disposal sites, researchers said.

Just clearing the rubble is on par with driving 737 times the Earth’s circumference, and would generate almost 66,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), according to researchers at the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, who used evolving open-source tools in remote sensing to detect and analyse conflict-related emissions.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, is part of a growing movement to account for the climate and environmental costs of war and occupation, including the long-term damage to land, food and water sources, as well as post-conflict cleanup and reconstruction.

It is the most detailed examination so far of the carbon and logistical toll of dealing with debris – which in Gaza conceals thousands of unidentified human remains, toxins such as asbestos and unexploded ordnance.

Researchers looked at two scenarios to calculate the speed and climate impact of processing the uncontaminated debris – which could then be used to help reconstruct the razed Palestinian territory.

Assuming 80% of the debris is viable for crushing, a fleet of 50 industrial jaw crushers, which appear never to have been permitted in Gaza, would take just over six months and generate about 2,976 tonnes of CO2e, the study found.

But it would take a fleet of 50 smaller crushers, the type primarily used in Gaza, more than 37 years to process the rubble, generating about 25,149 tonnes of CO2e. In this scenario, the CO2 generated by moving and crushing the debris from Gaza’s destroyed buildings would be on a par with charging 7.3bn mobile phones.

The longer the contaminated debris remains in situ, the more damage it will do to the air, water and health of the 2 million Palestinians who have now been displaced, starved and bombarded for 21 months.

“The CO2 emissions from clearing and processing the rubble may seem small compared to the total climate cost of the destruction in Gaza, but our micro focus unpacks the labour and work required to even begin the process of reconstruction,” said Samer Abdelnour, lead author and senior lecturer in strategic management at the University of Edinburgh Business School.

“While filling the military emissions gap is important, our work can also support Palestinian policymakers, civil engineers, planners and other workers on the ground who are determined to reclaim what was lost, stay on the land and rebuild,” said Abdelnour, a Palestinian Canadian.

Commenting on the study, Ben Neimark, senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London who leads a team researching the total climate cost of Israel’s recent conflicts, said: “The methodological focus on debris is cutting-edge work, highlighting often-missed environmental damage left by militaries after the war is over. It provides a fresh look at the daily images of bombed-out buildings and rubble from Gaza, rather than seeing them as longer-term climate impacts of war.”

Gaza is a 25-mile strip of land, only twice the size of Washington DC at 141 square miles (365 sq km). More than 90% of homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, in addition to the vast majority of schools, clinics, mosques and infrastructure.

The current analysis merges open-source data on building surface area, height, structural damage and road network topology to estimate debris distribution across Gaza – and then calculate the carbon cost of processing and transporting that debris during reconstruction, according to Nicholas Roy, co-author of the study who compiled the data and conducted the analysis.

“Looking ahead, finer spatial and temporal resolution of satellite images, advances in deep learning for building and damage classification, and methods that integrate information from different perspectives – such as street-level cellphone footage and top-down satellite images – open new opportunities to estimate military emissions across different scopes and better understand the true climate cost of war,” said Roy, an MSc statistical science student at Oxford University.

Burning fossil fuels is causing climate chaos, with increasingly deadly and destructive extreme weather events forcing record numbers of people to migrate. The Gulf region is among the most vulnerable to extreme weather and slow-onset climate disasters including drought, desertification, extreme heat and erratic rainfall, as well as environmental degradation, food insecurity and water shortages.

The total military carbon footprint is estimated at about 5.5% of global emissions – excluding greenhouse gases from conflict and war fighting. This is more than the combined contribution of civilian aviation (2%) and shipping (3%).

Researchers are attempting to calculate the climate costs being generated in two of the most deadly conflicts currently – Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s military assaults in Gaza and the broader Middle East – that could eventually help calculate claims for reparations.

In June, a study led by Neimark found that the long-term climate cost of destroying, clearing and rebuilding Gaza could top 31m tonnes of CO2e. This is more than the combined 2023 annual greenhouse gases emitted by Costa Rica and Estonia – yet there is no obligation for states to report military emissions to the UN climate body.

Stuart Parkinson, executive director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, said: “Militaries and war are large and hidden contributors to the climate crisis … It is important to include the full range of activities from production of the military equipment to fuel use during war fighting, from the damage to carbon stores like forests to cleanup efforts and reconstruction following the end of the war. This study adds to this bigger picture of war-related emissions.”

The Israeli government did not respond.

guardian
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Wed 23 Jul, 2025 10:20 am
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague has published an advisory opinion on the obligation of countries to combat climate change. According to the opinion, countries could be in violation of international law if they fail to take climate protection measures.
The ICJ is thus paving the way for lawsuits by countries affected by climate change.

The non-binding report is over 500 pages long. It was eagerly awaited and is seen as a possible turning point in international climate law and as historic.

Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change
The Court gives its Advisory Opinion and responds to the questions
posed by the General Assembly
0 Replies
 
hingehead
 
  1  
Reply Sun 27 Jul, 2025 07:40 pm
SA’s algal bloom disaster: The brutal reality of the climate crisis
The harmful algal bloom that is destroying South Australia’s marine wildlife is a climate disaster delivered with horrific clarity to our shores. By Jennifer Mills.
Full story: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/environment/2025/07/26/sas-algal-bloom-marine-disaster
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Tue 29 Jul, 2025 12:02 pm
The US Environmental Protection Agency wants to revoke a key scientific assessment of the dangers of greenhouse gases.
The necessary steps will be taken to formally withdraw the endangerment finding, said Lee Zeldin, head of the EPA, in the conservative podcast ‘Ruthless.’ He praised the plans as ‘the biggest deregulation measure in the history of the United States.’

EPA seeks to cancel scientific basis for climate regulations
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Wed 30 Jul, 2025 06:08 am
@Walter Hinteler,
Quote:
An energy revolution is underway in this century, though most people have not noticed it


The renewable energy revolution is a feat of technology
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Wed 30 Jul, 2025 08:41 am
@Walter Hinteler,
https://i.imgur.com/BtwF386l.png

Trump promised that, as US president, he would greatly expand oil and gas production, even in nature reserves. His battle cry on the subject is: ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ This is also the aim of the current proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency. The aim is to put the economy before climate protection. According to the report, high energy prices associated with renewable energies pose a much greater threat to the well-being of the US population.

Why is this the case? The report the Climate Working Group explains that it is due to climate change. It is possible to respond to increasingly severe and frequent extreme weather events and protect oneself, for example with heating or air conditioning systems. However, poorer households in particular do not use these devices enough. This is because, according to the report, the costs are too high.

The fact that extreme weather also endangers the very houses in which air conditioning and heating systems could be installed, and that these systems are powered by fossil fuels and could therefore contribute to further global warming, is swept under the carpet.

Although the US Environmental Protection Agency's name suggests that it should be committed to protecting the environment, scientific consensus indicates that this is not the case.

0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  2  
Reply Sat 2 Aug, 2025 04:03 am
Quote:
Cold Nordic countries are being seared by “truly unprecedented” heat, as hot weather strengthened and lengthened by carbon pollution continues to roast northern Europe.


Nordic countries hit by ‘truly unprecedented’ heatwave
Quote:
The Norwegian Meteorological Institute said temperatures above 30C were recorded on 12 days in July by at least one station in its three northernmost counties. Although the country had a brief respite last week as hot weather moved north and east, the institute said it expected temperatures of 30C might be reached again over the weekend.

“We have some hot days ahead of us in northern Norway,” it said.

In Sweden, meteorologists said long-term heatwaves were noted at several stations in the north of the country, with a weather station in Haparanda measuring 25C or more for 14 days in a row. In Jokkmokk, Lappland, the heatwave lasted for 15 days.

“To find a longer period at these stations, you have to go back more than a century,” said Sverker Hellström, a scientist at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute.

Blistering heat swept northern Europe in mid-July, driven by hot waters off the Norwegian northern coast and a stubborn area of high pressure that brought temperatures in the Nordics 8-10C above seasonal norms. The region has also since been hit by storms and lightning strikes that have sparked wildfires.

The hot weather has taken people by surprise in a part of the continent better adapted to the cold. Researchers have found that countries such as the UK, Norway and Switzerland will face the greatest relative rise in uncomfortably hot days as the planet heats up, and have warned that their infrastructure is not well-suited to cope.

On Wednesday, an ice rink in northern Finland opened its doors to people seeking refuge from the heat after they overfilled the local hospital’s emergency room, according to Finnish media. On Thursday, herders warned that their reindeer were on the verge of dying in the heat.

Swedish radio reported that foreign tourists heading north to Scandinavia for “coolcations” had instead encountered dangerous heat warnings.

“As climate change progresses, exceptionally severe heatwaves will intensify,” said Heikki Tuomenvirta, a scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. “They are occurring more frequently, are more severe and last longer.”
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  3  
Reply Sat 2 Aug, 2025 11:04 am
Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a ‘farce’ full of misinformation

Experts say the report being used to justify the mass rollback of climate regulations has many claims based on long-debunked research

Quote:
A new Trump administration report which attempts to justify a mass rollback of environmental regulations is chock-full of climate misinformation, experts say.

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 “endangerment finding”, which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. Hours later, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown.

“Climate change is a challenge – not a catastrophe,” wrote the energy secretary, Chris Wright, in the report’s introduction.

The esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann said the report was akin to the result he would expect “if you took a chatbot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites”.

The energy department published the report hours after the EPA announced a plan to roll back 2009’s “endangerment finding”, a seminal ruling that provided the legal basis for the agency to regulate climate-heating pollution under the Clean Air Act. If finalized, the move would topple virtually all US climate regulation.

In a Fox News interview, Wright claimed the report pushed back on the “cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science”. But Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University and expert in climate misinformation, said its true purpose was to “justify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels”.

