Environment

Let me tell you how much fun it was to deal with late-May temps in early March in a metal box.

March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data. And the next year or so looks to turn the dial up on global warmth even more, as some forecasts predict a brewing El Niño will reach super strength.

Not only was it the hottest March on record for the US but the amount it was above normal beat any other month in history for the lower 48 states. March’s average temperature of 50.85F(10.47C) was 9.35F (5.19C) above the 20th-century normal for March.

That easily passed the old record of 8.9F set in March 2012 as the most abnormally hot month on record – regardless of the month of the year – according to records released on Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).

The average maximum temperature for March was especially high at 11.4F above the 20th-century average and was almost a degree warmer than the average daytime high for April, Noaa said.

Argentine MPs approved a bill early Thursday promoted by President Javier Milei that authorizes mining in ecologically sensitive areas of glaciers and permafrost, and has outraged environmentalists.

With apologies to Betteridge, the jury is out. But this is scarcely a ragtag group.

The world, as we know, is in trouble. The last three years have been the hottest ever recorded. Global emissions are still at record highs. The planet is now consistently flirting with the 1.5C limit it promised not to cross. Increasingly, it feels as if we need a genuine miracle to stop us from sleepwalking into catastrophe. Could that miracle be an environmental warning from a woman in her pants?

For those of us on the other side of the pond, that means panties, not trousers.

This is the stated desire of Headline Newds, a new series of web videos by actor Megan Prescott, film-maker Bree Essrig and “climate narrative strategist” Jessica Riches. Released through the not-for-profit Yellow Dot Studios – belonging to Adam McKay, creator of movies The Big Short and Don’t Look Up – Headline Newds is made up of bite-size videos in which the climate emergency is broken down and raunchily explained to us by a variety of OnlyFans models.

It’s an interesting trick, and one that we have seen trialled elsewhere. When McKay made The Big Short in 2015, it was a gamble. As compelling as the story was, it hinged on an understanding of mortgage-backed securities and their integration into the broader credit markets underpinning the 2008 financial crisis. And rather than risk alienating audiences with a long, boring explanation, he hired Margot Robbie to talk us through the subject while wiggling around in a bubble bath.

There is a very short logical step from that to Headline Newds. And so we have the launch episode, The Sun is Daddy, in which Prescott slowly removes her clothes while explaining that solar energy could meet our global energy demands with less land than is being used by the fossil fuel industry. Or, in her words: “Daddy is a giver.”

Extreme heat is already creating “non-survivable” conditions for humans in heatwaves that have killed thousands and likely many more, according to new research that warns people are more susceptible to rising temperatures than first thought.

Scientists re-examined six extreme heatwaves between 2003 and 2024 and found that when temperature, humidity and the body’s ability to stay cool were accounted for, all were potentially deadly for older people.

The absolute limit for humans to survive had been assumed to be a six-hour exposure to a wet bulb temperature of 35C – a measure that accounts for temperature and humidity but has rarely been observed on the planet at that level.

Heatwaves in Mecca (Saudi Arabia, 2024), Bangkok (Thailand, 2024), Phoenix (United States, 2023), Mount Isa (Australia, 2019), Larkana (Pakistan, 2015) and Seville (Spain, 2003) had seen thousands of deaths despite none approaching that wet bulb limit, the research found.

But when scientists applied a new model of human survivability that takes into account the body’s ability to function and stay cool depending on age, they found all six events had seen non-survivable periods for older people who could not find shade.

The Iran war is also a climate war. Beyond its terrible human costs, the war’s disruptions of oil, gas, fertilizer and other shipments is another reminder of the risks inherent in basing the world economy on fossil fuels. The war’s jets, missiles and aircraft carriers, and the tankers, refineries and buildings they blow up, represent millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions that further imperil a climate system that is already “very close” to a point of no return, scientists say, after which runaway global warming could not be stopped. Nevertheless, petrostate leaders around the world continue doing their utmost to stave off a desperately needed course correction.

Now, a little noticed ray of hope may be peeking over the horizon.

