World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say

the Guardian

Disastrous events included flash flooding in Africa and wildfires in Europe and North America. (...)

“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.” (...)

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Flash floods in the Libyan city of Derna were the most deadly climate disaster of 2023, killing 11,300 people. Photograph: Mahmud Turkia/AFP/Getty Images.

“The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.

His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels. (...)

Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.

He said these new developments indicated the Earth was in uncharted territory ​​and under siege. (...)

[W]hat disturbed him most in 2023 was the sharp increase in sea surface temperatures, which have been abrupt even for an El Niño year. (...)

In the Antarctic, scientists have also been perplexed and worried by the pace of change. (...)

[H]uman influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had also created “frightening” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. Cold wet fronts from the Antarctic had interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in between. (...)

This year’s deadliest climate disaster was the flood in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna. In a single day, Storm Daniel unleashed 200 times as much rain as usually falls on the city in the entire month of September. (...)

Forest fires burned a record area in Canada and Europe, and killed about 100 people in Lahaina on Maui island, the deadliest wildfire in US history, which happened in August. (...)

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Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #energy #energy_transition #carbon_footprint #global_warming #fossil_fuel #extreme_weather #storms #floodings #flash_floods #forest_fires #wildfires #heat_waves #cop28

Why AI is a disaster for the climate

The Guardian

Amid all the hysteria about ChatGPT and co, one thing is being missed: how energy-intensive the technology is. (...)

Given the current hysteria about AI, I thought I’d check to see where it is on the chart [of the Gartner Hype Cycle]. (...)

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The carbon footprint of server farms used to power generative AI could be problematic. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images.

All of this serves the useful function – for the tech industry, at least – of diverting attention from the downsides of the technology that we are already experiencing: bias, inscrutability, unaccountability and its tendency to “hallucinate”, to name just four. (...) Which is worrying because its environmental impact will, at best, be significant and, at worst, could be really problematic.

How come? Basically, because AI requires staggering amounts of computing power. And since computers require electricity, and the necessary GPUs (graphics processing units) run very hot (and therefore need cooling), the technology consumes electricity at a colossal rate. (...)

So maybe the best hope for the planet would be for generative AI to topple down the slippery slope into Gartner’s “trough of disillusionment”, enabling the rest of us to get on with life.

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Tags: #artificial_intelligence #ai #chatgtp #computing #energy #energy_transition #carbon_footprint #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming

Fossil fuels kill more people than Covid. Why are we so blind to the harms of oil and gas?

The Guardian

Were we able to perceive afresh the sheer scale of fossil fuel impact we might be horrified, but because this is an old problem too many don’t see it as a problem.

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A climate activist holds banner in front of the NYC office of JPMorgan Chase bank's new headquarters during an ‘Occupy Park Avenue’ protest on 29 October 2022 in New York City. Photograph: Ron Adar/Rex/Shutterstock.

If fossil fuel use and impact had suddenly appeared overnight, their catastrophic poisonousness and destructiveness would be obvious. But they have so incrementally become part of everyday life nearly everywhere on Earth that those impacts are largely accepted or ignored (that they’ve also corroded our politics helps this lack of alarm). This has real consequences for the climate crisis. Were we able to perceive afresh the sheer scale of fossil fuel impact we might be horrified. But because this is an old problem too many don’t see it as a problem. (...)

[L]ong-term phenomena become acceptable merely because of our capacity to adjust. Violence against women (the leading form of violence worldwide) and slower forms of environmental destruction have been going on so long that they’re easy to overlook and hard to get people to regard as a crisis. (...)

To normalize is to turn something into the status quo, into something no longer seen as a problem, and this in turn undermines the impetus to pursue a solution. (...)

The fossil fuel industry through airborne particulate matter alone annually kills far more people every year than Covid-19 has in three years. Recent studies conclude that nearly 9 million people a year die from inhaling these particulates produced by burning fossil fuel. It’s only one of the many ways fossil fuel is deadly, from black lung among coal miners and cancer and respiratory problems among those near refineries to fatalities from climate-driven catastrophes such as wildfire, extreme heat and floods. (...)

One consequence of these habits of mind is the hostile reaction to the impact of renewables. Renewables require mining; the total amount of mining they require is far less than the fossil-fuel mining that goes on all around us and has for a long time. (...)

With renewables the materials need to be extracted once and then are used for many years and are thereafter, in many cases, recyclable; with fossil fuel we burn it up as we go, so constant new interjections of coal, oil or gas are needed. They literally go up in smoke. (...)

“Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” (...)

