In the months following the last catalogue, the acceleration toward mass extinction continued rapidly, with new revelations almost universally characterized as both "faster" and "worse" than expected.
The above image was taken from our first article, about an ongoing water shortage in the American west which is emblematic of the dual nature of resource scarcity: those who are least in power to abide it will be the ones to suffer, while those in the greatest position to profit will always find methods to bypass any consequences and continue to reap the disproportionate rewards, hogging increasingly scant resources for themselves in the name of capitalist growth.
Jay Famiglietti moved to Arizona this year after a career using satellites to study how the worst drought in a millennium was sapping groundwater beneath the American West.
He has documented that the decline of groundwater in California’s Central Valley accelerated dramatically in recent years, and that states along the Colorado River were losing their aquifers far faster than the more visible shriveling of the nation’s largest reservoirs.
It was not a satellite but an airplane, however, that was on Famiglietti’s mind as he picked up his wife at the airport earlier this year: a charter flight of people arriving in Phoenix as part of a major expansion of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., one of Arizona’s premier economic development jewels. This symbol of Arizona’s future brought home the stakes of this moment.
In one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, it’s a boom time — water-intensive microchip companies and data centers moving in; tens of thousands of houses spreading deep into the desert. But it is also a time of crisis: Climate change is drying up the American Westand putting fundamental resources at ever greater risk.
“I’m incredibly concerned,” said Famiglietti, an Arizona State University professor who is leading a multiyear effort to assess the water supply the state has above and below ground. “I don’t think that people, and this is everyone, the general public, but right up to our water managers and elected officials, really understand now that groundwater is the key to our future.”
“There’s just not enough for all the things we want to do,” he said…
“It’s always a tricky balance,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said in a recent interview. “How do we grapple with the reality of decreasing water supply but not adversely impact the economy, generally speaking — whether it’s from a growers perspective, farmworkers perspective, but also the nation’s food supply?”
The most revealing quote comes from Rhett Larson, an ASU water law professor:
“Sometimes, you’ve got to give up some dreams to get to others,” Larson said. “Arizona is in that situation with its water.”
“We want to be the greatest semiconductor and microchip manufacturer in the world. We can do that. We have enough water, but our food prices are going to go up because we’re not going to grow as much food,” he said. “Those are the hard conversations that Arizona has to have right now.”
The new analysis found that Phoenix, which is heavily reliant on air-conditioning to keep residents cool in the desert heat, would experience immense loss of life and illness if a citywide blackout during a heat wave lasted for two days, with power gradually restored over the next three days.
Under that scenario, an estimated 789,600 people would require emergency department care for heat-related illnesses, overwhelming the city’s hospital system, which has only 3,000 emergency department beds, the study said. An estimated 12,800 people in Phoenix would die, the study said.
State Farm announced that it will not accept any new applications for business or personal property and casualty insurance in the Golden State. The company, accounting for 20 percent of bundled home insurance policies and 13 percent of commercial policies in California, said it was facing “historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market.” It will still keep existing policy holders on its books for now, but the announcement signals that risks are growing beyond what State Farm, a company worth $131 billion at the end of 2022, can bear.
Insuring property in California has been a dicey proposition in recent years. Torrential rainfall this past winter caused as much as $1.5 billion in insured losses this year. The state has also suffered the costliest wildfires in US history, including the 2018 Camp Fire, which led to more than $10 billion in losses.
Human action is driving many of these risks. Real estate prices have been rising in California for decades, and populations are growing in the places most vulnerable to burning and flooding. Decades of suppressing natural fires have allowed fuel for wildfires to accumulate to dangerously high levels. Humans are also heating up the planet, lifting sea levels, amplifying downpours, and exacerbating the conditions for massive blazes.
This month, the global sea surface hit a new record high temperature. It has never warmed this much, this quickly.
Scientists don't fully understand why this has happened.
But they worry that, combined with other weather events, the world's temperature could reach a concerning new level by the end of next year.
Experts believe that a strong El Niño weather event - a weather system that heats the ocean - will also set in over the next months.
Warmer oceans can kill off marine life, lead to more extreme weather and raise sea levels. They are also less efficient at absorbing planet-warming greenhouse gases.
We propose a set of safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for climate, the biosphere, fresh water, nutrients and air pollution at global and subglobal scales. These domains were chosen for the following reasons. They span the major components of the Earth system (atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, biosphere and cryosphere) and their interlinked processes (carbon, water and nutrient cycles), the ‘global commons’ that underpin the planet’s life-support systems and, thereby, human well-being on Earth; they have impacts on policy-relevant timescales; they are threatened by human activities; and they could affect Earth system stability and future development globally. Our proposed ESBs are based on existing scholarship, expert judgement and widely shared norms, such as Agenda 2030. They are meant as a transparent proposal for further debate and refinement by scholars and wider society.
“Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice,” said Prof Dirk Notz, of the University of Hamburg, Germany, who was part of the study team. “As scientists, we’ve been warning about the loss of Arctic summer sea ice for decades. This is now the first major component of the Earth system that we are going to lose because of global warming. People didn’t listen to our warnings.
“This brings another warning bell, that the kind of projections that we’ve made for other components of the Earth system will start unfolding in the decades to come.”
‘We can’t escape the reality’: France is preparing for 4°C of warming by 2100
France is preparing for 4°C of global warming by the end of the century as countries fail to deliver on targets that would keep temperatures below Paris Agreement goals.
Environment minister Christophe Béchu told French newspaper JDD that his government was no longer betting on limiting temperatures to 1.5°C or at least well below 2°C.
“We can’t escape the reality of global warming,” Bechu warned in a statement on Sunday.
“So we must prepare concretely for its inevitable effects on our country and our lives.”
The main factor is the destruction of wild landscapes to make way for farms, towns, cities and roads, but climate change is also an important driver of species decline and is predicted to have an increasingly worse impact as the world warms.
The study’s authors analyzed more than 70,000 species across the globe – spanning mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and insects – to determine whether their populations have been growing, shrinking or remaining steady over time.
They found 48% of these species are declining in population size, with fewer than 3% seeing increases, according to the study published Monday in the journal Biological Reviews.
Alarming reporting. What are we doing to address this issue?
Italy helped a retailer open chocolate and gelato stores across Asia.
The United States offered a loan for a coastal hotel expansion in Haiti.
Belgium backed the film “La Tierra Roja,” a love story set in the Argentine rainforest.
And Japan is financing a new coal plant in Bangladesh and an airport expansion in Egypt.
Funding for the five projects totaled $2.6 billion, and all four countries counted their backing as so-called “climate finance” – grants, loans, bonds, equity investments and other contributions meant to help developing nations reduce emissions and adapt to a warming world. Developed nations have pledged to funnel a combined total of $100 billion a year toward this goal, which they affirmed during climate talks in Paris in 2015. The funding helped crown Japan and the United States as two of the top five contributors.
Although a coal plant, a hotel, chocolate stores, a movie and an airport expansion don’t seem like efforts to combat global warming, nothing prevented the governments that funded them from reporting them as such to the United Nations and counting them toward their giving total.
A chemicals company is releasing large quantities of a “forever chemical” described as being “very persistent, mobile and toxic” into the River Wyre in Lancashire each year, and is not breaking any rules.
Earlier this year, the Guardian and Watershed Investigations revealed that effluent coming from the site of AGC Chemicals Europe in Thornton-Cleveleys could contain about 700 types of perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS).
PFAS is an umbrella term for thousands of human-made substances known as “forever chemicals” because they will not break down in the environment for thousands of years. Some are also known to be toxic and can accumulate in the human body.
The case, which was centered on the scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act, was arguably the most important environmental decision the Supreme Court has handed down since a majority last year invalidated an EPA effort to regulate power plant emissions. The plaintiffs asked the court to provide a clearer definition for what the law meant when it gave the agency power to regulate the "waters of the United States."
In an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by four other conservative justices, the court limited the scope of the EPA's ability to control wetland pollution. That's important because, in addition to the wetlands themselves, the water at issue often feeds into the rivers and lakes that are more clearly covered by federal pollution controls.
This is a useful goal, but our new research shows that something is still missing: stringent policies to eliminate methane emissions.
Our study is the first global review of methane policies which have been adopted across the world since the 1970s. It reveals that only around 13% of man-made methane emissions from the biggest sources (agriculture, energy and waste) is regulated by policies capable of controlling and preventing them.
This falls to 10% if we take a conservative view of the total emissions and regions covered by specific policies and whether they have been fully or partially implemented.
Over 100 activists from Greenpeace, Stay Grounded Network, Extinction Rebellion, Scientist Rebellion and other climate organisations took part in the action, calling for a ban on private jets, Greenpeace International said on Twitter.
They blocked the main entrance to the business aviation show, which is being held at the Palexpo exhibition centre near Geneva Airport.
Geneva police intervened quickly to remove the activists, some of whom were attached to private jets. A total of 80 people were arrested.
The number of private and business jets has more than doubled globally over the past 20 years.
