`”We are on the deathbed. Humanity cannot survive – the way it has been behaving with nature – for more than fifty years, sixty years, or, at the most, one hundred years, which is nothing. If the Third World War does not happen, then we will be committing a slow suicide. Within a hundred years, we will be gone. Not even a trace will be left.”1 Osho
See also: Osho, “Religion: The Crimes Against Nature and the Environment”
And: Priests & Politicians: The Mafia of the Soul
It is becoming increasingly clear that humanity just doesn’t have the consciousness to prevent the inexorable destruction of the only home it has.
- Carbon Dioxide Levels in the Atmosphere
- The Human Population Clock is Ticking
- The Emissions Gap Report 2022
The Unfolding Story – 2024 – Updated Regularly:
Read 2023 Edition HERE
13 March, 2024
Drought, soil desiccation cracking, and carbon dioxide emissions: an overlooked feedback loop exacerbating climate change
“Soil stores 80 percent of carbon on earth, yet with increasing cycles of drought, that crucial reservoir is cracking and breaking down, releasing even more greenhouse gases creating an amplified feedback loop that could accelerate climate change.” – ScienceDaily
13 March, 2024
More Top Climate News
The International Monetary Fund estimates that fossil fuel subsidies worldwide totaled $7 trillion last year. Of course, in the IMF’s calculation, the largest subsidy of all… is the indirect subsidy the industry enjoys because the price of their products does not include the environmental and climate costs to society. To address that subsidy, it would require a carbon tax—even more of a political non-starter in the United States than the president’s budget request.” – Inside Climate News
March 13, 2024
THE VICUÑAS AND THE $9,000 SWEATER
“Thirty years of providing the world’s finest wool to the fashion house Loro Piana has done almost nothing for the Indigenous people of the Peruvian Andes.” – Bloomberg
March 12, 2024
The Take: Why is Mexico City running out of water?
“Experts say the city of 21 million could run out of water in a matter of months.” – Aljazeera
March 9, 2024
The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I.
“How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy? if Google were to integrate generative A.I. into every search, its electricity use would rise to something like twenty-nine billion kilowatt-hours per year. This is more than is consumed by many countries, including Kenya, Guatemala, and Croatia. ‘I think we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,’ Altman said at a public appearance in Davos. He didn’t see how these needs could be met, he went on, ‘without a breakthrough.’ He added, ‘We need fusion or we need, like, radically cheaper solar plus storage, or something, at massive scale—like, a scale that no one is really planning for.'” – The New Yorker
March 8, 2024
The SEC’s new climate rules were a missed opportunity to accelerate corporate action
“Unfortunately, the federal agency watered down the regulations amid intense lobbying from business interests, undermining their ultimate effectiveness—and missing the best shot the US may have for some time at forcing companies to reckon with the rising dangers of a warming world.” – MIT Technology Review
Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures
“The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too expensive for consumers’ liking. ‘The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,’ he told Fortune last week. “’he people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.’… Experts say Woods’s rhetoric is part of a larger attempt to skirt climate accountability. No new major oil and gas infrastructure can be built if the world is to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits but Exxon, along with other major oil companies currently basking in record profits, is pushing ahead with aggressive fossil-fuel expansion plans. ‘It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems,’ said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia business school…. Troves of internal documents and analyses have over the past decade established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating as far back as the 1970s, but forcefully and successfully worked to sow doubt about the climate crisis and stymie action to clamp down on fossil fuel usage. The revelations have inspired litigation against Exxon across the US.” – The Guardian
February 29, 2024
Texas wildfires cause chaos as largest blaze in state history scorches 1.2m acres
“Fueled by parched grasses, strong winds and abnormally warm temperatures, the fires have scorched more than 1.2 million acres since last Sunday, according to the Texas A&M forest service, leaving a desolate landscape of charred prairie, dead cattle and burned-out homes in their wake.” – The Guardian
February 26, 2024
New Research from Antarctica Affirms the Threat of the ‘Doomsday Glacier,’ but Funding to Keep Studying It Is Running Out
“In a worst case scenario, rising global temperatures and marine heatwaves could melt enough of the Thwaites Glacier and other Antarctic ice to raise sea levels 10 feet by the early 2100s.” – Inside Climate News
February 24, 2024
Barriers against Antarctic ice melt disappearing at the double
