Tonight’s news awaits your comments. Everyone is encouraged to share their 2¢ or articles, stories, and tweets. This is an open thread.
Also on a personal note, I need to step away from hosting the OND for a while. I do not know for how long. If anyone would be willing to take over hosting Thursday nights, then please let it be known in the comments. Hosting Thursday’s OND could be accomplished with a single editor or a team like is done with OND’s Science Saturday.
Hosting the OND involves creating a DK story (formerly known as a diary) and selecting 10-20 news articles from trustworthy, reliable sources from the past day (or week) and pasting them into the diary. Publish the OND between 11:45 and midnight Eastern. You may wish to look at tonight’s OND as an example.
‘Hopeless and broken’: why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair
The Guardian
“Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken,” says the climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota. “After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”
Instead, Cerezo-Mota expects the world to heat by a catastrophic 3C this century, soaring past the internationally agreed 1.5C target and delivering enormous suffering to billions of people. This is her optimistic view, she says. […]
“I think 3C is being hopeful and conservative. 1.5C is already bad, but I don’t think there is any way we are going to stick to that. There is not any clear sign from any government that we are actually going to stay under 1.5C.”
Children are expensive – not just for parents, but the environment – so how many is too many?
The Conversation
People born in the future stand to inherit a planet in the midst of a global ecological crisis. Natural habitats are being decimated, the world is growing hotter, and scientists fear we are experiencing the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history.
Under such circumstances, is it reasonable to bring a child into the world?
My philosophical research deals with environmental and procreative ethics – the ethics of choosing how many children to have or whether to have them at all. Recently, my work has explored questions where these two fields intersect, such as how climate change should affect decision-making about having a family.
What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign
The Washington Post
As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target
The Guardian
Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed.
Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.
Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.
Record-breaking increase in CO2 levels in world’s atmosphere
The Guardian
The largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred, according to researchers who monitor the relentless accumulation of the primary gas that is heating the planet.
The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO2 levels over a 12-month period.
The increase has been spurred, scientists say, by the periodic El Niño climate event, which has now waned, as well as the ongoing and increasing amounts of greenhouse gases expelled into the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
New documents show oil executives promoted natural gas as green — but knew it wasn’t
Grist
A congressional hearing on the fossil fuel industry’s “evolving efforts to avoid accountability for climate change” turned into a spectacle on Wednesday morning as lawmakers in Washington, D.C., grilled a panel of experts on wide-ranging — and often irrelevant — topics. The thousands of internal oil company documents released before the hearing, however, contained some bombshell findings.
One of the biggest revelations is that BP executives understood that natural gas, which the company promoted as a “bridge” or “destination” fuel to a cleaner future as coal declined, was incompatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015. “[O]nce built, gas locks in future emissions above a level consistent with 2 degrees,” at least without widespread carbon capture technology, according to a comment on a draft outline for a speech by BP’s CEO in 2017.
“This is the first evidence I’ve seen of them acknowledging internally, at the highest levels, that they know this — natural gas is a climate disaster — and yet, they still promote it,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy organization.
Venezuela Just Became First Country To Lose All Its Glaciers In Modern Times
IFL Science
A grim milestone in the struggle against climate change has now been reached, as the disappearance of Venezuela’s final glacier means the country has won the race to be the first to see all of its ice bodies melt. As recently as 1910, the South American nation boasted six glaciers spanning a total area of 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), yet these have been reduced to mere smatterings of ice that no longer meet the requirements to be classed as glaciers. […]
"In Venezuela there are no more glaciers," Professor Julio Cesar Centeno from the University of the Andes (ULA) told AFP in March. "What we have is a piece of ice that is 0.4 percent of its original size."
‘False promises and phantom emissions’: How was Shell able to double its carbon credits in Canada?
Euronews
Canadian taxpayers covered 93 per cent of the costs of the Quest carbon capture project, a Greenpeace report reveals.
Shell has sold millions of ‘phantom’ carbon credits based on emissions savings that never happened, according to a new investigation.
The fossil fuel giant made more than $200 million Canadian dollars (€135 million) selling the credits from its flagship carbon capture facility to Canada’s biggest oil sands companies.
But a two-for-one deal struck with the Government of Alberta meant that Shell was selling credits for two tonnes of CO₂ for every one tonne that it actually captured.
Exclusive: Corporate climate watchdog document deems carbon offsets largely ineffective
Reuters
Staff at an influential corporate climate action group whose board announced a plan to allow companies to offset greenhouse gas emissions from their supply chain with carbon credits has now found such offsets are largely ineffective, a confidential preliminary draft reviewed by Reuters shows. […]
The draft cites cases where carbon credits have failed to deliver the climate benefits they tout. It states, for example, that one scientific paper it reviewed found no significant evidence that projects in the Brazilian Amazon have mitigated forest loss.
