[MCN] Even before reaching a 1.5C limit, deadlier heat waves, deeper drought, drying household wells, death in the forests -- Whodunnit? Many of us, but not equally

[Lance Olsen]

There’s “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” today, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) insisted in a new report

https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129912



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“A death zone is creeping over the surface of Earth, gaining a little more ground each year. 

“As an analysis published this week in Nature Climate Change shows, since 1980, these temporary hells on Earth have opened up hundreds of times to take life (C. Mora et al. Nature Clim. Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3322 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3322>; 2017).”

“The analysis also reveals that even aggressive reductions in emissions will lead the number of deadly heatwaves to soar in the coming decades.”

Nature  22 June 2017) doi:10.1038/546452a


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“Droughts of the twenty-first century are characterized by hotter temperatures, longer duration, and greater spatial extent …. This situation increases the vulnerability of ecosystems to drought, including a rise in drought-driven tree mortality globally (Allen et al. 2015) and anticipated ecosystem transformations from one state to another—for example, forest to a shrubland (Jiang et al. 2013). When a drought drives changes within ecosystems, there can be a ripple effect through human communities that depend on those ecosystems for critical goods and services (Millar and Stephenson 2015). …. Despite the high costs to both nature and people, current drought research, management, and policy perspectives often fail to evaluate how drought affects ecosystems and the “natural capital” they provide to human communities. Integrating these human and natural dimensions of drought is an essential step toward addressing the rising risk of drought in the twenty-first century.” 

Crausbay, et al. Defining Ecological Drought for the Twenty-First Century. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. December 2017.

Open Access
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0292.1 


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Household water wells are drying up in record numbers as California drought worsen
Dorany Pineda, Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee
Thu, December 8, 2022 at 6:00 AM·

7 min read

https://news.yahoo.com/household-water-wells-drying-record-130012790.html

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PNAS 2022 Vol. 119 No. 42 

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2210525119 

OPINION 

Climate change and the threat to civilization 

Daniel Steel, C. Tyler DesRoches, and Kian Mintz-Woo

1st 2 paragraphs

In a speech about climate change from April 4th of this year, UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres lambasted “the empty pledges that put us on track to an unlivable world” and warned that “we are on a fast track to climate disaster” (1). Although stark, Guterres’ statements were not novel. Guterres has made similar remarks on previous occasions, as have other public figures, including Sir David Attenborough, who warned in 2018 that inaction on climate change could lead to “the collapse of our civilizations” (2). In their article, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021”—which now has more than 14,700 signatories from 158 countries—William J. Ripple and colleagues state that climate change could “cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable” (3). 

Because civilization cannot exist in unlivable or uninhabitable places, all of the above warnings can be understood as asserting the potential for anthropogenic climate change to cause civilization collapse (or “climate collapse”) to a greater or lesser extent. Yet despite discussing many adverse impacts, climate science literature, as synthesized for instance by assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has little at all to say about whether or under which conditions climate change might threaten civilization. 




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Book review : Under the Sky We Make. Kimberly Nicholas, PhD

Excerpt : 

“Individual responsibility has become something of a flashpoint in the climate discourse. 

“On the one hand, oil companies love to harp on about <https://grist.org/energy/footprint-fantasy/> personal carbon footprints as a way of distracting from their much larger contributions to the climate crisis, both through the fossil fuel products they make and their longstanding, ongoing efforts to delay climate action and misinform the public. 

“At the same time, prominent journalists and scientists have waved off individual climate actions as a distraction from the systemic changes that are needed to solve the crisis — changes like overhauling our electricity and transit systems through governmental investments in clean energy, better regulation, and carbon pricing. 

“They’re joined by a growing chorus of climate justice advocates who rightly point out that asking poor people to make difficult dietary shifts or give up the car they need to get to work is completely unfair.

“That’s not what Nicholas is doing. Her message isn’t aimed at folks struggling to make ends meet, but at people making a middle-class income or higher who live in a wealthy country like the United States, Germany, or France. Far from a distraction, Nicholas argues that the climate impact of the carbon elite is something we need to focus on — individually    and systematically. She points out that globally, more than two-thirds of climate pollution can be attributed to household consumption <https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es803496a>, and that the richest 10 percent of the world population — those making more than $38,000 a year <https://wedocs.unep.org/xmlui/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/34432/EGR20ch6.pdf?sequence=3> — is responsible for about half of those emissions.”

https://grist.org/culture/cutting-your-carbon-footprint-matters-a-lot-if-youre-rich/


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