“Undersea anchors of ice that help prevent Antarctica’s land ice from slipping into the ocean are shrinking at more than twice the rate compared with 50 years ago, research shows. More than a third of these frozen moorings, known as pinning points, have decreased in size since the turn of the century, experts say. Further deterioration of pinning points, which hold in place the floating ice sheets that fortify Antarctica’s land ice, would accelerate the continent’s contribution to rising sea levels, scientists warn.” – ScienceDaily
February 22, 2024
Carbon emissions from the destruction of mangrove forests predicted to increase by 50,000% by the end of the century
“Mangroves in regions such as southern India, southeastern China, Singapore and eastern Australia are particularly affected…. Over the past 20 years, a substantial number of mangrove forests have been replaced by agriculture, aquaculture and urban land management, leading global mangrove carbon stocks to decline by 158.4 million tonnes — releasing the same level of carbon emissions as flying the entire US population from New York to London.” – ScienceDaily
February 22, 2024
Disasters Forced 2.5 Million Americans From Their Homes Last Year
“More than a third said they had experienced at least some food shortage in the first month after being displaced. More than half reported that they had interacted with someone who seemed to be trying to defraud them. And more than a third said they had been displaced for longer than a month. The United States experienced 28 disasters last year that each cost at least $1 billion. But until recently, the number of Americans displaced by those disasters has been hard to estimate because of the nation’s patchwork response system.” – The New York Times
February 18, 2024
World’s largest oil companies have made $281bn profit since invasion of Ukraine
“Global Witness says the five ‘super-majors’ are the ‘main winners of the war’ while many struggle to heat their homes. The world’s five largest listed oil companies have made profits of more than a quarter of a trillion dollars since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to dramatic increases in energy prices and household bills.” – The Guardian
February 12, 2024
Revealed: the 1,200 big methane leaks from waste dumps trashing the planet
“The huge leaks of the potent greenhouse gas will doom climate targets, experts say, but stemming them would rapidly reduce global heating…. Landfills emit methane when organic waste such as food scraps, wood, card, paper and garden waste decompose in the absence of oxygen. Methane, also called natural gas, traps 86 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years, making it a critical target for climate action. Scientists have said emissions from unmanaged landfills could double by 2050 as urban populations grow, blowing the chance of avoiding climate catastrophe.” – Guardian
February 9, 2024
Atlantic Ocean circulation nearing ‘devastating’ tipping point, study finds
“Collapse in system of currents that helps regulate global climate would be at such speed that adaptation would be impossible…. They found Amoc is already on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the world.” – The Guardian
February 8, 2024
Ice cores provide first documentation of rapid Antarctic ice loss in the past
The first direct evidence that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet shrunk suddenly and dramatically at the end of the Last Ice Age, around eight thousand years ago. The evidence, contained within an ice core, shows that in one location the ice sheet thinned by 450 metres — that’s more than the height of the Empire State Building — in just under 200 years. This is the first evidence anywhere in Antarctica for such a fast loss of ice. Scientists are worried that today’s rising temperatures might destabilize parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the future, potentially passing a tipping point and inducing a runaway collapse.” – ScienceDaily
January 30, 2024
‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show
“They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth’s climate on a scale significant to human civilization,” said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami. ‘These findings are a startling confirmation that big oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years – for twice my lifetime – and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry’s denial of basic climate science decades later.’” – The Guardian
January 29, 2024
Move to sustainable food systems could bring $10tn benefits a year, study finds
“It found that existing food systems destroyed more value than they created due to hidden environmental and medical costs, in effect, borrowing from the future to take profits today. Food systems drive a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, putting the world on course for 2.7C of warming by the end of the century. This creates a vicious cycle, as higher temperatures bring more extreme weather and greater damage to harvests. Food insecurity also puts a burden on medical systems. The study predicted a business-as-usual approach would leave 640 million people underweight by 2050, while obesity would increase by 70%.” – The Guardian
January 28, 2024