The draft states the staff also reviewed evidence showing some schemes sell more carbon credits than the projects can deliver on, or exaggerate the emission reductions they achieve.
More and faster: Electricity from clean sources reaches 30% of global total
AP News
Billions of people are using different kinds of energy each day and 2023 was a record-breaking year for renewable energy sources — ones that don’t emit planet-warming pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane — according to a report published Wednesday by Ember, a think tank based in London.
For the first time, 30% of electricity produced worldwide was from clean energy sources as the number of solar and wind farms continued to grow fast.
Of the types of clean energy generated last year, hydroelectric dams produced the most. That’s the same as in most years. Yet droughts in India, China, North America and Mexico meant hydropower hit a five-year low. Research shows climate change is causing droughts to develop more quickly and be more severe.
Indonesian company defies order, still clearing peatlands in orangutan habitat
Mongabay
Indonesia’s largest deforesting company has continued to clear peatland despite an order by the government for the firm to stop clearing rainforests. The company in question is pulpwood producer PT Mayawana Persada.
Since 2016, the company has cleared more than 35,000 hectares (86,500 acres) of forests to establish monoculture pulpwood plantations — an area half the size of Singapore — in its concession in West Kalimantan province, sized at 136,710 hectares (337,800 acres).
Activists noted that these clearances happened on critical orangutan habitat and carbon-rich peatlands.
World's oceans suffer from record-breaking year of heat
BBC News
Fuelled by climate change, the world's oceans have broken temperature records every single day over the past year, a BBC analysis finds. Nearly 50 days have smashed existing highs for the time of year by the largest margin in the satellite era.
Planet-warming gases are mostly to blame, but the natural weather event El Niño has also helped warm the seas. The super-heated oceans have hit marine life hard and driven a new wave of coral bleaching.
The analysis is based on data from the EU's Copernicus Climate Service. Copernicus also confirmed that last month was the warmest April on record in terms of global air temperatures, extending that sequence of month-specific records to 11 in a row.
Bleaching of coral reefs shows severe ocean circulation changes
Oxford University Press via Phys.org
A new paper in Oxford Open Climate Change indicates that extensive bleaching and deaths are widespread at several major coral reefs around the world. This suggests that climate change has resulted in shifting patterns in ocean circulation. Coral reefs may soon be a thing of the past.
Last year, 2023, was the hottest year in recorded history on land and in the oceans, with dramatic and unexpected temperature increases. The highest excess daily air temperatures recorded in 175 countries, as well the most prolonged excessive sea surface temperatures, were centered around Jamaica, and 2023 marked the worst coral bleaching yet in the Northern Hemisphere, with the Southern Hemisphere poised to follow in early 2024. […]
Areas of high 2023 coral bleaching mortality represent coral reefs included the entire Caribbean region, the east and west coasts of Mexico and Central America, Kiribati, Fiji, Eastern New Guinea, which local observers report to have near total bleaching and severe coral reef death.
Scientists Warn Climate Change Is to Blame for Brazil’s Worst Floods in 80 Years
truthout
Devastating floods in the south Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul have killed dozens of people and displaced thousands more over the past several days, in one of the most catastrophic natural disasters the country has seen in decades. […]
The rain totals over the past week have equaled close to 70 percent of what the region typically sees in the entire month of April. The flooding is the worst Brazil has seen in the past 80 years, and continued storms hitting the region are going to make things “much worse,” Gov. Eduardo Leite said on Friday. […]
Several scientists have stated outright that two factors are to blame for the floods — the El Niño and La Niña weather patterns for this year, and the effects of human-made global climate change.
Climatologist Francisco Eliseu Aquino has described the two factors as creating a “disastrous cocktail.” Brazilian climate activist Bruon Brezenski has described the devastation wrought by the storms as “a war scene.”
Dieback hits Tasmanian forests after dry summer as researchers investigate impact on trees' future
ABC News (Australia)
Huge patches of forest in Tasmania have rapidly turned brown over recent months, with many trees dying after a dry summer. But what this signals for forests in the future as the climate continues to warm is unclear.
From February to the end of April, parts of the state received the lowest rainfall since records began.Hobart just endured the third-driest summer on record.
"This is putting amazing stress on our trees," The Tree Projects lead researcher Jen Sanger told ABC Radio Hobart's Kylie Baxter.
The extensive sudden tree death in Tasmania is the result of a phenomenon called dieback.
