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. (...)

Complete article

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

The media needs to cover the climate crisis as seriously as it covered Covid

The Guardian

With some exceptions, the news industry is still not responding to the true scale and danger of global heating. (...)

Despite our living through the hottest summer in history, as well as wildfires, tropical storms and crazy-hot oceans, the news media continues to be outdone by the rest of popular culture when it comes to covering the most urgent story of our time.

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‘With the planet on fire, more and better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution.’ Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

Inexplicably, climate crisis remains a niche concern for most mainstream news outlets. In the US, most TV coverage of this summer’s hellish weather did not even mention the words “climate change” or “climate crisis”, much less explain that the burning of oil, gas and coal is what’s driving that hellish weather. Too many newsrooms continue to see climate as a siloed beat of specialists. (...)

Dramatic changes in climate have made increased news coverage of extreme weather unavoidable. But explaining the climate connection to extreme weather is a different task. Linking changes in the weather to the decisions being made by industry and government, that have overheated the planet is where news coverage needs to end up. (...)

In every newsroom in every community, climate crisis needs to be thought of not as a beat, but as a through-line involving everything we do. No corner of the newsroom is exempt – not business or culture, not sports or city hall. (...)

Can politics reporters and editors scale back their fixation on horse-race coverage and instead provide the kind of coverage that voters need to make informed choices? Election coverage should help audiences understand what the candidates will do about the climate crisis if elected, not just what they say. It should hold candidates accountable by asking them not (as Fox did at the first US Republican debate last month) whether they believe in climate change but rather, “What is your plan to deal with the climate crisis?”

Overall, we also need much more and better coverage of climate solutions. (...)

What else does “more and better” climate coverage mean? We expect some answers to emerge this week at Climate Changes Everything: Creating a Blueprint for Media Transformation, a conference at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. (...)

With the planet on fire, more and better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution. Only when the general public understands what is happening, why and what needs to be done, can large enough numbers of people compel governments and corporations to change course. (...)

But the news industry as a whole is still not matching the scale of the crisis with the kind of coverage that’s required. (...)

Complete article

> See also: Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders (Media Lens)

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #fossil_fuels #co2 #pollution #air_pollution #global_warming #extreme_weather #forest_fires #flooding #heat_waves #health #climate_deniers #propaganda #fake_news #disinformation #capitalism #industrial_capitalism #media #news #news_media #journalist #journalism #Covering_Climate_Now

Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders

Media Lens

None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of extreme weather events of the kind that has been devastating lives across the globe this summer. (...)

Almost as astonishing has been the indifference of our leaders. The silence has been deafening. Where are they? Why is no-one joining the dots and demanding some kind of serious response? (...)

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Broadcaster and author Stephen Fry said on the BBC:

‘Extraordinary that you can have a conversation with an economics minister in Labour who didn’t even mention the climate catastrophe coming, that there’s a tsunami coming towards us… yet everyone is talking about just doing the same thing only better. It’s catastrophic.’ (...)

Or compare with NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus, previously arrested for defending the Earth:

‘Dear journalists of the world: We are at risk of losing basically everything. This – what we’re experiencing now – is how that process unfolds. The more fossil fuels we burn, the further in that process we go.

‘You MUST begin to tell 5 critical truths. Civilization depends on it.’

Despite the overwhelming evidence that climate catastrophe is not just a looming threat, it is here; despite the desperate pleading for help from climate scientists; and despite the surreal silence and indifference of Western political leaders, a stubborn rump of opinion continues to insist that the climate crisis is a cynical scam promoted by vested interests. (...)

It is crucial to look deeper because the reality becomes clear when we ask even the simplest of rational questions:

How does the [media] coverage afforded to climate collapse compare to coverage afforded to other comparable threats?

How much of this coverage recognises the true severity of the threat, its true corporate causes and the business-unfriendly revolution in priorities required if it is to be addressed? (...)

As recently as April 2019, even after the start of the mass climate protests a year earlier, Columbia Journalism Review reported:

‘Yet at a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media. Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news… Many newspapers, too, are failing the climate test. Last October, the scientists of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report, warning that humanity had a mere 12 years to radically slash greenhouse-gas emissions or face a calamitous future in which hundreds of millions of people worldwide would go hungry or homeless or worse. Only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the United States covered that report.’ (...)

Corporate media are not making this the World War Three-style crisis it clearly is. Indeed, the deepest causes and solutions of the crisis are rarely even mentioned. The irony is that climate deniers are convinced the ‘mainstream’ is giving climate collapse heavy coverage precisely because the ‘mainstream’ has obscured the true scale of a crisis that actually merits vastly more coverage. (...)

Thus, while it is, of course, true that our world is currently awash with corporate propaganda downplaying the reality of climate collapse, the disturbing truth is that these deceptions often find a receptive audience. Why? Because many people don’t want to consume less or less cheaply; they don’t want to drive or fly less or less cheaply; they don’t want to be denied ever-expanding consumption. (...)

When industrial capitalism tries to impose infinite economic growth on a finite planet, loss of freedom is the inevitable ultimate result. At this point, we have a painful choice between losing some personal freedoms and losing literally everything.

Complete article

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #fossil_fuels #co2 #pollution #air_pollution #global_warming #extreme_weather #forest_fires #flooding #heat_waves #health #climate_deniers #propaganda #fake_news #disinformation #capitalism #industrial_capitalism

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Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #forest_fires #heatwave #extreme_weather #flooding

From Drought to Deluge on a New Planet

Tom Dispatch

Consider this perhaps the strangest thing of all in our all-too-strange world: the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced essentially never leads the news. Yes, the immediate crises of our world, most recently Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, are 24/7 headlines for weeks at a time. And any set of events that sends millions of us into external or internal exile, as has become all too common on this planet of ours, should indeed be a focus of attention. But to put all of this in context, it’s estimated that within three decades up to a mind-boggling 1.2 billion human beings could be driven from their homes thanks to the burgeoning climate emergency. (...)

