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‘Everybody has a breaking point’: how the climate crisis affects our brains
The Guardian
[…] a changing climate doesn’t just shape the environment in which we live. Rather, the climate crisis spurs visceral and tangible transformations in our very brains. As the world undergoes dramatic environmental shifts, so too does our neurological landscape. Fossil-fuel-induced changes – from rising temperatures to extreme weather to heightened levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide – are altering our brain health, influencing everything from memory and executive function to language, the formation of identity, and even the structure of the brain. The weight of nature is heavy, and it presses inward.
Evidence comes from a variety of fields. Psychologists and behavioural economists have illustrated the ways in which temperature spikes drive surges in everything from domestic violence to online hate speech. Cognitive neuroscientists have charted the routes by which extreme heat and surging CO2 levels impair decision-making, diminish problem-solving abilities, and short-circuit our capacity to learn. Vectors of brain disease, such as ticks and mosquitoes, are seeing their habitable ranges expand as the world warms. And as researchers like [Yoko] Nomura have shown, you don’t need to go to war to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder: the violence of a hurricane or wildfire is enough. It appears that, due to epigenetic inheritance, you don’t even need to have been born yet.
Dumps Are a Big Driver of Warming, Study Says
The New York Times
They’re vast expanses that can be as big as towns: open landfills where household waste ends up, whether it’s vegetable scraps or old appliances.
These landfills also belch methane, a powerful, planet-warming gas, on average at almost three times the rate reported to federal regulators, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.
The study measured methane emissions at about 20 percent of about 1,200 large, operating landfills in the United States. It adds to a growing body of evidence that landfills are a significant driver of climate change, said Riley Duren, founder of the public-private partnership Carbon Mapper, who took part in the study.
Extreme heat drives up food prices. Just how bad will it get?
Grist
Sometimes climate change appears where you least expect it — like the grocery store. Food prices have climbed 25 percent over the past four years, and Americans have been shocked by the growing cost of staples like beef, sugar, and citrus.
While many factors, like supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, have contributed to this increase, extreme heat is already raising food prices, and it’s bound to get worse, according to a recent study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. The analysis found that heatflation could drive up food prices around the world by as much as 3 percentage points per year in just over a decade and by about 2 percentage points in North America. For overall inflation, extreme weather could lead to anywhere from a 0.3 to 1.2 percentage point increase each year depending on how many carbon emissions countries pump into the atmosphere.
Though that might sound small, it’s actually “massive,” according to Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “That’s half of the Fed’s overall goal for inflation,” he said, referencing the Federal Reserve’s long-term aim of limiting it to 2 percent. The Labor Department recently reported that consumer prices climbed 3.2 percent over the past 12 months.
Antarctic Sea Ice Near Historic Lows; Arctic Ice Continues Decline
NASA
Sea ice at both the top and bottom of the planet continued its decline in 2024. In the waters around Antarctica, ice coverage shrank to near-historic lows for the third year in a row. The recurring loss hints at a long-term shift in conditions in the Southern Ocean, likely resulting from global climate change, according to scientists at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Meanwhile, the 46-year trend of shrinking and thinning ice in the Arctic Ocean shows no sign of reversing.
“Sea ice acts like a buffer between the ocean and the atmosphere,” said ice scientist Linette Boisvert of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Sea ice prevents much of the exchange of heat and moisture from the relatively warm ocean to the atmosphere above it.”
Less ice coverage allows the ocean to warm the atmosphere over the poles, leading to more ice melting in a vicious cycle of rising temperatures.
Climate change has slowed Earth’s rotation — and could affect how we keep time
Nature
Climate change is starting to alter how humans keep time.
An analysis published in Nature on 27 March has predicted that melting ice caps are slowing Earth’s rotation to such an extent that the next leap second — the mechanism used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with that based on Earth’s unstable speed of rotation — will be delayed by three years.
“Enough ice has melted to move sea level enough that we can actually see the rate of the Earth’s rotation has been affected,” says Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and author of the study.
One Of The World’s Most Important Ocean Currents Really Is Slowing Down
IFL Science
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has slowed substantially since the mid-90s, a new study reveals. AMOC is an essential component of the systems that keep the Earth’s regional climates in balance. Without it, Europe could suffer colder winters while the tropics could heat up even faster. Climatologists have identified AMOC as one of the most vulnerable parts of the planetary heat balance for decades, but uncertainty has remained about how much change is taking place. […]
Measurement efforts consistently show AMOC is weakening, but disagree on how much.
Dr Alexey Mishonov of the University of Maryland and co-authors have measured the strength of AMOC in a new way. […]
"If AMOC slows down, the heat exchange will be reduced, which in turn will affect the climate, causing hot areas to get hotter and cold areas to get colder," said Mishonov in a statement. Most climatic changes have at least some beneficiaries, but this one is likely to be bad for almost everyone affected.
