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The Guardian
The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said.
As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.
“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said.
“Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”
AP News
The world population grew by 75 million people over the past year and on New Year’s Day it will stand at more than 8 billion people, according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday.
The worldwide growth rate in the past year was just under 1%. At the start of 2024, 4.3 births and two deaths are expected worldwide every second, according to the Census Bureau figures.
The growth rate for the United States in the past year was 0.53%, about half the worldwide figure. The U.S. added 1.7 million people and will have a population on New Year’s Day of 335.8 million people.
CNN
[…] Many researchers argue we’re in the middle of a sixth mass extinction, caused not by a city-size space rock but by the overgrowth and transformative behavior of a single species — Homo sapiens. Humans have destroyed habitats and unleashed a climate crisis.
Calculations in a September study published in the journal PNAS have suggested that groups of related animal species are disappearing at a rate 35% times higher than the normally expected rate.
And while every mass extinction has winners and losers, there is no reason to assume that human beings in this case would be among the survivors. […]
A growing number of scientists believe a sixth mass extinction event of a magnitude equal to the prior five has been unfolding for the past 10,000 years as humans have made their mark around the globe. […]
While the loss of even one species is devastating… [but now] entire categories of related species, or genera, are disappearing, a process he said is affecting whole ecosystems and endangering the survival of our own species.
Nature
[…] According to the latest estimates, the world would need to eliminate emissions of carbon dioxide in little more than a decade, while also slashing those of methane and other greenhouse gases, to have even a 50% chance of limiting average warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. […]
In the end, the climate doesn’t care who emits greenhouse gases. There is only one viable path forward, and that is for everybody to phase out almost all fossil fuels as quickly as possible. […]
No amount of clean energy is going to prevent further global warming without a concurrent phase out of fossil fuels… Doing so will be neither easy nor painless. […]
There is no truly safe level of warming, and every fraction of a degree matters. The main agenda must be to cut emissions as quickly as possible in an effort to head off expensive and potentially irreversible damage.
The Washington Post
You won’t hear President Biden talking about it much, but a key record has been broken during his watch: The United States is producing more oil than any country ever has. […]
The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline nationwide has dropped to close to $3, and analysts project it could stay that way leading up to the presidential election, potentially assuaging the economic anxieties of swing state voters who will be crucial to Biden’s hopes of a second term. […]
“If you are not looking carefully at what the administration is actually doing, it is easy to get the wrong impression,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm. “There are a lot of things going on at once. This is an administration which is focused on the energy transition, but also taking a pragmatic approach on fossil fuels.” […]
Voters who listen to Trump and Biden speak may come away with the impression that the opposite is true. Trump recently told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that he would act as a dictator… , in part because he wanted to “drill, drill, drill” for more oil. [Trump] has constantly attacked Biden’s clean energy agenda and accused him of squandering America’s prior “energy independence” because of allegiance to “environmental lunatics.”
The New Republic
While much of the country was occupied last week with holiday travel and time with family, a little-known government agency approved a $90 million guarantee for ING Capital to finance a liquified natural gas export facility in Texas. All told this year, that agency—the U.S. Export-Import Bank—has approved nearly $1 billion in fossil fuel lending, including $100 million for expanding an oil refinery in Indonesia and $400 million of insurance for revolving credit facilities to help commodity trading giant Trafigura purchase LNG. […]
Not long after taking office, in January 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order which tasked the bank and other federal agencies with identifying “steps through which the United States can promote ending international financing of carbon-intensive fossil fuel–based energy.” At U.N. climate talks at the end of that year, the White House joined 38 other countries and institutions in a vow to “end new direct public support for the international unabated fossil fuel energy sector within one year of signing this statement.” […]
EXIM defends its continued fossil fuel investments by pointing to the “non-discrimination” charge in its charter, preventing it from refusing funds to specific industries. Advocates counter that the statute does not preclude the bank from setting greenhouse gas intensity thresholds for projects that it backs.