When [climate change] hits as fire or flood, as a dramatic weather disaster of some sort, the news often loves to show us the calamity at hand (and the all-too-photogenic weeping survivors). But the cause of it all, climate change itself? No such luck. (...)

Only recently the authoritative U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest devastating report, produced by 1,000 scientists, on what we’re doing to ourselves. In the midst of the Ukrainian events, it got hardly a moment’s notice. (...)

Whiplashed

Those Who Contribute the Least to Climate Change Suffer the Most

By Jane Braxton Little

(...) While California may be a poster child for extreme weather events, they are occurring almost everywhere. Such wild swings from tinder-dry to inundation are known as climate or weather whiplash. (...)

When it comes to weather whiplash, Australia is exhibit A for Anthropocene, the current geological epoch dominated by the human impact on the environment. (...)

Conflicts between wildlife and humans are already common enough, but climate scientists expect them to increase as droughts, floods, and fires push animals off their normal ranges and into agricultural areas. (...)

And here’s the only good news: climate change is a problem with a solution. We humans created it, which means it’s solvable. That, however, would require societal and political will of a kind we simply haven’t seen yet. And that’s the bad news. (...)

“a damning indictment of failed climate leadership… that reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”

Swain, the UCLA climate scientist, put it this way: “We’re on a train going faster and faster down the tracks with perfectly functional brakes. But the drivers, for whatever reasons, are choosing not to engage the brakes.” (...)

Complete article

A regular antidote to the mainstream media

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change #ipcc #headlines #media #news #jpurnalism #journalist #disinformation #refugees #climate_refugees #climate_whiplash #weather_whiplash #anthropocene #australia #california #forest_fires #bushfires #drought #global_warming #sea_level #flooding #rain_bomb #extinction #texas #storm #hurricane #extrme_weather #water_quality #soil #erosion #agriculture #cattle_farming

Fossil fuel firms among biggest spenders on Google ads that look like search results

The Guardian

One in five ads served on search results for 78 climate-related terms placed by firms with interests in fossil fuels, research finds.

Fossil fuel companies and firms that work closely with them are among the biggest spenders on ads designed to look like Google search results, in what campaigners say is an example of “endemic greenwashing”. (...)

Advertisers pay for their ads to appear on the search engine when a user queries certain terms. The ads are appealing to businesses because they are very similar in appearance to search results: more than half of users in a 2020 survey reported they could not tell the difference between a paid-for listing and a normal Google result. (...)

However, Shell’s net-zero strategy relies heavily on carbon capture and offsetting, according to a Carbon Brief analysis, which says: “Despite its ‘highly ambitious’ framing … Shell’s vision of a continued role for oil, gas and coal until the end of the century remains essentially the same.” (...)

“Since at least the 1980s in the US, there has been a very concerted effort by public relations agents to help polluting companies develop strategies to ‘go green’ while maintaining business as usual.

“Many of the initiatives companies are taking are very piecemeal and will not amount to any kind of long-term or systemic change.” (...)

The analysis also looked at “snippets”, which are not paid-for but are chosen by Google’s algorithm as the most relevant result. The Guardian found the snippet chosen for “fracking” linked to the website of an oil and gas lobby group, the Independent Petroleum Association of America. (...)

A years-long piece of research by the US Environmental Protection Agency concluded in 2016 that in some cases fracking had harmed drinking water supplies.

Unlike Facebook, Google does not have a publicly accessible ad library, meaning it is difficult to analyse advertising on the platform. (...)

Complete article

> See also: The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing (The Guardian)

Tags: #capitalism #environment #pollution #waste #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #cop26 #global_warming #aur_pollution #neoliberalism #market_fundamentalism #inequality #cerrado #desert #rivers #amazon #co2 #nox #fossil_fuel #deforestation #brazil #brasil #flooding #heat_dome #extreme_weather #forest_fires #media #carbon_footprint #oil_industry #lobby #desinformation #economic_growth #consumerism #citizen #protest #Fridays_for_Future #Green_New_Deal_Rising #Extinction_Rebellion #ExxonMobil #Royal_Dutch #shell #Aramco #Goldman_Sachs #google #greenwashing #McKinsey #Independent_Petroleum_Association_of_America #alphabet #snippets #google_snippets #lobby

The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing

The Guardian

Since the 1980s, fossil fuel firms have run ads touting climate denial messages – many of which they’d now like us to forget. Here’s our visual guide.

Why is meaningful action to avert the climate crisis proving so difficult? It is, at least in part, because of ads.

The fossil fuel industry has perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign to delay climate action by confusing the public and policymakers about the climate crisis and its solutions. This has involved a remarkable array of advertisements – with headlines ranging from “Lies they tell our children” to “Oil pumps life” – seeking to convince the public that the climate crisis is not real, not human-made, not serious and not solvable. The campaign continues to this day. (...)

Complete article

Tags: #capitalism #environment #pollution #waste #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #cop26 #global_warming #aur_pollution #neoliberalism #market_fundamentalism #inequality #cerrado #desert #rivers #amazon #co2 #nox #fossil_fuel #deforestation #brazil #brasil #flooding #heat_dome #extreme_weather #forest_fires #media #carbon_footprint #oil_industry #lobby #desinformation #economic_growth #consumerism #citizen #protest #Fridays_for_Future #Green_New_Deal_Rising #Extinction_Rebellion