I want to sue the republican party for willful denial of scientific evidence about climate change.

[China]

Scientists detect sign that a crucial ocean current is near collapse

 

The Atlantic Ocean’s sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data — raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades.

 

Scientists have long seen the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, as one of the planet’s most vulnerable “tipping elements” — meaning the system could undergo an abrupt and irreversible change, with dramatic consequences for the rest of the globe. Under Earth’s current climate, this aquatic conveyor belt transports warm, salty water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, and then sends colder water back south along the ocean floor. But as rising global temperatures melt Arctic ice, the resulting influx of cold freshwater has thrown a wrench in the system — and could shut it down entirely.

 

The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that continued warming will push the AMOC over its “tipping point” around the middle of this century. The shift would be as abrupt and irreversible as turning off a light switch, and it could lead to dramatic changes in weather on either side of the Atlantic.

 

“This is a really worrying result,” said Peter Ditlevsen, a climate physicist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the new study. “This is really showing we need a hard foot on the brake” of greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

I wonder if that change will usher in a new ice age.

[China]

 

[Renegade7]

On 7/25/2023 at 7:43 PM, China said:

Scientists detect sign that a crucial ocean current is near collapse

 

I wonder if that change will usher in a new ice age.

 

It's like nature healing itself from global warming if that happens.

 

People taking selfies at death valley right now in front of that thermometer is like the dinosaurs taking one with the asteroid that killed them.

 

Now this...

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/08/02/southamerica-record-winter-heat-argentina-chile/

 

Quote

It’s midwinter, but it’s over 100 degrees in South America

It’s the middle of winter in South America, but that hasn’t kept the heat away in Chile, Argentina and surrounding locations. Multiple spells of oddly hot weather have roasted the region in recent weeks. The latest spell early this week has become the most intense, pushing the mercury above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, while setting an August record for Chile.

 

 

In Buenos Aires, where the average high on Aug. 1 is 58 degrees (14 Celsius), it surpassed 86 (30 Celsius) on Tuesday.

“South America is living one of the extreme events the world has ever seen,” weather historian Maximiliano Herrera tweeted, adding, “This event is rewriting all climatic books.”

 

Edited August 4, 2023 by Renegade7

[Jabbyrwock]

2 hours ago, Renegade7 said:

 

People taking selfies at death valley right now in front of that thermometer is like the dinosaurs taking one with the asteroid that killed them.

 

Sounds like a t-shirt

[Mr. Sinister]

^Guaranteed a bunch of doofuses would do that

[dfitzo53]

On 7/31/2023 at 7:13 PM, China said:

 

[China]

An insidious form of climate denial is festering in the Republican Party

 

When Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) questioned US climate envoy John Kerry at an oversight hearing in July — a month that became the hottest ever recorded — he sidestepped that the country was in the grip of repeated heat waves, fires, and a looming hurricane season. Over a six-minute interrogation, the House Freedom Caucus chair claimed Kerry wanted to charge taxpayers a “quadrillion dollars to fix a problem that doesn’t exist” and accused him, along with thousands of scientists and the 195 governments signed onto the Paris climate accord, of “grifting.”

 

Kerry shook his head when Perry concluded. “That’s a pretty shocking statement,” he said, “that you believe all the scientists of the world are grifters.”

 

The shock from the emotionally charged attack may have been the point. “There’s a longstanding history of climate deniers going after the messenger as well as the message,” Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami associate professor who studies climate disinformation, told Vox. “The harder it is to dismantle the message, the easier it is to go after the individuals most prominently communicating it.”

 

Collective climate change denial in the Republican Party is not new. But the Perry-Kerry exchange illustrates how the GOP’s claims are becoming increasingly audacious — as signals from human-caused climate change become all the more apparent.

 

Record heat? “Normal”: “It’s hot, hot, hot all right,” said Laura Ingraham on her Fox News show. “After all, we’re in the middle of a season called ‘summer.’” (Fact check: More than 3,000 temperature records were shattered in the US for the month of July alone, something scientists say would be “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.)

 

Forest fires? “Nature naturally burns itself off every 11 years with natural disaster forest fires,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK). “This is a forest fire.” (Fact check: The severity of wildfires such as the historic blazes in Canada this year are fueled by complex conditions including forest management and drought primed by climate change.)