New York City congestion pricing, first in the nation, is approved at $15 and up for vehicles
NBC News
A majority of the MTA board voted Wednesday in favor of New York City congestion pricing, green-lighting the controversial plan that will charge cars $15 to enter Manhattan below 61st Street and hit trucks with even higher tolls starting in just a few months.
Only one of the 12 board members opposed the proposal… The approval, essentially a rubber stamp of “clarifications” like exemptions, given the plan itself was approved last year, means congestion pricing can begin following a 60-day public information campaign and a concurrent 30-day testing period.
How climate-driven migration could change the face of the U.S.
NPR — Fresh Air
Abrahm Lustgarten: Imagine tens of millions of Americans moving and what that means. It's not just bad news for the places that they leave from or bad news that force them to move. It's potentially extraordinary growth in the places that they arrive at, and also enormous economic implications for both ends of that spectrum. A lot of what I've come to understand about climate migration in the United States is that it will be, ultimately, an economic decision, not an environmentally driven decision. And that's to say that people will move when they find that the changing environmental conditions affect their economic standing and their economic security - their jobs, their income, the cost of living.
Cities Can Expect Mass Species Turnover in a Warming World
Bloomberg
Peregrine falcons perched atop towering skyscrapers. Coyotes caught on camera playing in someone’s backyard. The pale green wings of a cabbage white butterfly perched on a flower blossom. Urban areas are awash in wildlife that faces growing pressures due to climate change, according to a study published today in PLOS ONE. The research, which looked at climate impacts on everything from mammals to insects in 60 of the most populous cities across the US and Canada, found that a warming world is moving many animals out of their historical geographic ranges and into new ones.
“Within a few years, the animals that you feed at your bird feeder might look very different,” said Alessandro Filazzola, the study’s lead author, who completed the research while he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Centre for Urban Environments.
This Map Shows Where Planting Trees Would Make Climate Change Worse
Yale Climate 360
[…] For a new study, scientists mapped the climate impact of tree planting across the globe, determining where it would be most and least beneficial. The study, published in Nature Communications, found that because of their low reflectivity, trees planted in arid, desert regions or in the snowy Arctic would, on balance, worsen warming.
The authors say that prior research into tree planting, which looked solely at how much carbon trees would draw down, grossly overstated how much warming plantings could prevent. They say the new study could help direct tree planting to those areas where it will do the most good.
Biden administration restores threatened species protections dropped by Trump
AP News
The Biden administration on Thursday restored rules to protect imperiled plants and animals that had been rolled back under … Donald Trump.
Among the changes, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will reinstate a decades-old regulation that mandates blanket protections for species newly classified as threatened. That means officials won’t have to craft time-intensive plans to shield each individual species while protections are pending, as has been done recently with North American wolverines in the Rocky Mountains, alligator snapping turtles in the southeastern U.S. and spotted owls in California.
The restoration of more protective regulations rankled Republicans who said the Endangered Species Act was being wielded too broadly and to the detriment of economic growth. Meanwhile, wildlife advocates were only partially satisfied, saying some potentially harmful changes under Trump were untouched.
I Moved to Rural New Mexico to Report on the Aftermath of a Massive Wildfire. My Neighbors Were My Best Sources.
ProPublica
In February 2023, I signed a lease on a dusty studio apartment in Las Vegas, New Mexico, two hours from my apartment in Albuquerque and just outside the burn scar of the largest wildfire in New Mexico history. Based on the railroad ties that served as “vigas,” or ceiling beams, my landlord told me my new home had likely been built in the late 1800s.
The rural communities in the mountains of northern New Mexico have long been wary of outsiders. More than a century ago, a band of white-capped marauders on horseback, known as the Gorras Blancas, rode through the countryside to fight back against the predominantly white speculators and railroad barons taking over the land. The Gorras Blancas cut through newly built fences dividing shared pastureland, known as the “ejido,” and burned piles of railroad ties. But they failed to repel the newcomers, who built Victorian homes on what became the town’s well-to-do east side.
My apartment was on the historically Hispanic, lower-income west side. I had moved there at the beginning of a yearlong collaboration between my newsroom, Source New Mexico, and ProPublica to examine the area’s recovery from the fire
Surge of new US-led oil and gas activity threatens to wreck Paris climate goals
The Guardian
The world’s fossil-fuel producers are on track to nearly quadruple the amount of extracted oil and gas from newly approved projects by the end of this decade, with the US leading the way in a surge of activity that threatens to blow apart agreed climate goals, a new report has found.
There can be no new oil and gas infrastructure if the planet is to avoid careering past 1.5C (2.7F) of global heating, above pre-industrial times, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has previously stated. Breaching this warming threshold, agreed to by governments in the Paris climate agreement, will see ever worsening effects such as heatwaves, floods, drought and more, scientists have warned.
