A Palestinian woman receives dialysis treatment at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital on February 8, 2024. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
The lack of medicine, food and water means thousands of people with asthma, kidney disease or diabetes are unable to treat or control their conditions
Four months of conflict in Gaza is jeopardising the health of thousands of people with chronic illnesses such as kidney disease, diabetes and asthma, doctors have warned.
The chronically ill are the hidden casualties of the war, as access to water, food and medicine is severely restricted, said Guillemette Thomas, the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical coordinator for Palestine.
“Hospitals that are still functioning are overwhelmed with injured people, they are not able to deal with chronic illness at all,” she said. “Before the war there were 3,500 hospital beds in Gaza, now there are fewer than 1,000, and hundreds and hundreds of injured. We don’t know how many people are dying because they can’t access healthcare.”
When medication is allowed into the territory there are no safe ways of distributing it, Thomas said. “We have some insulin coming in aid trucks, but patients can’t get to the places where it is stocked because of the airstrikes. People are bombed on their way to the hospital.”
Experts struggle to explain how rises in sea-surface temperatures have accelerated so quickly. Photograph: PPAMPicture/Getty Images
Rapid ocean warming and unusually hot winter days recorded as human-made global heating combines with El Niño
February is on course to break a record number of heat records, meteorologists say, as human-made global heating and the natural El Niño climate pattern drive up temperatures on land and oceans around the world.
A little over halfway into the shortest month of the year, the heating spike has become so pronounced that climate charts are entering new territory, particularly for sea-surface temperatures that have persisted and accelerated to the point where expert observers are struggling to explain how the change is happening.
“The planet is warming at an accelerating rate. We are seeing rapid temperature increases in the ocean, the climate’s largest reservoir of heat,” said Dr Joel Hirschi, the associate head of marine systems modelling at the UK National Oceanography Centre. “The amplitude by which previous sea surface temperatures records were beaten in 2023 and now 2024 exceed expectations, though understanding why this is, is the subject of ongoing research.”
Humanity is on a trajectory to experience the hottest February in recorded history, after a record January, December, November, October, September, August, July, June and May, according to the Berkeley Earth scientist Zeke Hausfather.
A protest against the killing of journalists in Gaza. Photo: International Federation of Journalists/X
A report by the Committee to Protect Journalists said that 78 journalists and media workers were killed in Gaza in the first three months of Israel’s war. The report added that the circumstances leading to the killing of these media professionals were difficult to ascertain due to Israel’s refusal to cooperate
Nearly three fourths of all journalists and media workers killed in 2023 were Palestinians who were killed in the first three months of the Israeli war in Gaza, said the annual report of Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released on Thursday, February 15.
According to the CPJ, at least 99 journalists and media workers were killed in 2023. This is the highest number of journalists and media persons killed in a year since 2015 and was a 44% increase from last year when the figure was 69.
Among the 78 journalists and media workers killed in the Israeli war on Gaza, 72 were Palestinians, three were Lebanese and two were Israeli journalists.
The report stated that the details of the circumstances leading to the killing of most of the journalists and media workers in Gaza were difficult to obtain due to Israel’s refusal to cooperate. A large number of family members of those journalists and media workers were also killed in the Israeli bombings and ground offensive which made the task of investigating the circumstances of their killing difficult.
A total of more than 28,700 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 69,000 others have been wounded in the Israeli war in Gaza since October 7. Many journalists have lost their entire families in Israeli attacks.
CJP claimed that at least 78 of the journalists and thirteen media workers were killed on duty in 2023. It also claimed that there were eight more journalists killed last year but the investigation into the circumstances in which they were killed was still not complete.
CJP claimed that a large number of journalists in Palestine were killed deliberately and it has raised the issue with the Israelis.
Most of the Palestinian journalists killed on duty in Gaza were in full gear and easily identifiable when they were targeted in air strikes or during Israeli ground offensives.
Deliberately targeting and killing journalists on duty is a war crime as per international law. Israel often claims that journalists killed in Gaza were members of “terrorist groups” without providing any evidence.
The numbers are much higher, say other groups
Several more journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces since December, including Al-Jazeera journalist Hamza al-Dahdouh who was targeted and killed by a missile attack on the car in which he was traveling with another freelance journalist Mustafa Thuraya.