 

Stronger hurricanes? Just a part of life: “This is something that is a fact of life in the Sunshine State,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a Fox News interview. “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.” (Fact check: Climate change drives the warming of ocean waters, which provide fuel for more devastating hurricanes and typhoons.)

 

More Americans are impacted by climate change; 62 percent of all voters recognize climate change is caused by human activity, according to a Gallup poll from this spring. Yet, climate change denial is not only alive and well in the GOP, it’s become “a lot more insidious and polarizing,” said John Cook, a University of Melbourne researcher who has tracked the path of climate disinformation online using artificial intelligence.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[LD0506]

We need to be burning Rs for energy instead of oil

[Larry]

1 hour ago, LD0506 said:

We need to be burning Rs for energy instead of oil

 

Takes a long time for dinosaurs to turn into oil.  

 

Although, if we could start with a nice mass extinction. . . . 

[China]

On 6/21/2023 at 12:03 AM, China said:

Montana vs. meddling kids

 

Montanans were treated yesterday to the novel sight of state bureaucrats defending their constitutional right to permit fossil fuel projects.

 

The case, Held v. Montana, is the first of its kind to make it to trial in the United States and could serve as a bellwether for other efforts to hold governments and industries to account for their role in warming the planet, as Lesley Clark reports for POLITICO’s E&E News.

 

Monday’s oral arguments were Montana officials’ chance to push back on a week of testimonyfrom young plaintiffs who argue that the state’s constitution requires agencies to take climate change into account.

 

Enacted in 1972 amid a national wave of environmental awareness, the document puts the right to a “clean and healthful environment” right at the top — ahead of freedom of religion and speech.

 

Officials argued Monday that they’re just following the law, including a new one that bars them from considering the effects of climate change on projects. They said the Montana Environmental Policy Act that the youth are challenging doesn’t have the regulatory teeth that would allow the state to reject projects under it.

“We have no right ... not to follow the law,” said Chris Dorrington, director of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, adding that his department “does not have the authority to not permit something that fully complies with the law.”

 

State officials got a little testy at the plaintiffs’ assertion that Montana has never turned down a fossil fuel project.

 

“I do take some offense at an insinuation that the folks at DEQ are simply putting their stamp of approval on any application that rolls in the door,” said Sonja Nowakowski, the state’s air, energy and mining division administrator. “These are very robust permitting processes. These people thrive on poking holes in applications and making sure they meet the letter of the law.”

 

The mere fact that the trial is happening is the real news here. State lawmakers have insulated regulators pretty well from it, via the law they passed this spring barring consideration of climate change in evaluating projects. (The activists say it was aimed at weakening their case.)

 

Still, legal experts are closely watching the two-week trial and say a decision on behalf of the young people could provide compelling precedent for future lawsuits that seek to prod governments to do more about climate change.

 

Click on the link for the full article 

 

Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youths in Landmark Climate Case

 

A judge in Montana ruled on Monday that young people in the state have a constitutional right to a healthful environment, finding in a landmark case that the state’s failure to consider climate change when evaluating new projects was causing harm.

 

The case, brought by a group of young Montana residents ranging in age from 5 to 22, is the first of its kind to go to trial in the United States. While the state has contended that Montana’s emissions are minuscule when considered against the rest of the globe’s, the plaintiffs argued that the state must do more to consider how emissions are contributing to droughts, wildfires and other growing risks to a state that cherishes a pristine outdoors.

 

In her ruling, Kathy Seeley, a district court judge, found that the state’s emissions “have been proven to be a substantial factor” in affecting the climate. Laws that limited the ability of regulators to consider climate effects were unconstitutional, she ruled.

 

“This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy and for our climate,” said Julia Olson, the executive director of Our Children’s Trust, which brought the case.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Olive oil is in trouble as extreme heat and drought push the industry into crisis

 

There is a crisis brewing in the olive oil industry.

 

The scorching temperatures that have swept southern Europe this summer are not only claiming lives and priming the land for devastating wildfires — they’re also very bad news for olive trees, with olive oil industry experts warning of skyrocketing prices and potential shortages.

 

When it’s too hot, olive trees drop their fruit to save moisture or produce fruit at the expense of the health of the tree, said Kyle Holland, who covers oils and oilseeds at market research group Mintec. Very high temperatures are particularly dangerous in spring, during flowering.

 

The situation is all the more concerning as it comes on the heels of a bad olive harvest last year, following Europe’s hottest summer on record.