Colorado to shield thousands of acres of wetlands, miles of streams after U.S. Supreme Court left them vulnerable
The Colorado Sun
Thousands of acres of Colorado wetlands and miles of streams, left unprotected by a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year, would be shielded under a hard-won measure that was approved this week by a bipartisan group of state lawmakers.
Environmental advocates say Colorado leads the nation in adopting such regulations, which will replace certain Clean Water Act rules that were wiped out last year in the U.S. Supreme Court case Sackett v. EPA.
“Colorado is the first state to pass legislation on this issue,” said Josh Kuhn, senior water campaign manager for Conservation Colorado. “It had a lot of attention because of the magnitude of the bill. There were dozens and dozens of meetings to try and strike the right balance. We’re really happy with this final piece of legislation.”
Their batteries hurt the environment, but EVs still beat gas cars
NPR News
[…] With all that's required to mine and process minerals — from giant diesel trucks to fossil-fuel-powered refineries — EV battery production has a significant carbon footprint. As a result, building an electric vehicle does more damage to the climate than building a gas car does.
But the gas car starts to catch up as soon as it goes its first mile.
If you look at the climate impact of building and using a vehicle – something called a "lifecycle analysis" – study after study has found a clear benefit to EVs. The size of the benefit varies – by vehicle, the source of the electricity it runs on, and a host of other factors – but the overall trend is obvious. […]
Building a battery is an environmental cost that's paid once. Burning gasoline is a cost that's paid again, and again, and again.
Scientists Warn against Treating Forests as Carbon Commodities
E&E News via Scientific American
Growing alarm over climate change has pushed world leaders in recent years to see Earth's forests as a critical resource in the fight against global warming.
But the newfound attention might not always be a good thing. The focus on forests and their value as carbon sinks could be contributing to an increase in global inequalities and create too much reliance on market-based solutions, such as carbon offsets.
The warning was included in a new report from the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, a nonprofit network of forest scientists. Published Monday, the report provides a scientific review of recent trends in global forest governance.
Global Aviation Emissions Nearly 300 Million Metric Tons Higher Than Reported for 2019, Study Finds
EcoWatch
A new study has uncovered that flight-related emissions from 2019 are far higher than reported. Scientists reviewed data for more than 40 million flights in 2019 and calculated the total global aviation emissions to be about 911 million metric tons, well above the 604 million metric tons reported to the United Nations in 2019. […]
A team of scientists used a high-resolution aviation transport emissions assessment model to review and calculate emissions for 197 countries for 2019. They found that aviation emissions were about 50% higher than the numbers reported to the UN for that year and published their findings in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Opinion: 5 Reasons for Environmentalists to Stop Blaming "Doom & Gloom" Narratives
Felix de Rosen @ Substack
[…] First, there is significant evidence that gloomy visions can lead people to take action. Major activist movements such as Extinction Rebellion emerged from the recognition that we are currently on the path towards generalized catastrophe. A 2023 study published in the journal Global Environmental Change found that anger was linked to activism seven times more powerfully than hope, and abundant research, such as this 2018 study in Science Communication, finds that fear-based messages have the potential to create the sense of urgency needed for effective action.
Second, optimistic messages can feel good, but they can also create complacency and thus prevent us from making the required sacrifices, political choices, and lifestyle changes. Positive narratives can deprive us of the awareness we need in order to respond appropriately to the severity of our crisis. The Kenyan climate activist Stella Nyambura Mbau makes the interesting connection between optimism and cowardice, writing that “the millions of people being uprooted by climate change do not benefit from the ‘stubborn optimism’ of environmental elites. Instead, they will be better served by the stubborn realism of the experts and activists now brave enough to call for urgent degrowth in rich countries and fair adaptation everywhere.”
Third, the opposition of “success narratives” to “doom and gloom” is a gross oversimplification.
Opinion: New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it
Press Watch
[…] But to [Joe] Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.
Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party:
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.
Editorial: We cannot afford to despair
The Guardian
First, the good news. We understand the problem: almost two-thirds of people worldwide believe the climate crisis is an emergency. We know what needs to be done, and should be confident that we will be able to achieve it, thanks to the rapid advance of renewable technologies. Collectively, we can also muster the money to do it.
The scale and speed of global heating make it hard to hang on to these facts. But it is also why we must focus on them rather than throwing up our hands. New research by the Guardian has found that hundreds of the world’s top climate scientists believe global temperatures will rise by at least 2.5C above pre-industrial levels by the century’s end, far above the internationally agreed limit. Only 6% of those surveyed, all from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, thought that the 1.5C target could be met.