Puerto Rico hasn't had reliable power in a decade.
The grid sends occasional surges through the wires that fry appliances.
Electricity rates are among the highest in the entire U.S.
Heat waves are getting intense in the summer, and outages mean A/C is no guarantee for an aging population.
3C of global warming means droughts, & floods, of historically unprecedented magnitudes across broad swaths of the planet. It means the collapse of ecosystems, and possibly even cascading effects that could trigger any number of critical Earth system "tipping points." [12/n]
For this reason, the Gates memo presupposes a false dichotomy regarding climate outcomes: The choice we are faced with is not between "good for us" & "the end of the world," but instead how much harm we are willing to tolerate, and endure, in the years to come. [8/n]
Will I be the first to suggest the carbon offsets worked exactly as planned: they delayed real action for another 25 years
Global emissions from heating are about 4x those from cooling.
Air conditioning is an important and lifesaving adaptation to climate change.
Decarbonize the grid.
Feels like the current trend in the U.S. is that a lot of people will experience climate change as a creeping, steady boil of rising rents, insurance premiums and prices for everyday items that fewer and fewer people will be able to swallow month to month
Behind closed doors, fossil fuel advocates are trashing carbon capture and storage.
@desmog.com obtained audio of Bjorn Lomborg telling a private luncheon CCS is 'not going to happen.'
Oil companies only support CCS to get 'a lot of subsidies,' he claimed.
www.desmog.com/2025/06/05/c...
Did another interview where I was asked how I study disasters and stay "optimistic".
This is very confusing for me because I am not optimistic. I am extremely pessimistic.
I think people mistake my making jokes for being optimistic. The memes are a coping mechanism, guys. It's all very bad.
I'm usually immune to being shocked...
Emissions from Land use and forestry (LULUCF) are set to nearly double, and match emissions from transport (!) in the 2030s, as forests are harvested and become a major carbon source.
My friend is in charge of the team that wrote the climate change adaptation plan for Switzerland and this is one of the things they expected.
Water began flowing onto hundreds of acres of dry, sunbaked lakebed as California officials filled ponds near the shore of the Salton Sea in an effort to create wetlands that will provide habitat for birds and help control lung-damaging dust around the shrinking lake. www.latimes.com/environment/...
How do we have a stable world, let alone "economic growth," if nearly half a billion people will need to move away from coasts and (to use jargon) the value of all that fixed capital is slowly destroyed?
It's Teacher Appreciation Week. Here's how to appreciate teachers: pay them better.
Pretty wild that "24/7" fossil fuel generation all suddenly went offline and basically only wind and solar were still producing during today's Spanish/Portuguese blackout.
"Baseload" power can be dramatically unreliable
I wrote about the doom loop of the climate crisis and the collapse of our shared reality for understanding and/or doing anything about it newrepublic.com/article/1942...
The massive explosion in use of satellite imagery by archaeologists has led to the discovery of hundreds of thousands of ancient sites and features across the world in the last 25 years, none of which were known about previously due to data resolution+coverage.
This is also a post about autism
A few thoughts:
- Globally, food loss and waste is responsible for ~10% of annual GHG emissions while aviation is “only” ~3%
- But everyone eats while only some (wealthier people) fly. One roundtrip flight DC-London is ~2 tons CO2e. Can’t do much of that and stay within a small carbon budget. 1/
I remember the first time I posted a video like this a bunch of older scientists took to Twitter to make fun of me for being too informal. If only they realized it’s videos like this that actually reach young people and that science communication is meant for the public — not other scientists!
The ‘spiral of silence’ blocking climate action and how to end it
- Globally, people are hugely supportive of climate action but wrongly believe their fellow citizens are not - revealing the truth could spark a social tipping point
#The89Percent
Story by me
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
I don’t know who needs to hear this but those five bags of clothes for good will you’ve been driving around in your trunk for two years? You can just drop them off and it takes two seconds. Truly wild stuff!
“As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.”
— Pope Francis
As @justinworland.com reminds us, "Francis paid special attention to the disproportionate impact of climate change on the world’s poorest and critiqued the economic structures that make this a reality."
Exquisite writing. Required reading for anyone parsing through the noise.
In preparation for today’s Super Bowl in New Orleans, state police forced over 100 homeless men and women onto buses under threat of arrest, dumping them in an unheated warehouse. Tents destroyed, belongings lost. Press are barred from the warehouse.
The price tag for this cruelty? $17.5 million
"Beryl knocked out power to more than 2 mil homes. Yes, hurricanes are devastating. Less than two months earlier, a sudden windstorm in the city blacked out electricity for more than a mil ppl. How many blackouts will it take before we realize today’s power grid was built for yesterday’s climate?"
"...frameworks...single out physical transport infrastructure without considering the people who use it."
Hearing from travelling post-docs (bi-coastal heat dome last year) about 2nd order effects like delayed organ transport certainly put things in to perspective.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
What do climate protests actually achieve? More than you think.
The evidence is in: Protests can persuade people, and maybe even change how they vote.
grist.org/protest/clim...
#Protest #Climate #Environment #Trump #Greensky
Climate impacts means lower yields and less land for food in the future, but what can we do? How do we provide healthy food using fewer inputs, less land, less capital etc?
I argue that biophysical limits mean we'll likely go much more plant based in this keynote 🧵
www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2nl...
