The Climate Crisis

The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation”, the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by burning fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”

While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil”, he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts – if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.”

Yeah I am in the NE. It was supposed to Thunderstorm but instead we still get the unrelenting heat/sun. I live up here for a reason people. I prefer the cool/cold weather because I can always add more clothes. This HEATDOME has hampered my central AC (I may have to replace the unit since a swift kick to the condenser was not effective). So here I am in my upstairs with a window AC.. and why is not cooler in here????? My husband just called me a wimp. I would volunteer to work a shift at my hospital if I didn't drink 2 glasses of wine after lunch. If I left now, I could get there in time for the evening shift.... but then... I would have to listen to people complaining about momentary discomfort (which is exactly what I am doing but then, I am not expecting anyone else to solve my problems).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/41958593

Add yours here: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/forms/name-our-storms-call-for-names

thanks Mike Taylor for the inspiration

archived (Wayback Machine)

archived (Wayback Machine)

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.”

archived (Wayback Machine)

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.)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20737457

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

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/21414090

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.

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