The largest twenty-one companies analyzed would disburse $5,444 billion over the period 2025–2050.
— Read on www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(23)00198-7
“Oceans have been absorbing the world’s extra heat. But there’s a huge payback”
England holds his arms out wide to show the size of one cubic metre of air. To heat that air by 1C, he says it takes about 2,000 joules. But to warm a cubic metre of ocean needs about 4,200,000 joules.
“By absorbing all this heat, the ocean lulls people into a false sense of security that climate change is progressing slowly.
“But there is a huge payback. It’s overwhelming when you start to go through all the negative impacts of a warming ocean.
“There’s sea level rise, coastal inundation, increased floods and drought cycles, bleached corals, intensification of cyclones, ecological impacts, melting of ice at higher latitudes in the coastal margins – that gives us a double whammy on sea level rise.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/15/oceans-have-been-absorbing-the-worlds-extra-heat-but-theres-a-huge-payback
Maintenance Is Sorely Needed In The Fight Against Global Warming
The incentives get even more distorted when stretched across industries and use cases. Here, again, maintenance distinguishes itself rhetorically from sustainability. Sustainability is a state; maintenance is a process. It requires work, and work of a certain type. Whatever its ultimate goal — safety, material efficiency, reducing carbon emissions — practical know-how and repetitive labor come first. This kind of pragmatism is sorely needed in the climate debate, which is so often preoccupied with end-states that it has no earthly or humanly way of achieving.
— Read on www.noemamag.com/the-disappearing-art-of-maintenance/
US Office of Climate Change and Health Equity
If I reflect back on when I started in public health, most people were actively hostile to the concept of health equity and global heating was regarded as a fringe issue of marginal significance. How much things have changed when the US DHHS sets up an Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. Even if it’s a small, under-resourced unit, its very existence has meaning.
“The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall … establish an Office of Climate Change and Health Equity to address the impact of climate change on the health of the American people,” – Source
Political Scenarios for Climate Disaster
There is no realistic scenario for addressing climate change that does not involve a comprehensive reorganization of human societies in the reasonably near term. Yet we emphasize reorganization, not collapse or apocalypse. As a species, humanity will almost certainly survive the coming centuries. But who will survive, and how they will live, is genuinely uncertain. The distribution of the burdens of substantial adaptation—which is now inevitable, whatever the extent of future carbon mitigation—and the political-economic means by which distribution is implemented: these are urgent issues facing us all.
— Read on www.dissentmagazine.org/article/political-scenarios-for-climate-disaster
Heatwaves: Changes in frequency and intensity
I’ve found myself thinking a lot about this paper by Herold et al. over the past few days. It describes the far-reaching implications of climate change for health and agriculture across different regions within Australia.
In particular I keep thinking about the implications of these two graphs:
The first graph shows heatwave frequency and the second one shows heatwave amplitude for different Australian cities for the recent past (blue), near-future (green) and far-future (red). Bottom and top of boxes indicate the 25th and 75th percentiles.
NB: For those not familiar with it, heatwave amplitude is a way of measuring and modelling the hottest day of the hottest heatwave within a year. This is different from the other common way of measuring heatwave intensity– magnitude–that looks at the average temperature across all heatwave days within a year. °C2 is a heatwave unit of measurement and isn’t the same thing as degrees Celsius.
There are many impacts and consequences associated with this model, but the frequency and scale of near- and far-future heatwaves alone should terrify us.
Australian climate extremes in the 21st century according to a regional climate model ensemble: Implications for health and agriculture
Estimated increases in daily excess mortality due to daytime temperatures above 30 °C are highest for Sydney and Brisbane under a far future climate (76.8 and 32.5 more deaths, respectively). For Sydney this is largely a result of the population’s sensitivity to high temperatures, whereas for Brisbane it is largely due to the increase in the number of hot days.