 

In Spain, the world’s biggest olive oil producer, production plunged to roughly 620,000 metric tons, compared to the five-year average of around 1.3 million metric tons, said Holland.

 

“After such a shortfall from the previous harvest, the last thing the industry needs is another poor crop,” said Walter Zanre, the chief executive of Filippo Berio UK, an arm of one of the world’s biggest olive oil brands.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Utah officials sued over failure to save Great Salt Lake: ‘Trying to avert disaster’

 

Environmental and community groups have sued Utah officials over failures to save its iconic Great Salt Lake from irreversible collapse.

 

The largest sal****er lake in the western hemisphere has been steadily shrinking, as more and more water has been diverted away from the lake to irrigate farmland, feed industry and water lawns. A megadrought across the US south-west, accelerated by global heating, has hastened the lake’s demise.

 

Unless dire action is taken, the lake could decline beyond recognition within five years, a report published early this year warned, exposing a dusty lakebed laced with arsenic, mercury, lead and other toxic substances. The resulting toxic dustbowl would be “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, the ecologist Ben Abbott of Brigham Young University told the Guardian earlier this year.

 

Despite such warnings, officials have failed to take serious action, local groups said in their lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday. “We are trying to avert disaster. We are trying to force the hand of state government to take serious action,” said Brian Moench of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, one of the groups suing state agencies.

 

“Plaintiffs pray that this Court declare that the State of Utah has breached its trust duty to ensure water flows into the Great Salt Lake sufficient to maintain the Lake,” reads the lawsuit, which was brought by coalition that includes Earthjustice, the Utah Rivers Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club, among others.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Phoenix breaks heat record as city hits 110F on 54th day this year

 

The temperature in Phoenix, Arizona continues to rise as the city broke its previous record of the most days at or above 110F (43C).

 

On Saturday afternoon, the National Weather Service announced that the temperature at Phoenix Sky Harbor international airport reached 110F, making it the 54th day this year with temperatures of at least 110F.

 

Saturday’s temperature breaks the previous record of 53 days that was set in 2020. From 1991 to 2020, the average days of 110F or above is 21 days, the NWS said.

 

An excessive heat warning has been issued for south central and south-west Arizona until 8pm on Sunday as weekend highs are expected to range between 108F and 114F. Meanwhile, lows are expected to range between 80F to 86F.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

U.N. Chief Warns: 'Humanity Has Opened The Gates To Hell'

 

The United Nations chief said “humanity has opened the gates to hell” in a speech Wednesday that warned that the global effort to cut planet-heating emissions is still “dwarfed by the scale of the challenge.”

 

It’s the latest attempt by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to capture in a soundbite the horrors unfolding in what is on track to be the hottest year in human history. Last year, he described the planet’s trajectory as a “highway to hell.” In March, he said that “humanity is on thin ice ― and that ice is melting fast.” In July, when temperatures reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the world, he declared the start of “the era of global boiling.”

 

By August, the United States tallied 23 climate disasters that eclipsed at least $1 billion in damages each so far in 2023 — with four months left before the year ends. Floods swept through Libya, killing thousands and sweeping enough bodies to sea that the tides deposited corpses on the beach like foamy driftwood. At the start of the hottest August on record, the U.N. International Children’s Emergency Fund published new data showing that heat and humidity exposed 76% of children in South Asia to extreme temperatures.

 

Guterres delivered his speech at the opening of the “climate ambition summit” of the latest U.N. General Assembly in New York. Since 2009, New York has made the most of having many of the world’s leaders and diplomats in the city for the General Assembly by hosting an annual week of climate-focused events ― known as “Climate Week” ― ahead of the official U.N. summit that takes place overseas in November.

 

The U.N. climate summit in two months will take place in Dubai, where the United Arab Emirates put Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, the head of its state oil company, in charge of the talks. The conference is scheduled to be the first since the historic 2015 Paris Agreement ― the first global pact to cut emissions that included the two biggest polluters, China and the U.S. ― to require an official “stocktake” to examine what progress has been made in the past eight years.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Greek Leader Says Climate Change 'An Opportunity To Expand Our Tourism Season'

 

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called climate change “an opportunity to expand our tourism season” after his country suffered deadly wildfires and historic floods in recent months.

 

Asked if the scorching temperatures recorded in Greece over the summer could encourage tourists to seek destinations in northern Europe, Mitsotakis told Bloomberg TV “it’s still going to be some time before the Scandinavian beaches ... compete with the Greek beaches.”