At the UN Cop30 climate summit last November, Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in vetoing calls to develop a “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels globally; indeed, the words “fossil fuels” were not even mentioned in the final text agreed at Cop30. But the 85 countries on the losing end of that veto may soon turn the tables.

Many of those governments will gather in Colombia on 28-29 April for a conference to begin a global transition away from oil, gas and coal. Critically, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will not be governed by UN rules, which require consensus, but by majority rule, thus preventing a handful of countries from sabotaging progress as petrostates did at Cop30. What’s more, the underlying terrain of this conference will no longer be principally politics, but economics: not the words that canny negotiators can keep in or out of a diplomatic text, but the implacable market forces that shape the world economy, including the potential emergence of a de facto economic superpower.

Virtual power plants continue to be one of the buzziest energy industry obsessions.

For good reason.

It can take many months or years to build one-off utility-scale power plants at a central location such as a nuclear reactor, solar farm, or offshore wind project.

Virtual power plants (VPPs), on the other hand, can replicate the scale of these projects much faster by aggregating energy technologies connected virtually and operating in many homes or businesses. Controlled by software, solar panels, EV chargers, battery energy storage systems, heat pumps, smart thermostats, and other distributed energy technologies can be synced up to send power to, or reduce demand on, the grid as needed.

CPower, Sunrun, Uplight, and Voltus are among the many companies jockeying to operate virtual power plants in the U.S. But public sector players see a role for themselves in the space, too.

It turns out that one of the leading public sector VPP operators is in my own backyard.

Every summer, people descend on the wildflower capital of Colorado to see grasslands flush with corn lilies, aspen sunflowers and sub-alpine larkspur. In January 1991, scientists set up a unique experiment in these Rocky Mountain meadows. It was one of the first (and longest running) to work out how the changing climate would affect an ecosystem.

At the time, it was believed a temperature increase could lead to longer, lusher grasses. But instead of flourishing, the grasses and wildflowers started to disappear, replaced by sage brush. The experimental meadows morphed into a desert-like scrubland. Even the fungi in the soils were transformed by heat.

The experiment provided a window into the future. These meadows will disappear in the coming decades if warming reaches 2C above preindustrial levels, according to the resulting article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings are alarming, not just for Colorado, but for mountains across the planet as “shrubification” takes over.

While the US government continues to call climate change a hoax and attack the science, in courtrooms from The Hague to Honolulu, fossil fuel companies are taking a different approach. Shell, Chevron, RWE and TotalEnergies all accept that climate change is real, human-caused and serious. The era of corporate climate denial, at least in legal proceedings, is largely over.

What has replaced it is a more nuanced position: accepting the science of climate change while contesting their responsibility for it.

New research published in the journal Transnational Environmental Law offers the first systematic analysis of how major fossil fuel companies defend themselves when taken to court over their role in causing global warming. Drawing on case documents from landmark lawsuits, the research identifies three distinct strategies companies are using.

The first and broadest argument is that climate change is a collective problem caused by society’s demand for energy, not by the companies that supply it. Chevron and Shell, in separate cases on different continents, cited the same passage from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report – that greenhouse gas emissions are driven by “population size, economic activity, lifestyle, energy use” – to argue that responsibility lies with modern industrial society as a whole.

The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.

Drawing on years of scientific data, I’ve been arguing for some time that this risk exists – and that governments are completely unprepared for it. In 2023, I made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into environmental change and food security, with a vast list of references. Called as a witness, I spent much of the time explaining that the issue was much wider than the inquiry’s scope.

While some MPs got it, governments as a whole simply don’t seem to understand what we’re facing. It’s this: the global food system is systemically fragile in the same way that the global financial system was before the 2008 crash.

It’s easy to see potential vulnerabilities, such as a fertiliser supply crunch caused by the closure of the strait of Hormuz, or harvest failures caused by climate breakdown. But these are not the thing itself. They are disruptions of the kind that might trigger the thing. The thing itself is the entire system sliding off a cliff. The same factors that would have brought down the financial system, were it not for a bailout amounting to trillions of dollars, now threaten to bring down the food system.