NPR News
[…] "It's looking virtually certain at this point that 2023 will be the hottest year on record," says Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit that analyzes climate trends.
Though temperature records from December have yet to be finalized, climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have found there's a more than 99% chance that 2023 will have the hottest recorded global average temperature, beating out 2016, the previous leader.
The record-breaking year helped fuel climate-driven disasters around the globe – from extreme heat that plagued Arizona for weeks, to devastating floods in Libya, to record-hot oceans that caused corals to bleach off Florida. Scientists say the extreme temperatures are in line with forecasts for how the planet will continue to warm.
"If we don't change things, if we keep going on the trajectory that we're going, we will look back at 2023 and think of it as: remember that year that wasn't so bad?" says Tessa Hill, marine scientist at the University of California Davis.
Clean Technica
Tomorrow is New Year’s Day, the time when people start looking forward to a new year filled with promise and prosperity. But the mood is somber among climate scientists this year, where the consensus is that 2023 marked the end of the prelude to climate change and the beginning of the new reality of an overheated planet. The sense is that people are finally beginning to understand what is in store for them in a hotter world but that the realization has come too late to ward off its effects. The time for concerted action was in 2000, not 2024. […]
And yet, [a] popular candidate for president of the United States is a grotesque caricature of a man whose Christmas message was that all his detractors could “rot in hell.” He also promises, if elected, to put a stop to the policies of the current administration that are making massive investments in renewable energy and creating tens of thousands of new jobs in the process. The popularity of someone who would engage in such venomous attacks offers little hope that the US will continue to embrace effective climate action. If America fails to lead, that will give other nations reason to think they can shirk their obligations as well, sending the climate into an even faster downward spiral.
The solution is to elect leaders who will work to curtail the use of fossil fuels. Otherwise, there is little reason to believe that 2024 will bring anything other than more unnecessary misery on millions of people as our planet continues to warm.
El País
Last weekend, Brazil experienced its ninth heat wave of the year, with 15 states on alert due to high temperatures. These are the last blows of a year that’s on track to be the hottest in history. […]
Heat waves in the cities, the extreme drought that has dried up the rivers of the Amazon, or the floods in the south of the country are all extreme climatic events that have been multiplied this year, as a result of El Niño. This phenomenon warms the environment naturally, but specialists warn that it’s increasingly intense due to climate change. For the director of the Climate and Society Institute (iCS), María Netto, the increase in the frequency and intensity of environmental catastrophes is something that has come to stay. But that’s not all. “There are impacts that aren’t so perceptible, that are growing little by little, such as the increase in temperature, or the variation in the frequency of rain, which [are factors that] have an enormous impact on agriculture and people’s quality of life.
Inside Climate News
The push and pull of progress and catastrophe made 2023 one of the most discordant—and consequential—years for the world’s climate. […]
What follows is a digest of some of the year’s key climate and clean energy actions. […]
Supremes Take a Wrecking Ball to the Clean Water Act: In the most important regulatory lawsuit of the year, the U.S. Supreme Court in May sharply limited the EPA’s authority to protect wetlands. Taking the kind of narrow reading of the law that has become characteristic of the post-Trump court, the justices ruled that the Clean Water Act gave the EPA authority over only pollution in “navigable waters,” not in wetlands that become a conduit for pollution and runoff into those rivers and lakes during heavy rains or flooding. […]
Summer in Hell: The southern U.S. and many parts of the world endured months of extraordinarily high temperatures. Phoenix shattered its previous heat record with 31 days straight of temperatures over 110 degrees. The city confirmed 579 heat-related deaths, many of which came from the city’s unhoused population. Beijing set a new record for high-temperature days, which led to outdoor work being halted during the hottest parts of the day. The record-setting heatwaves, researchers found, would have been “almost impossible” without human-caused warming. […]
Smoke and Mosquitoes: Smoke from massive Canadian wildfires blanketed much of the eastern half of the United States this summer, spurring a conversation about public health and air quality. The season’s record heat also came into the conversation after eight people in the U.S. contracted malaria from local mosquitoes—the nation’s first such cases in 20 years. As climate change plays out, researchers say, warmer and wetter weather could mean more mosquito-borne illnesses. […]
U.S. Climate Assessment Is Grim Reading: This year, the federal government released the Fifth National Climate Assessment, its preeminent report on climate change impacts, risks and responses. Its conclusion: As the impacts of climate change worsen, no part of the country will be spared. Ignoring those risks has ever-increasing costs, the report said. In the 1980s, the country experienced, on average, one billion-dollar disaster every four months, according to the NCA. Now, there is one every three weeks, on average.
