A million tons, every two minutes

 Jeffrey St. Clair >>

+ A million tons: the amount of ice Greenland loses every two minutes.

+ Every day for the last 12 months, global sea surface temperatures have broken records.

+ In 1993, the US Forest Service fought wildfires on 1.79 million acres. By 2021, the number of burned acres had more than quadrupled.

+ In 2019, 149 million people worldwide were classified as ‘acutely food insecure’ – meaning they did not have enough food to meet their daily nutritional needs. Only four years later, that number has more than doubled to 333 million. One leading cause has been droughts and crop failures attributed to climate change.

+ In the first two-and-a-half months of 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have burned across 11,000 square kilometers of the Amazon, according to real-time satellite monitoring, a record number for this early in the year.

+ Lula has made lofty pledges to address climate change and protect the environment, goals that will prove very challenging to meet if Petrobras, Brazil’s state-run oil company, goes forward with its plans to significantly boost oil production, with the goal of becoming the world’s third-largest oil producer by 2030.