With the World Stumbling Past 1.5 Degrees of Warming, Scientists Warn Climate Shocks Could Trigger Unrest and Authoritarian Backlash
“Most of the public seems unaware that global temperatures will soon push past the target to which the U.N. hoped to limit warming, but researchers see social and psychological crises brewing.” – Inside Climate News
January 25, 2024
Canada’s oil sands spew massive amounts of unmonitored polluting gases
“The sands release more of these pollution-causing gases than megacities such as Los Angeles, California, and about the same as the rest of Canada’s human-generated sources combined — including emissions from motor traffic and all other industries.” – Nature
January 24, 2024
Achieving sustainable urban growth on a global scale
“Urban areas contribute up to 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, urban areas globally will either double or triple, and the raw materials needed to build future cities is more than the world can sustainably provide…. ‘Our planet’s future is an urban future, and our systems of international administration must reflect that,’ the authors, Seto and co-authors Jessica Espey, Michael Keith, Susan Parnell, and Tim Schwanen, stated.” – ScienceDaily
January 24, 2024
Paper provides a clearer picture of severe hydro hazards
“Over the last two decades an estimated three billion people have been affected by water-related natural disasters such as droughts and floods. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of these hydro hazards, with some prognosticators estimating there will be upwards of $3.7 trillion in water-related damage over the next 30 years in the U.S. alone. Beyond damaging homes and infrastructure, severe wet and dry spells will also devastate crops and deplete water reservoirs.” – ScienceDaily
January 22, 2024
2025: A Civilizational Tipping Point
“There is a growing body of evidence that the 2024–2030 period will present us with a critical juncture, upending a centuries-long era of economic growth. No, it will have nothing to do with climate change or novel viruses: those two will come somewhat later. Missing entirely from mainstream discourse there is a greatly overlooked side of our predicament, which will set a nice little ‘game of musical chairs’ in motion most probably around 2025. Fasten your seat belts, while you can.” – Medium
January 22, 2024
Ancient zombie viruses in melting permafrost could cause new pandemic, scientists warn
“The effects of disturbing millennia-old viruses could be ‘calamitous’, scientists warn…. ‘At the moment, analyses of pandemic threats focus on diseases that might emerge in southern regions and then spread north,’ Prof Claverie, of Aix-Marseille University in France, told the paper. ‘By contrast, little attention has been given to an outbreak that might emerge in the far north and then travel south – and that is an oversight, I believe.’… “Huge mining operations are being planned, and are going to drive vast holes into the deep permafrost to extract oil and ores,’ he said. ‘Those operations will release vast amounts of pathogens that still thrive there. Miners will walk in and breathe the viruses. The effects could be calamitous.’” – Independent
January 17, 2024
Melting Greenland Has Lost 1 Trillion Tons More Ice Than Thought
“The Greenland ice sheet, an expanse of frozen water about three times the size of Texas, is disappearing much faster than previously thought, according to new research, and the difference may already be affecting the distribution of heat around the world. The mass of ice lost between 1985 and 2022 has been underestimated by as much as 20%, or more than 1,000 gigatons (1 trillion metric tons).” – Bloomberg
January 17, 2024
Climate change isn’t producing expected increase in atmospheric moisture over dry regions
“The findings are particularly puzzling because climate models have been predicting that the atmosphere will become more moist, even over dry regions. If the atmosphere is drier than anticipated, arid and semi-arid regions may be even more vulnerable to future wildfires and extreme heat than projected.” – ScienceDaily
January 14, 2024
PR giant Edelman worked with Koch network, despite climate pledges
Move by world’s largest public relations company, uncovered by tax records, alarms climate advocates…. The PR giant has made numerous climate declarations over the past decade, including making a pledge to eschew projects promoting climate denial. Partnering with a part of the Koch network, which has long worked to sow climate doubt, calls those pledges into question, said Duncan Meisel, the executive director of Clean Creatives, a non-profit pushing creative agencies to cut ties with fossil fuel polluters. ‘A relationship with the Koch network … puts them totally out of step with their stated climate commitments,’ said Meisel.” The Guardian
January 12, 2024
Earth boiled in 2023 — will it happen again in 2024?
“The final numbers are in, and 2023 is officially the hottest year on record — shattering previous records, as well as the expectations of many climate scientists. And researchers say that 2024 could be even worse.” – Nature
January 12, 2024
MIT Technology Review: The big story – The Atlantic’s vital currents could collapse. Scientists are racing to understand the dangers.
