hanrahan

Billions fewer birds are flying through North American skies than decades ago," reports the Associated Press, "and their population is shrinking ever faster, mostly due to a combination of intensive agriculture and warming temperatures, a new study found."

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34721401

It is a double-edged sword. As the planet heats up, more of us are turning up and turning to air conditioning to keep us cool. The trouble is that, as well as consuming vast amounts of electricity, AC also leads to significant greenhouse gas emissions and worsens the climate change we are trying to combat.

are we though ? trying to combat climate change, when nearly everything we do is wrong or making it worse.

this leads me to this article

https://theconversation.com/the-new-climate-denial-using-wealth-to-insulate-yourself-from-discomfort-and-change-199101

The new climate denial? Using wealth to insulate yourself from discomfort and change

A new study spanning 11 years of data has revealed a clear link between wildfire smoke pollution and an increase in violent assaults in Seattle. These findings represent the first direct causal evidence that short-term exposure to wildfire-driven air pollution can increase interpersonal violence in an urban environment

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34564972

Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a “staggering and deeply concerning” loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade.

Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year.

“To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish,” said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study’s lead author.

“A 7.2% decline for every tenth of a degree per decade might sound small,” he added. “But compounded over time, across entire ocean basins, it represents a staggering and deeply concerning loss of marine life.”

Rice, maize, and cassava crops cumulatively account for approximately 11% of total global deforestation—exceeding that of cocoa, coffee, and rubber—according to an analysis between 2001 and 2022, published in Nature Food.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34309891

In the past 20 years, Gardiner writes, plastic production has doubled, and it will double again, perhaps triple, in the near future. Petrochemicals for plastic are, she says, “expected to be the largest single driver of oil demand in the decades to come. Obviously these oil companies can see what’s coming – they understand that that shift away from fossil fuels is a threat to their business model that has been so profitable for them.” Plastic, she says, “is a way for them to keep drilling and to keep making money. Putting their expertise and muscle into solar or wind power was not the way they wanted to go. It’s not as profitable as selling oil and gas, so they’re all in on the current model, and plastic is a way to perpetuate it. Which is why it is, I guess, even more catastrophic. Because if it’s enabling the industry to keep drilling, to keep selling oil and gas, that is a huge threat to the climate.”

The extraction and transport of fossil fuels, and manufacturing and disposal of plastics, all create carbon emissions. According to the UN, in 2019, plastics generated 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – 3.4% of total global emissions.