When the Trump administration announced plans last year to rescind a rule limiting roadbuilding and timber harvests on millions of acres of national forests and grasslands, officials called the repeal necessary to prevent and manage wildfires.

But as the U.S. Department of Agriculture prepares to release its draft environmental impact statement for the rescission, that justification is unraveling. And many critics of the move see the claim that roads are needed to fight fires in remote forests as cover for a giveaway to the timber industry.

On average, about 8 million acres have burned each year between 2017 and 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly double the average from 1987 to 1991. Wildfires on federal lands average about five times the size of those in the rest of the country, leading some of the nation’s top land managers to argue that national forests are a front line for fighting the nation’s steep increase in wildland blazes.

Yet a chorus of fire scientists, frontline firefighters, legal experts and the agency’s own historical record have contradicted that reasoning, saying that roads don’t reduce wildfire risk; they multiply it.

If he had to name the five biggest obstacles to effective wildfire response, lack of roads “probably either wouldn’t be on the list, or it’d be at the bottom,” said Lucas Mayfield, a former Hotshot firefighter and co-founder of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit that advocates for policy on behalf of firefighters.

The primary unit of climate collapse is the zettajoule. If you have never heard of this term, you are not alone. Even scientists who work on a planetary scale struggle to relate the immensity of the change measured by this titanic unit of energy.

What is a zettajoule?

A zettajoule is a billion trillion joules. Typed out on a calculator or computer screen, the row of 21 zeros looks absurdly long – a train of seven carriages, each with three empty windows. Experts often have to resort to abstract terms like “unfathomable”, “almost beyond comprehension” and “really big” to ensure our tiny human minds are sufficiently blown away by what these numbers convey.

Why are zettajoules in the news (again)?

When used to calculate the heat on our planet, that train is accelerating and running out of track. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned this week in its latest annual State of the Global Climate report that our world has a huge and growing energy imbalance, which is warming the oceans, the land and the air to dangerous levels.

The new report says Earth’s energy imbalance increased by about 11 zettajoules a year between 2005 and 2025, which is equivalent to about 18 times total human energy use.

War in the Middle East is once again exposing the downsides of our addiction to oil and gas. Transportation and electricity costs are soaring for ordinary families, while multinational oil giants and Vladimir Putin reap windfalls. Then add in the usual planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

Understandably, $5-a-gallon gasoline and other fallouts from the energy crisis are inspiring calls for America to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. And though it’s become unfashionable to say so, individual Americans can also change our expensive and destructive gas-guzzling ways. Yes, President Trump’s attacks on electric vehicles, renewable power and fuel-efficiency rules are awful. But nobody’s really stopping you from buying electric vehicles, installing solar panels or using less fuel.

It’s not a bad idea. You can save real money while doing a small part to help stabilize the climate, defund Big Oil and even reduce the risk of future conflicts in fossil-fueled nations like Iran and Venezuela. It’s true that your contribution to a better world will only be a drop in the bucket, but lots of individual drops, after all, are what fill buckets.

The case is quickly becoming a national test of how states deploy terrorism laws against protest movements tied to environmental issues.

By the 1980s, Detroit’s once titanic carmakers were being upended by rivals from Japan. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler had grown rich selling gas guzzlers, but when oil prices rose and suddenly cheap, fuel-efficient Japanese models looked attractive, they were unprepared. The collapse in sales led to hundreds of thousands of job losses in the automotive heartland of the US.

Now western car manufacturers are making what one former boss calls a similar “profound strategic mistake” as they pull back from electric vehicles (EVs) and refocus on the combustion engine just as oil prices are soaring once again. Experts say the industry’s future – and that of tens of millions of jobs – could be on the line. This time, however, the threat is from China.

Cheap, well-made electric cars from brands such as BYD and Leapmotor are finding buyers across Europe. BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s biggest EV seller this year. Chinese marques are fast seizing the market share once dominated by the likes of Volkswagen, Ford, Peugeot and Renault.