But since the IEA’s declaration in 2021, countries and major fossil fuel companies have forged ahead with a glut of new oil and gas activity. At least 20bn barrels of oil equivalent of new oil and gas has been discovered for future drilling since this point, according to the new report by Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based NGO.
Climate and agriculture scientists set the record straight – emissions from the livestock sector must decline by 50% this decade, and some countries should do more than others.
Harvard Law School
By 2036, global emissions from livestock must drop by 61% to align with the goals of the Paris Agreement. This, according to a first of its kind report from researchers at Harvard University, New York University, Leiden University, and Oregon State University, sets out a new understanding of livestock within the context of climate change goals, and new expectations for climate policy – providing the first set of GHG emissions trajectories for the global livestock sector, and in high, middle, and low-income countries. […]
“The report essentially provides the first articulation of a Paris-compliant livestock sector. The reduction targets for livestock suggested by the survey results are in line with what the IPCC show is needed globally for all emissions and sectors, so it appears that the experts are suggesting a reasonable pathway for the livestock sector. Much of the political focus has been on the energy transition, however a food transition is also needed – especially for highly emitting animal products. How much and when livestock reduction should contribute to climate goals has until now been unclear – but these findings provide some clarity for policy makers grappling with these issues, and can help with the formation of plans to tackle climate change. We’re way behind schedule on this, and technological solutions alone are inadequate. Difficult decisions are inevitable – and well-designed policy, communicated effectively, is essential”.
Breakdown of Safety Is Not Unique to Boeing — It’s Endemic to Capitalist Society
Truthout
[…] Changes in the federal safety regulation of aviation demonstrate how these endemic problems within Boeing’s safety regime were permitted. Regulatory oversight of aviation was understaffed and underresourced during the Trump administration, with the FAA’s top position vacant for 14 months and enforcement fines against airlines dropping 88 percent. Trump’s FAA gave more authority to private companies, but his administration isn’t solely responsible for the deregulatory shift, as the FAA had been moving toward “sharing” regulatory oversight with manufacturers over the years. This began in 2004, against the protests of aviation unions who warned such a move would hurt the safety of the industry and lead to more accidents. […]
But even private sector regulators are suffering from a lack of sufficient personnel… This was also confirmed in the February FAA report, which called the turnover of “experienced personnel” a “major concern.” […]
As much as this story is one of consumer safety, Boeing’s problems are also the result of an anti-worker culture. […]
While some consumers remain understandably frightened and are deliberately avoiding Boeing flights, these problems are not exclusive to Boeing. The breakdown of consumer safety measures is endemic to the neoliberal capitalist pursuit of profit in the provision of public services, and to an employment regime that continually fails to provide adequate protections for workers.
Commentary: A call for economic degrowth
The Japan Times
[…] Achieving rapid decarbonization to reach the Paris Agreement’s target — namely limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century — demands ending wasteful mass production and consumption for the sake of endless economic growth.
Concretely, this means banning luxurious, unnecessary products such as private jets, cruise ships and yachts, as well as drastically reducing meat consumption and the sale of SUVs, in addition to investing in green technologies and infrastructure. However, the current economic and political system is incapable of seriously considering such options — no matter how necessary they are — because they are against the logic of endless capital accumulation.
Within a capitalist society, the only solution to the global ecological crisis is growth, growth and more growth. Popular proposals such as Society 5.0 in Japan and the Green New Deal in the United States aim to make energy and resource usage more efficient and create more stable jobs with higher salaries. They wish to achieve both economic growth and a transition to a sustainable society by decoupling growth from energy and resource usage. […]
Capitalism does not necessarily produce what is needed, but what is profitable. Even if technology increases productivity and efficiency, if the price of goods goes down due to higher productivity, consumption also increases, so efficiency gains would be lost. This is called Jevons paradox. […]
As a result, despite the introduction of such advances, resource and energy use will not decrease sufficiently to achieve decarbonization.
Capitalism Is What’s Burning the Planet, Not Average People
Jacobin (From 2021)
[…] climate denial is now no longer the main blockage — instead, it’s the delay and inaction of the capitalist class.
It is capitalists who profit from the climate crisis while the poorest suffer. It is the capitalist system putting profit above all else that blocks decarbonization while the world burns. Of course, it is technically correct to say that climate change is human-induced. As far as I know, the capitalist class are all human (unless David Icke knows something we don’t). But this doesn’t mean that all humans have played a role in producing the crisis. […]
We have now known about the causes and effects of climate change for several decades, yet capitalism’s priority of maximizing short-term profits has crowded out the need to transition our energy system.
We are not all equally responsible for climate breakdown. Our individual behaviors, even taken in aggregate, cannot propel rapid and just decarbonization without a planned transformation of the economy. We can either choose to indulge in a misanthropic climate politics that puts humanity in general on the hook while obfuscating the true cause of the crisis — or we can embrace a humanist and socialist vision of climate justice that tells a story of human potential and the possibility of a better world, making the best of the climate we inherent.
