FRED PEARCE , Contributing Writer - Yale Environment 360
Stephan:
Climate change is turning out to be far more complex than anyone knew, with implications we are only beginning to understand. Here is the latest information I could find.
There is a paradox at the heart of our changing climate. While the blanket of air close to the Earth’s surface is warming, most of the atmosphere above is becoming dramatically colder. The same gases that are warming the bottom few miles of air are cooling the much greater expanses above that stretch to the edge of space.
This paradox has long been predicted by climate modelers, but only recently quantified in detail by satellite sensors. The new findings are providing a definitive confirmation on one important issue, but at the same time raising other questions.
The good news for climate scientists is that the data on cooling aloft do more than confirm the accuracy of the models that identify surface warming as human-made. A new study published this month in the journal PNAS by veteran climate modeler Ben Santer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that it increased the strength of the “signal” of the human fingerprint of climate change fivefold, by reducing the interference “noise” from background natural variability. Sander says the finding is “incontrovertible.”
Gloria Dickie, Climate and Environment Reporter - Reuters
Stephan:
Here is another just realized report on climate change, and it is definitely not good news. While the U.S. Congress behaves like spoiled children fighting over who gets the cookies, changes are occurring that will reshape human civilization through changes in the earth itself. But you hardly hear a word about that.
A southeast Greenland polar bear on glacier, or freshwater, ice is seen in this handout photograph taken in September 2016. Thomas W. Johansen / NASA Oceans Melting Greenland / Handout / Reuters
LONDON, U.K. — For the first time ever, global temperatures are now more likely than not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday.
This does not mean the world would cross the long-term warming threshold of 1.5C above preindustrial levels set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
But a year of warming at 1.5C could offer a glimpse of what crossing that longer term threshold, based on the 30-year global average, would be like.
With a 66% chance of temporarily reaching 1.5C by 2027, “it’s the first time in history that it’s more likely than not that we will exceed 1.5C,” said Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre, who worked on the WMO’s latest Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update.
Janet Adamy, News Editor - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
Here is a report giving us a measure of the failed state of the American Congress. There is a notable increase in the death of our young people and yet nothing is being done about it, in fact, the Republicans want to drastically cut a range of funding designed to foster the wellbeing of our children.
For decades, advances in healthcare and safety steadily drove down death rates among American children. In an alarming reversal, rates have now risen to the highest level in nearly 15 years, particularly driven by homicides, drug overdoses, car accidents and suicides.
The uptick among younger Americans accelerated in 2020. Though Covid-19 itself wasn’t a major cause of death for young people, researchers say social disruption caused by the pandemic exacerbated public-health problems, including worsening anxiety and depression. Greater access to firearms, dangerous driving and more lethal narcotics also helped push up death rates.
Between 2019 and 2020, the overall mortality rate for ages 1 to 19 rose by 10.7%, and increased by an additional 8.3% the following year, according to an analysis of federal death statistics led by Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, published in JAMA in March. That’s the highest increase for two consecutive years in the half-century that the government has publicly tracked such figures, according to Woolf’s analysis.
Other developed countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and […]
The Christian community, particularly the evangelicals, made a Faustian bargain with the Republican Party producing the christofascist movement. The christofascist movement produced the anti-choice movement under which the state controls a woman’s body. Now we are seeing the result, both politically in elections, and in the decline of Christianity as people, particularly the young, walk away from the church in droves.
Why it matters: The jump in religion-switching comes as many Americans say they no longer believe in their initial religion’s teachings — or, in many cases, disagree with a religion’s stance against LGBTQ+ people.
By the numbers: The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute survey of people across the country found that a quarter of Americans (24%) say they’ve changed religious traditions or denominations over their lifetime or recently.
That’s a 50% jump from 2021, when 16% said they had switched, the survey found.
People who are members of other non-Christian religions (38%) or religiously unaffiliated (37%) were the most likely to say that they had switched from a different religious tradition.
The people of Montana chose MAGAt Republicans to govern them, and now they are going to live with the consequences, and they are not going to like it. I predict that over the next five years we are going to see a lot of whining from Red state voters who voted for Republicans as their state is caught unprepared as the climate worsens. It is impossible to vote Republican and be an ethical person who supports fostering social wellbeing.
Montana MAGAt Republican Governor Greg Gianforte inspects the wreckage of a crash that killed four airmen at 8,500 feet on Emigrant Peak in Emigrant, Montana. Credit: William Campbell / Getty
Montana is now home to one of the most extremist anti-climate, pro-fossil fuel and big developer laws in the country after Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a GOP-sponsored bill banning agencies from considering climate impacts in major project analyses last week.
H.B. 971, which passed both chambers of the state legislature largely by party lines last month, bans agencies like the Montana Department of Environmental Quality from considering greenhouse gas emissions and climate impacts both inside and outside of the state when conducting analyses of large projects like coal mines and power plants.
The new law severely undercuts environmental analyses as a major tool of the climate movement, and, as Inside Climate News writes, is one of the most aggressive anti-climate laws in the country. The bill had garnered widespread opposition from the public with more than 1,000 public comments, 95 percent of which were submitted to oppose the proposal, per the Montana […]
