Hell & High Water: Climate Chaos

 

 

Jeffrey St. Clair>>

 

+ Fifteen years before it was predicted, the average global temperature has breached 1.5C above pre-industrial levels over a 12-month period.

 

+ For the third year in a row Atlantic sea ice reached a new low, signaling that the continent’s sea ice has undergone an ‘abrupt critical transition.’”

 

+ With global temperatures rising to unprecedented levels, fossil fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion in 2022.

 

+ 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.

 

+ A new study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment projects that under all future emissions scenarios, the Arctic Ocean will likely become ice-free for the first time on a late August or early September day within the next 10 to 15 years.

 

+ The North Atlantic sea surface temperature has been at record warm levels for an entire year now, setting daily record highs every day for 365 consecutive days and counting.

 

+ 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.

+ China, the world’s leading solar supplier, doubled production capacity last year and now produces nearly three times more panels than global demand. Global prices for panels have fallen 50% in the past year to as low as 10 cents a watt.

 

+ According to a study out of MIT: “The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 TWh annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”

 

+ The world’s five biggest fossil fuel companies (Total, Chevron, Shell, BP and Exxon/Mobil) are expected to add 51 billion tonnes of C02 emissions to the atmosphere between now and 2050. A new study by Global Witness finds that the planned fossil fuel production from these “5 majors” will kill 11.5 million people by 2100.

 

+ After years of funding climate denial, Exxon’s CEO Darren Woods told Fortune magazine this week that the public was to blame for climate change, not the fossil fuel industry: “The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it. The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”