“Science is the basis for climate regulation, so now they are trying to replace legitimate science with pseudoscience,” she said.

‘This is an agenda to promote fossil fuels’

The attack on the research underpinning the endangerment finding – which says greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare – comes as part of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda to boost fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of global warming.

“This is an agenda to promote fossil fuels, not to protect public health and welfare or the environment,” said Rachel Cleetus, a director at climate and science non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists who was an author on the sixth US national climate assessment.

Asked about scientists’ assertions that the new report is rife with misinformation, an energy department spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said: “This report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence – not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations.”

But the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces what is widely considered the gold standard compendium of climate science, compiled by a huge multinational team of scientists, peer-reviewed and agreed to by every national government.

The latest IPCC synthesis report, released two years ago, was a vast undertaking involving 721 volunteer scientists around the world. It states that it is “unequivocal” that human activity has heated the planet, which has “led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people”.

By contrast, the Trump administration report was crafted by five handpicked scientists who are seen as having fringe or contrarian views by mainstream climate scientists, with no peer review. The experts behind the report have previously denied being climate deniers. The energy department did not respond to a question about the authors.

“This report had five authors and was rushed over four months, and would not pass muster in any traditional scientific peer review process,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the climate non-profit Berkeley Earth, who called the paper a “farce”.

Wright, the energy secretary, insisted he had not steered the report’s conclusions, while Judith Curry, one of the report authors, said in a blogpost she hoped the document would push climate science “away from alarmism and advocacy”.

‘I’m embarrassed by this report’


Mainstream climate scientists, however, condemned the findings as distorted and inaccurate. “This is a report written by a couple of scientists who are outliers in their arguments for climate change,” said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University. “This document does in no way depreciate the value of previous assessments, but rather just cherrypicks the literature to pretend to create a new review.”

Mahowald said the lack of peer review meant it was “obviously not as robust” as the IPCC report or the US government’s periodic national climate assessment, which the Trump administration recently took offline. The latest national climate assessment, compiled by a dozen government agencies and outside scientists in 2023, concluded that the “effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States”

“If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,” Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, said of the new report. “The only way to get this report was to pick these authors.”

Hausfather agreed that the authors’ work “might represent their views but is not consistent with the broader scientific literature on climate change”. He was among the scientists whose work the authors cited.

The new paper includes a chart from a 2019 report which he led, claiming it demonstrates how climate models “consistently overestimated observations” of atmospheric carbon. But Hausfather’s research actually showed that climate models have performed well.

“They appear to have discarded the whole paper as not fitting their narrative, and instead picked a single figure that was in the supplementary materials to cast doubt on models when the whole paper actually confirmed how well they have performed in the years after they were published,” he said. The energy department did not respond to a request for comment about Hausfather’s concerns.

That approach to research seems to underpin the entire paper, said Hausfather, who is also the climate research lead at tech company Stripe.

“This is a general theme in the report; they cherrypick data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not,” he said.

Dessler said scientists are obliged to engage with the full range of evidence, even if it contradicts their initial assumptions. Ignoring this principle “can rise to the level of scientific misconduct”, he said.

“The report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide,” Dessler said. “Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2’s innocence.”

The lack of peer review in the administration’s report led to conclusions that deviated, sometimes wildly, from the scientific literature. Many of its claims are based on long-debunked research long promoted by climate deniers, said Mann.

“It is shop worn, decades-old, discredited climate denier talking points, dressed up in the clothing of some sensible new set of revelations,” he said. “What’s different is that it has the imprimatur of the EPA and the federal government now.”

The report, for instance claims that warming trends have been overstated, despite evidence to the contrary. It was published as extreme heat is affecting millions of Americans.

“They’re literally trying to tell us not to believe what we see with our own two eyes … and instead buy into their denialist framing that rejects not just the science, but what is plainly evident if you look out your window,” said Mann.

The authors also write that ocean acidification is occurring “within the range of natural variability” and is beneficial for marine life despite the ocean’s acidic levels currently being the highest since 14m years ago, a time when a major extinction event was occurring.

And the report references the apparent health of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which it says “has shown considerable growth in recent years”. The reef was recently hit by its sixth mass bleaching event since 2016, a devastating phenomenon for corals in which they whiten and sometimes die due to high sea temperatures. No widespread bleaching events were recorded on the reef before 1998.

The report is “tedious” and at times “truly wearisome”, according to Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. Kopp recently worked on a paper showing how rising temperatures and drought will worsen crop yields, counter to the report’s claims that crops will flourish with extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Carbon dioxide fertilization is largely irrelevant to how increasingly extreme heat and intense drought will impact crop yields,” Kopp said. “As a former department of energy fellow, I’m embarrassed by this report.”

guardian
0 Replies
 
 

Related Topics

 
Copyright © 2025 MadLab, LLC :: Terms of Service :: Privacy Policy :: Page generated in 0.1 seconds on 08/06/2025 at 11:18:24