“If that happened, it would likely be a climate disaster. It could freeze the far north of Europe, driving down average winter temperatures by more than 10 °C. It might cut crop production and incomes across the continent as much of the land becomes cooler and drier. Sea levels could rise as much as a foot on the Eastern Seaboard, flooding homes and businesses up and down the coast. And the summer monsoons over major parts of Africa and Asia might weaken, raising the odds of droughts and famines that could leave untold numbers without adequate food or water. It would be a ‘global catastrophe,’ says Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.” – MIT Technology Review
January 11, 2024
2023 was the hottest in 125,000 years. But it won’t be the last
“However, with warming trends predicted, it may turn out to be merely an average year rather than an anomaly.” – South China Morning Post
January 11, 2024
Oceans break heat records five years in a row
“The heat stored in the world’s oceans increased by the greatest margin ever in 2023…. Cheng Lijing, an oceanographer at the IAP and the lead author of the paper, says that the findings reflect the growing amount of human-generated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. ‘The oceans store 90% of the excess heat in the Earth’s system. As long as the level of greenhouse gases remains relatively high in the atmosphere, the oceans will keep absorbing energy, leading to the increase of the heat in the oceans.’ He calls ocean heat content a ‘particularly robust indicator’ of global climate change because it is much less affected by natural fluctuations in Earth’s system than are air temperatures and sea surface temperatures.” – Nature
January 11, 2024
Record heat in 2023 worsened global droughts, floods and wildfires
“Record heat across the world profoundly impacted the global water cycle in 2023, contributing to severe storms, floods, megadroughts and bushfires, new research shows.” – ScienceDaily
January 10, 2024
Bird flu confirmed among mass sub-Antarctic seal deaths as virus continues global spread
Marco Falchieri, a scientist in the UK Animal and Plant Health Agency’s (APHA) influenza and avian virology team said, ‘My worst fear is an adaptive mutation to mammals, which we are not seeing in these new samples, but we need to keep monitoring,’ he said. An adaptive mutation, he added, ‘could mean it becomes a mammalian-adapted virus, and consequently increases risk for humans too.'” – The Guardian
January 9, 2024
Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe
“The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals. The vast majority (99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US.” – The Guardian
January 9, 2024
The climate costs of war and militaries can no longer be ignored
“More than 5% of global emissions are linked to conflict or militaries but countries continue to hide the true scale…. A proportion of those carbon costs come from military activities. For these, understanding is hampered by the longstanding culture of domestic environmental exceptionalism enjoyed by militaries, and how at the US’s insistence, this was translated into UN climate agreements.” – The Guardian
January 8, 2024
Global heating will pass 1.5C threshold this year, top ex-Nasa scientist says
“The internationally agreed threshold to prevent the Earth from spiraling into a new superheated era will be ‘passed for all practical purposes’ during 2024, the man known as the godfather of climate science has warned. James Hansen, the former Nasa scientist credited for alerting the world to the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, said that global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels, amplified by the naturally reoccurring El Niño climatic event, will by May push temperatures to as much as 1.7C (3F) above the average experienced before industrialization.” – The Guardian
January 2, 2023
From NYC to DC and beyond, cities on the East Coast are sinking
“Major cities on the U.S. Atlantic coast are sinking, in some cases as much as 5 millimeters per year — a decline at the ocean’s edge that well outpaces global sea level rise, confirms new research. Particularly hard hit population centers such as New York City and Long Island, Baltimore, and Virginia Beach and Norfolk are seeing areas of rapid ‘subsidence,’ or sinking land, alongside more slowly sinking or relatively stable ground, increasing the risk to roadways, runways, building foundations, rail lines, and pipelines, according to a new study.” – ScienceDaily
January 2, 2023
Reducing Inequality Is Essential in Tackling Climate Crisis, Researchers Argue
“Promoting climate-friendly behaviors will be more successful in societies where everyone has the capacity: financially, physically, and time-wise, to make changes.” – ScienceDaily
January 1, 2023
Big five oil companies to reward shareholders with record payouts
“The world’s five largest listed oil companies are expected to reward their investors with record payouts of more than $100bn (£79bn) for 2023 against a backdrop of growing public outrage at fossil fuel profits.” – The Guardian