 

“People still enjoy the hot Mediterranean and they do want to come to the Mediterranean and to Greece in particular during the summer because they like to spend time at the beach,” Mitsotakis said. “If anything, I would argue that climate change is an opportunity for us to expand our tourism season.”

 

Mitsotakis argued that rising temperatures could help make his country a year-round destination, expanding the popular July and August season.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

On 12/29/2022 at 1:14 PM, China said:

Republicans plan more attacks on ESG. Investors still plan to focus on climate risk

 

Republicans are planning to use their control of the House of Representatives in 2023 to intensify attacks on companies that account for climate-related risks when they're making investment decisions.

 

GOP officials in Washington and more than a dozen states say they're focusing on firms that are using their financial power to push a so-called woke political agenda, rather than trying to maximize profits. As part of the campaign, Florida, Louisiana and Missouri have collectively pulled more than $3 billion from BlackRock over the investment firm's consideration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Faced with the political backlash, Vanguard, another large asset manager, said it decided to withdraw from a group of investors that's working to zero out greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury.

 

Republicans say they're fighting a coordinated effort by big investors to impose progressive policies that threaten capitalism itself.

 

Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican from Kentucky and a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, says ESG investing is aimed at "politicizing capital allocation and actively discriminating against fossil energy."

 

ESG is "a cancer in our capital markets that must be eradicated," Barr said in a statement to NPR.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

Joe Biden Gets Unlikely Legal Win From Texas Judge

 

A federal judge in Texas has given President Joe Biden an unexpected legal win, upholding one of the current administration's efforts to tackle climate change.

 

More than two dozen Republican-led states had challenged the Labor Department rule that allows employee retirement plans to consider environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors when making investment decisions.

 

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative appointee of former President Donald Trump to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo, has previously blocked Biden's bid to end the "remain in Mexico" immigration policy. And in April, Kacsmaryk temporarily halted the use of mifepristone, commonly known as the abortion pill.

 

Kacsmaryk earlier this year refused to transfer the lawsuit over the ESG rule to another court, rejecting the Biden administration's claim that the states were "judge shopping" by filing the lawsuit in Amarillo, where he is the only judge.

 

And in an unanticipated outcome, Kacsmaryk sided with the Biden administration and concluded in a September 21 opinion that the administration's investment rule didn't violate the Administrative Procedure Act.

 

Click on the link for the full article

Edited September 26, 2023 by China

[China]

Pope Francis warns planet ‘is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point’ as he urges climate action

 

Pope Francis issued a stark reminder about the effects of climate change on Wednesday, warning that “the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”

 

“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident,” the pope said in a letter titled Laudate Deum, or Praise God.

 

“No one can ignore the fact that in recent years we have witnessed extreme weather phenomena, frequent periods of unusual heat, drought and other cries of protest on the part of the earth that are only a few palpable expressions of a silent disease that affects everyone,” the letter added.

 

It also made a point of stressing that “specific climate changes provoked by humanity are notably heightening the probability of extreme phenomena that are increasingly frequent and intense.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Big Oil's Using Fortnite, TikTok, And Twitch In Effort To Convince Kids Fossil Fuels Are Cool

 

Kids today only care about online free-to-play shooter Fortnite. They don’t even talk about how great gasoline is! Luckily for us, one large oil company wants to change that using Fortnite, TikTok stars, and Twitch streamers. Welcome to Hell.

 

Climate change is bad. I think we can all agree on that. But for kids, who have long lives and futures ahead of them, the prospect of the planet turning into a nightmare sphere of extreme weather and chaos is particularly scary. But don’t worry about all that, kids. Instead, Shell—a massive oil company and one of the many entities directly responsible for destroying our planet—wants you all to know just how rad its fossil fuel products are, and even made a whole Fortnite world for you to enjoy! But to truly enjoy it, you’ll need to use Shell’s V-Power® NiTRO+ Premium Gasoline, of course.

 

As reported by Media Matters earlier this week, Shell has partnered with map creators to develop “Shell Ultimate Road Trips”, a Fortnite world featuring six different areas to explore in the car of your choice. In the middle of these worlds, players will find a lonely, sad-looking Shell gas station acting as the map’s hub.