U.S. Global Change Research Program
[…] While there are still uncertainties about how the planet will react to rapid warming, the degree to which climate change will continue to worsen is largely in human hands. […]
Despite an increase in adaptation actions across the country, current adaptation efforts and investments are insufficient to reduce today’s climate-related risks and keep pace with future changes in the climate. […]
The global warming observed over the industrial era is unequivocally caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities—primarily burning fossil fuels. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2)—the primary greenhouse gas produced by human activities—and other greenhouse gases continue to rise due to ongoing global emissions. Stopping global warming would require both reducing emissions of CO2 to net zero and rapid and deep reductions in other greenhouse gases. […]
While US greenhouse gas emissions are falling, the current rate of decline is not sufficient to meet national and international climate commitments and goals. US net greenhouse gas emissions remain substantial and would have to decline by more than 6% per year on average, reaching net-zero emissions around midcentury, to meet current national mitigation targets and international temperature goals; by comparison, US greenhouse gas emissions decreased by less than 1% per year on average between 2005 and 2019.
Global Carbon Budget
The Global Carbon Budget has over 100 contributors from many organisations and countries. It was founded by the Global Carbon Project international science team to track the trends in global carbon emissions and sinks and is a key measure of progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement. It’s widely recognised as the most comprehensive report of its kind. The budget is updated annually and published at the COP meetings every year.
The Guardian
[…] For the scientists fighting to save them from extinction, bearing witness to their decline can be a profound and devastating responsibility. In his nearly 50-year career, Jim Jacobi, a biologist with the Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center, has been one of the last people on earth to ever see at least four birds that are now considered extinct. In 1984, he was one of the last people to ever hear the song of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō.
“I still get goosebumps – the hair in the back of my neck stands up when I think about it,” he said. He and two other researchers had hiked out to a remote forest in Kauai when they heard it. “That Oo’oo – oo-auh sound.
“It was just amazing – very flute-like,” he recalled. He immediately turned on his recorder to capture the song. […]
[The mating song the male Kauaʻi ʻōʻō was singing was supposed to be a duet. The pauses in between his song were where the female would have sung her part.]
The New York Times
“It seems like we’ve been battling climate change for decades and made no progress,” Dr. Hannah Ritchie says. “I want to push back on that.” Ritchie, a senior researcher in the Program on Global Development at the University of Oxford and deputy editor at the online publication Our World in Data, is the author of the upcoming book, “Not the End of the World.”
In it, she argues that the flood of doom-laden stats and stories about climate change is obscuring our ability to imagine solutions to the crisis and envision a sustainable, livable future. That brighter story is one Ritchie, who is 30, builds by pointing to the progress being made in areas like deforestation, air cleanliness and the falling cost and rising adoption of clean-energy technologies. “For a long time I felt helplessness, that these problems were massive and unsolvable,” Ritchie says. “It’s important to counter those feelings. We need to go much faster, but there is a lot of progress to acknowledge and lessons to learn.” […]
Hannah, in your most honest, unguarded moments, how optimistic are you that humanity will rise to the challenge of climate change?
We won’t reach 1.5 degrees, that’s gone. But I am optimistic we can get very close to two degrees. But the question is, Can we keep temperatures to two degrees and at the same time create resilience, lift people out of poverty, adapt such that we limit those damages as much as possible? On that, I’m fairly optimistic.