WTF Climate Change News

[Beebo Brink]

‘Like the flip of a switch, it’s gone’: has the ecosystem of the UK’s largest lake collapsed? | Northern Ireland | The Guardian

 

[Free]

"We're" to blame.

Exxon CEO blames public for failure to fix climate change

The world isn’t on track to meet its climate goals — and it’s the public’s fault, a leading oil company CEO told journalists. Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from …

thehill.com

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

"We're" to blame.

Exxon CEO blames public for failure to fix climate change

The world isn’t on track to meet its climate goals — and it’s the public’s fault, a leading oil company CEO told journalists. Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from …

thehill.com

Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from Fortune that the world has “waited too long” to begin investing in a broader suite of technologies to slow planetary heating.

He's saying Exxon shareholders are to blame. Let us begin rounding them up.

 

[Soen Eber]

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

"We're" to blame.

Exxon CEO blames public for failure to fix climate change

The world isn’t on track to meet its climate goals — and it’s the public’s fault, a leading oil company CEO told journalists. Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from …

thehill.com

Obviously companies like Exxon are especially guilty since so many have funded denial about climate change. ...but there is some truth to saying the public is also at fault. Anyone who consumes an unnecessary amount of energy is also at fault. Anyone who consumes products with a higher climate impact than substitutes is also at fault. It's a bit too easy to just point the finger at the corporations supplying what we want.

What I'm saying is there is a massive collective failure to do enough, but yeah, fuck that guy in particular. Exxon is at least as guilty as anything else.

 

[Beebo Brink]

‘Our yields are going to be appalling’: one of wettest winters in decades hits England’s farms | Farming | The Guardian

Speak to farmers across the country and you will hear stories of how one of the wettest winters in decades has ruined thousands of acres of crops and put farms under tremendous financial pressure.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

More than half of new power installed in US last year was solar

“It’s really monumental,” said Shawn Rumery, senior director of research at the Solar Energy Industries Association, or SEIA. The trade group announced the 2023 numbers in a report released with analytics firm Wood MacKenzie. The 32.4 gigawatts that came online in the U.S. last year shattered the previous high of 23.6 gigawatts recorded in 2021 and accounted for 53 percent of new capacity. Natural gas was next in line at a distant 18 percent.

SEIA called 2023 the best year for renewables since the second world war. Texas and California led a solar surge driven mostly by utility-scale installations, which jumped 77 percent year-over-year to 22.5 gigawatts. The residential and commercial sectors also reached new milestones. Only the relatively nascent community solar market missed its previous mark, though not by much, said Rumery. Overall he called it an “almost record-setting year across the industry.”

 

[Isabeau]

$500K Dune Built to Protect Coastal Homes Lasts Just 3 Days

The handmade barrier, which used 14,000 tons of sand, quickly crumbled.

www.thedailybeast.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

Circle August on your calendar.

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory (nature.com)

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.

 

[Cindy Claveau]

Melting polar ice is slowing the Earth’s rotation, with possible consequences for timekeeping

A study published Wednesday found that the melting of polar ice — an accelerating trend driven primarily by human-caused climate change — has caused the Earth to spin less quickly than it would otherwise.


The author of the study, Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, said that as ice at the poles melts, it changes where the Earth’s mass is concentrated. The change, in turn, affects the planet’s angular velocity.

Agnew compared the dynamic to a figure skater twirling on ice: “If you have a skater who starts spinning, if she lowers her arms or stretches out her legs, she will slow down,” he said. But if a skater’s arms are drawn inward, the skater will twirl faster.

Less solid ice at the poles, then, means more mass around the equator — Earth’s waist.

“What you’re doing with the ice melt is you’re taking water that’s frozen solid in places like Antarctica and Greenland, and that frozen water is melting, and you move the fluids to other places on the planet,” said Thomas Herring, a professor of geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new study. “The water flows off towards the equator.”

 

[Beebo Brink]

Copernicus online portal offers terrifying view of climate emergency | Climate crisis | The Guardian

 

[Isabeau]

We’re doomed.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

David Ho (@davidho@mastodon.world)

Attached: 1 image I’m a bad person

mastodon.world

 

[Beebo Brink]

More than half of new power installed in US last year was solar

Sooo, about all that solar....

Solar panel waste to reach crisis levels in next two to three years, Australian experts warn | Energy | The Guardian

The solar industry is quickly approaching its tipping point, with unprecedented levels of waste headed for the tip.

Solar panel waste levels will reach a crisis point in the next two to three years instead of by 2030, as was previously forecast, according to a white paper released this week.

Led by Rong Deng, a renewable energy engineering researcher at the University of NSW, the paper predicted that if the production of solar panels expands by five to 10 times, as is hoped, “we will run out of the world’s reserves of silver in just two decades”.

 

[Free]

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Good news - world's fossil fuel producers are on track to nearly quadruple the amount of extracted gas and oil from newly approved projects by the end of this decade, with the US leading the way! El cheapo oilo coming back again!

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/28/oil-and-gas-fossil-fuels-report

 

[Beebo Brink]

Faster than expected. Again.

Schools close and crops wither as ‘historic’ heatwave hits south-east Asia | Extreme heat | The Guardian

“The level of heat the globe has experienced over the last 12 months, both on the land and in the ocean has surprised science,” said Prof Benjamin Horton, the director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore. “We always knew we were going to be headed in this direction with our increasing greenhouse gases, but the fact that we’re shattering all these records in 2023, and 2024, is perhaps slightly ahead of time.”

“We’re just not prepared. There’s very few, if any, places in the world that are resilient to this type of heat,” he said, adding that societies needed to adapt.

(emphasis added)

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Durch police has detained Greta Thunberg twice on 06/04/2024 when she joined Extinction Rebellion to block a motorwoay in Den Haag.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg arrested in the Netherlands

Dutch authorities have detained Greta Thunberg and other climate protesters from the Extinction Rebellion group after they blocked a motorway in The Hague on Saturday.

www.dw.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

As if we weren't fucked enough already.

Geoengineering Test Quietly Launches Salt Crystals into Atmosphere | Scientific American

The nation's first outdoor test to limit global warming by increasing cloud cover launched Tuesday from the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay.

The experiment, which organizers didn't widely announce to avoid public backlash, marks the acceleration of a contentious field of research known as solar radiation modification. The concept involves shooting substances such as aerosols into the sky to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

The move led by researchers at the University of Washington has renewed questions about how to effectively and ethically study promising climate technologies that could also harm communities and ecosystems in unexpected ways. The experiment is spraying microscopic salt particles into the air, and the secrecy surrounding its timing caught even some experts off guard.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

We’re doomed.

Not only are we running out of time, but there is a giant percentage of the population that is either in total denial of the problem or isn't willing to actually support any policies that involve them having to give up something. It won't be politically feasible to do ANYTHING about it till it's far too late.