 

The campaign—part of Shell’s pivot back to focusing on gasoline over cleaner energy sources— is designed to promote the company’s “new and improved” premium gasoline. The idea is that in the map, players will need to occasionally fill up at the central Shell gas station and use its new V-Power NiTRO+ fuel to successfully navigate obstacles and courses.

 

To help promote this terrible collaboration, Shell has enlisted various TikTok creators and Twitch streamers in an effort to connect with their large audiences made up of mostly younger individuals.

 

Media Matters reportedly identified at least a half dozen streamers—including folks like Punisher, NateHill, Chica, and brookeab—with a combined Twitch following of over 5.5 million subscribers—who helped promote Shell’s Fortnite map and fossil fuel products during sponsored streams that racked up over a million views. Some of these creators also promoted the sponsored streams on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok to their millions of followers. Media Matters also identified three content creators who advertised the ShellxFortnite map in several videos posted on the gas company’s official YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram accounts.

 

Click on the link for the full story

[China]

It's a global climate solution — if it can get past conspiracy theories and NIMBYs

 

In the 11th arrondissement, a middle-to-working class neighborhood in the east of Paris, if you walk out your front door, you can arrive at a preschool in one minute. A bookstore in three minutes. A cheese store in four minutes. Baguette for that cheese? Bakery's across the street.

 

Grocery store and pharmacy, five minutes. Parks, restaurants, metro stops, a hospital: all within a 15-minute walk. I know this because I used to live there, on a tiny cobblestone street with buildings covered in vines.

 

This is a 15-minute city, says Carlos Moreno, a professor at University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, who met me on the banks of the Seine River. Moreno says that in a 15-minute city, a person can access key things in their life — work, food, schools and recreation — within a short walk, bike, or transit ride of their home.

 

My former Paris street and much of the neighborhood were built in this dense way more than 150 years ago. But this old idea of areas with many amenities close by has now evolved into an urban planning model gaining popularity with politicians around the world. Moreno says that's because it not only improves quality of life, but 15-minute cities can also reduce cars' planet-warming greenhouse gases. Transportation accounts for about 20% of global energy-related carbon dioxide pollution, with cars making up almost 10%, according to the International Energy Agency.

 

In recent years, Moreno has been helping mayors put this idea to use, particularly the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. Paris is converting old military buildings and old parking structures into mixed-use buildings with apartments, retail and office space. Parisian neighborhoods are opening new parks and community gardens and expanding hours for child care nurseries. And the city has built more than 600 miles of protected bike lanes. "What is important is creating a roadmap for the transformation of the city," Moreno says.

 

Now the 15-minute city idea is spreading with mayors in the United States, including Justin Bibb, the 36-year-old mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, who made building 15-minute cities one of his top priorities when he came into office last year. But this climate solution is running into obstacles, from zoning regimes that prioritize single-family homes to conspiracy theories that have stirred up death threats for the idea's proponents.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Rapid ice melt in west Antarctica now inevitable, research shows

 

Accelerated ice melt in west Antarctica is inevitable for the rest of the century no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, research indicates. The implications for sea level rise are “dire”, scientists say, and mean some coastal cities may have to be abandoned.

 

The ice sheet of west Antarctica would push up the oceans by 5 metres if lost completely. Previous studies have suggested it is doomed to collapse over the course of centuries, but the new study shows that even drastic emissions cuts in the coming decades will not slow the melting.

 

The analysis shows the rate of melting of the floating ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea will be three times faster this century compared with the previous century, even if the world meets the most ambitious Paris agreement target of keeping global heating below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Global Warming Is Accelerating

 

Nearly every day since mid-June 2023 has been warmer than any equivalent day since 1958.
 

I’ve written quite a lot about this lately (for example, here), but it can’t be said enough. Global warming is accelerating. 2023 is the warmest year on record, and by a lot.

 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

BTW, if you want to see how bad things will (not could) get when the sea level rises, here's a map you can play with from NOAA where you can wipe out places like Miami, San Francisco, Louisiana, NYC, etc.  Note: this map only goes up to 10 feet sea level rise.  The report above says it could be as much as 17 feet.  So we've got that going for us.

 

Sea Level Rise Viewer

[PeterMP]

13 hours ago, China said:

Global Warming Is Accelerating

 

Nearly every day since mid-June 2023 has been warmer than any equivalent day since 1958.
 