In the US, the pullback has been even more severe. Donald Trump has in effect wiped out the country’s electrification push by cancelling tax credits for consumers and dismantling exhaust emissions rules, which he calls a scam.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/37077490

Whatever the actual weather may be where you are, this Blender creation by visual artist @toolbrowny (on YouTube) aka shanedioneda.com, may give you a spring experience.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/36901105

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/36900956

Reading through speculation about what the **Monsterverse’s new kaiju Titan X aka Le Gran Dios de la Mar may be (such as the article linked above), it sounds increasingly as though she may be a new protective mother figure, impacted or possibly even responding to the effects of global heating on the oceans.

If so, this season’s Titan threat may put Monarch: Legacy of Monsters in a unique position among current major science fiction streaming shows in directly taking on a Climate Change/Emergency scenario with no gloss of allegory.

It is nonetheless absolutely in keeping with the long tradition of the broader franchise in critiquing the consequences of human actions on the planet.

The 70+ year Godzilla franchise is unique in embedding the impact of humanity on the Earth’s environment from its outset.

The narrative of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as later nuclear weapons testing and nuclear power plants, calling up kaiju, literally “strange creature”, is a constant within the franchise.

In addition to atomic/nuclear radiation, films such as Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971), with its smog monster, and the more recent Monsterverse film Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), which ends with Godzilla leading an ecological recovery, the franchise continues to underscore its deep theme that humanity shares the Earth and will bear the consequences for its actions.

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Toxic smoke from burning oil depots has blanketed Iran’s capital following missile strikes.

Warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean may have brought devastating floods to the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization, according to a recent study in which its authors link three wildly different lines of evidence to tell the story.

People in Shang Dynasty China, around 3,000 years ago, probably didn’t realize that the massive floods sweeping through their heartland were the product of typhoons battering the southern Chinese coast hundreds of kilometers away. They certainly couldn’t have seen that the sheer intensity of those typhoons was fueled by a sudden shift in temperature cycles over the Pacific Ocean thousands of kilometers to the south and east. But, with the benefit of 3,000 years of hindsight and scientific progress, Nanjing University meteorologist Ke Ding and colleagues recently managed to connect the dots. The results are like a handwritten warning from the Shang Dynasty about how to prepare for modern climate change.

Around 3,000 years ago, two great civilizations were flourishing in central China. In the Yellow River Valley, the Shang Dynasty rose to prominence, producing the first Chinese writing and also sacrificing thousands of people in ceremonies at the capital, Yinxu. Meanwhile, on the Chengdu Plain in southwestern China, the Shanxingdui culture built a walled capital city and sculpted large bronze heads, gold foil masks, and tools of jade and ivory, which they buried in huge sacrificial pits.

Archaeological sites across central China reveal that at various points between 2,500 and 4,000 years ago, disasters rocked these thriving societies, decimating the population, forcing settlements to relocate, and causing major cultural shifts and political upheaval.

The benefits of agrivoltaics—the placement of solar panels over cropland for more efficient land use—varies dramatically depending on where it’s located, finds new research from the United States. As agrivoltaics spread and attract more interest, this is one of the first studies to really dig into its inherent trade-offs, and identify places where it works well for both electricity generation and farmers’ bottom lines.

The trade-offs in question are that while the huge increased electricity production enabled by more solar panels is a positive, and renting out land to solar providers can also provide new revenue streams for farmers, the shading effect of solar panels can disturb crop growth. Weighing up these costs and benefits has complicated the picture for farmers who may be considering agrivoltaics on their land.

To shed some light on the issue, a study led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign started by looking at 14 years of maize and soybean crop data from the Midwestern US. The dataset, which included information on crop yield and water-use, compared conventional non-solar cropland with farms where a third of the productive area was covered by panels. They also applied climate simulations to the data, to determine how crop-growing conditions and solar panel impact could change under a low, high, and highest-emission future scenario.

Very quickly, stark differences appeared in the model, between the more humid eastern stretch of the Midwest, and the drier semiarid western Midwest.

The economics of running fossil fuel infrastructure rely on having an economy of scale. As that scale decreases, the cost efficiency will plummet, leading the public sector to abandon them, most likely. We will either need to nationalize some of these things and run them at a loss as the sunsetting happens, or people will be left behind on the old fuels they can no longer access.