Astroturf organizations backed by conservatives and fossil-fuel interests have pushed false claims about health threats and organized locals against both wind turbines and solar installations. But the space they take up can be far less than that occupied by fossil fuel, and many turbines and solar panels coexist with agriculture. (...)

The way we have long operated was always destructive, and it’s now a crisis larger than any in human history. Change needs to come, swiftly, and though practical change is crucial, so are changes in imagination, perception and values. The two go together, and they always have.

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Tags: #fossil_fuel #oil #gas #exxonmobil #suncor #tar_sands #pollution #air_pollution #health #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #renewables #energy #energy_transition

Blocking roads isn’t crazy – It’s our last hope that sanity will prevail

Jonathan Cook (Middle East Eye)

A lack of public concern in the West at dealing with the impending climate catastrophe isn’t accidental. It’s been engineered.

COP27, the United Nations’ annual climate conference attended by world leaders, kicked off in Egypt at the weekend in the midst of a wave of civil disobedience actions in the UK.

The protests have been led by environmental groups such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, and come as oil giants have announced massive profits from surging energy prices caused by the Ukraine war, and new reports show catastrophic climate change is soon to reach a tipping point, becoming irreversible. (...)

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Protesters, with their necks padlocked together, block the road as they take part in a protest by Just Stop Oil climate activists at Piccadilly Circus, London, on 9 October 2022 (AFP)

Most of these actions have been ignored by the media or dismissed as the antisocial posturings of individuals divorced from the concerns of ordinary people. (...)

But the criticism most widely hurled at these various forms of direct action is that they are counterproductive, that they antagonise ordinary people and make them stop listening.

There is an obvious rejoinder. No one appeared to be listening before the activists took to the streets. Endless scientific warnings have made little impact on public discourse. The establishment media have paid only lip service to the dangers, even as the effects on the climate have become harder to overlook. And governments have made placatory noises while doing nothing meaningful to reverse the collision course humanity is on with the planet. (...)

The World Meteorological Organization, meanwhile, noted that the three greenhouse gases have reached record highs, with methane – the biggest offender – showing the largest year-on-year jump.

Civil disobedience is a symptom not of the climate crisis – nature won’t listen to the protesters – but of the inaction that continues to be the default position of governing political elites, as well as the billionaire-owned media that is supposed to serve as a watchdog on their power. (...)

The establishment media is playing a crucial part in twisting social and political priorities. Every time it focuses on the inconvenience caused by the climate protests – or the potential risk of someone dying in an ambulance caught in a hold-up – it is downplaying what are already the tangible, lethal consequences of the climate emergency. (...)

Nonetheless, the claim that there is widespread antipathy in Britain towards acts of civil disobedience on the climate is greatly overstated – and by the very same media outlets determined to play down the climate crisis. (...)

Despite this, the rightwing Conservative government in London has been progressively eradicating the right of protest – precisely to prevent actions to highlight its continuing crimes against the planet.

A spate of recent legislation has been designed to criminalise any expression of dissent. (...)

Actions like glueing oneself to railings, sitting in a road, obstructing fracking machinery or tunnelling can result in up to three years’ imprisonment. “Disruption prevent orders” can be issued to anyone who has attended a protest in the last five years, banning them from taking part in future demonstrations for two years. Activists’ freedom of movement can be limited by orders requiring them to wear an electronic tag or denying them entry to specified areas. (...)

One might have hoped that at least Britain’s opposition party would be vowing to reverse such draconian measures once in office. But Labour leader Keir Starmer has suggested he would legislate even stiffer penalties for those taking direct action on the climate. (...)

What all this represents is a shift over the past decade from one kind of political insanity – a denial, either implicitly or explicitly, of a climate crisis – to a different kind of insanity: official acknowledgment of a looming climate catastrophe but a refusal to do something meaningful to avert it. (...)

But even more troubling, wars seem to be increasingly useful as a distraction. (...)

In this way, wars helpfully deflect attention from the far bigger global crisis of the environment, one in which Western leaders cannot present themselves as the Good Guys – because they are, in fact, the worst, the greediest and the most destructive of the Bad Guys.

The endless War on Terror has served this purpose all too well over the past two decades, when the climate crisis should have been the world’s top priority. (...)

Instead the constant chatter in western capitals, on TV and in the press, is about how to find new ways to generate gas and oil for public consumption to overcome the energy crisis, not how to wean ourselves off these climate-destroying fuels. (...)

But in a world of self-inflicted collapse, Putin is no more insane than his western counterparts. In truth, the only sane people are those trying to wake up everyone else, whether by glueing their hands to the road, climbing bridges or hurling soup at paintings.

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> See also: Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis (Media Lens)

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