I’ve written quite a lot about this lately (for example, here), but it can’t be said enough. Global warming is accelerating. 2023 is the warmest year on record, and by a lot.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

I'd warn against drawing any conclusions about the larger and longer context of global warming based on 2023.  It is an El Nino year.  El Nino years are always warmer.  This is how you got people in the late 1990s talking about ice free Arctic after the extremely warm El Nino year of 1998.

 

2022 wasn't particularly warm compared to the years around it.   

 

Just by my eye, that doesn't look like acceleration, and concluding there is acceleration off of one year is stupid.

 

There's also generally about an 11 year lag between temperatures and solar cycle.  11 years ago puts us about at the maximum of the previous solar cycle (which while low in terms of a historical average still had more solar output than the years around it). 

 

Combining where we are in terms of the solar cycle and it is an El Nino year, it wouldn't be shocking if 2023 was exceptionally warm and the next few years were cooler than 2023.  You can look at the above graph and pick out 1998 where they same sort of thing happened, and then it is like 7 years until you get another year as warm as 1998.  Just after 1998, there was a lot written that ended up being wrong based on the assumption that 1998 was some sort of new normal and not an outlier.  And realistically, predictions made based on the assumption that 1998 represented a new normal and wasn't an outlier harmed the science and made it harder as a society to do something about climate change.

Edited October 26, 2023 by PeterMP

[China]

As climate warms, Georgia Power seeks to add more fossil fuels

 

Georgia Power says it needs significantly more capacity to generate electricity to meet customer needs in the years ahead than previously projected. And in a filing Friday with state regulators, the utility said it wants to burn more climate-warming fossil fuels to bridge most of that gap.

 

In its filing with the Public Service Commission (PSC), Georgia Power asked state regulators to approve a bevy of new electricity generation assets — plus transmission infrastructure improvements — citing the state’s economic growth and the need to meet new demand, especially in winter. The proposal largely hinges on expanding natural gas capacity and buying electricity from out-of-state facilities, though it also includes more renewable resources and energy storage.

 

The request to add mostly fossil fuel power comes after the planet just endured its hottest summer on record and after scientists and the federal government have repeatedly warned that the dangerous effects of climate change will worsen without swift action to reduce emissions.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Environmental disasters and ‘dark’ tourism: The modern-day ghost towns created by the climate crisis

 

Think of “ghost towns” and images of dusty, lost-to-time towns, like those in America’s Wild West, may come to mind.

 

Indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, a slew of boomtown-gone-bust mining towns were deserted by residents as natural resources and economic viability dried up. Over time, some of these relics have found new life as fun and kitschy tourist attractions.

 

And while iterations of such abandoned settlements are found on every continent, with varying manmade and natural causes to blame, a new era of ghost towns is now emerging that, while eerie, feels far off from good touristic fun.

 

Climate change and ensuing environmental disasters – marked by an increasing frequency and intensity of destructive floods, droughts, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures – are now fueling what experts say are just the first waves of places abandoned due to climate displacement.

 

“We are going to see a movement – it’s already happening – where people are moving away from these areas that are most impacted by storms, by rising sea levels and floods, but also by constant fire, smoke inhalation – all of that,” says Gaia Vince, author of “Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World.”

 

She cites recent examples like wildfires in Hawaii, California and Australia, and floods in Bangladesh, as some of the latest triggers for population displacements.

 

“How many people are going to return to Lahaina in Hawaii after the fires there?” she questions. “I don’t think it’ll be 100% of the population that left. Some people will not be able to.”

 

Abandoning a settlement is typically a last-resort scenario, made only once residents have exhausted all other options, say experts.

 

Through the lens of tourism, many areas that have been historically reliant on tourism economies will also be vulnerable to abandonment says Vince. She cites examples like Alpine ski resorts, where snowfall is no longer conducive to skiing, or traditional holiday spots like Spain and the Mediterranean that have been experiencing deadly heatwaves and wildfires.

 

“Tourists are going to choose other places,” she says. “They don’t want to sit in a heatwave, with having to be evacuated because of forest fires.”

 

But there is also a niche segment of so-called “dark tourism” that could arise around such climate change-born ghost towns.

 

“There is an inherent fascination with ruination, where ruins of the past often tell a story of our misdeeds and misfortunes,” explains Philip Stone of the University of Central Lancashire, where he runs the Institute for Dark Tourism Research. “Climate change will undoubtedly cause death of landscapes where we shall mourn our environmental decline.”

 

Click on the link for the full article