Hamza was the son of prominent journalist Wael Dahdouh, most of whose family members were killed in Israeli strikes earlier. Wael himself was injured in one of the attacks carried out by the Israelis while on duty.
According to estimates by other organizations, the number of Palestinian journalists killed is higher. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) claimed at least 95 journalists or around 8% of all registered journalists in Palestine have been killed by Israel between October 7 and December 19.
According to Palestinian Authority’s media office, the total number of media workers killed in Palestine since October 7 is 126.
PJS claims that most of the journalists killed in Gaza were deliberately targeted by Israeli forces with the intention of “assassination and murder.” Some of the journalists were also threatened by Israeli forces before they were actually killed for covering the Israeli genocide, PJS alleged.
In addition to killing Palestinian journalists, Israel has also resorted to other means of shutting down the spread of information, including media gags, denial of visas to foreign journalists, and repeated shutdowns of the internet and telecommunication services, sometimes for weeks.
“The war [Israeli war in Gaza] is unprecedented in terms of threats to journalists” Jodie Ginsberg, Chief Executive Officer of the CPJ, told Al-Jazeera.
Israel has a long history of targeting and killing journalists. In 2022, Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed when she was reporting the Israeli military raid on Jenin. CPJ claims there were at least 20 such cases before the current war in Gaza but no one has ever been charged or held responsible for these killings.
Philippa Stroud, chair of the government’s Low Pay Commission, and CEO of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Credit: ARC(CC0 1.0 DEED)
Tory peer Philippa Stroud, who has close ties to the funders of GB News, has been elevated to a senior advisory role by the government.
A new government advisor on the minimum wage is the head of an international network of climate crisis deniers funded by the owners of GB News, DeSmog can reveal.
Philippa Stroud was appointed chair of the Low Pay Commission, a body reporting to Kemi Badenoch’s Department of Business and Trade, on 30 January. The government-appointed role pays £530 per day for three days of work per month (£19,114 per year).
The Conservative peer is the CEO of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new pressure group that shares its funders with GB News and is linked to some of the world’s most prominent climate crisis deniers, including psychologist Jordan Peterson. Stroud has been described by The Telegraph as “the most powerful right-winger you’ve never heard of”.
The appointment comes as senior Conservative Party figures continue to embrace anti-climate politics. On 6 February, former prime minister Liz Truss attacked “net zero zealots” at the launch of her new Popular Conservatism faction.
Last month, Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Clare Coutinho met with and praised fuel pricing lobbyist Howard Cox, a Reform UK candidate who wants to “scrap net zero” and claims that “man is not responsible for global warming”.
The government is also pushing ahead with legislation that would require the awarding of annual North Sea oil and gas licences. The Climate Change Committee, the independent body that advises the government on its net zero policies, warned on 30 January that mixed messages, including new fossil fuel projects, have damaged the UK’s international climate standing.
Last year was the first on record to see consistent global warming of 1.5C, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
DeSmog has previously revealed that the Conservative Party received £3.5 million in donations from fossil fuel interests and climate science deniers in 2022.
Stroud’s appointment also cements the relationship between the Conservative Party and GB News. On Monday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took part in an hour-long town hall event on GB News, following the example of several Conservative MPs who are regular guests and presenters on the right-wing broadcaster.
Stroud’s ARC project is run by hedge fund manager Paul Marshall and the UAE-based Legatum Group, GB News’s principal backers. The Legatum Institute, a think tank funded by the Legatum Group, gave £50,000 to a faction of the Conservative Party in December. Before taking up her post at ARC, Stroud was CEO of the Legatum Institute.
“Anti-science climate change denialism has become the secret handshake that ushers in the faithful and bars the door to unbelievers,” Jolyon Maugham, executive director of the Good Law Project, told DeSmog. “This is an appalling betrayal of the principles of sound government – and of our children who need us to be led by science and not by the financial interests of wealthy Tory donors.”
ARC, Stroud, the Legatum Group, and the Low Pay Commission were approached for comment.
ARC and Legatum
Philippa Stroud was made a life peer by then prime minister David Cameron (now foreign secretary) in 2015, after failing to win a parliamentary seat in 2010.
The Legatum Group, which has employed Stroud both directly and indirectly since 2016, is one of the largest shareholders in GB News, which frequently attacks climate science and policies. A DeSmog investigation found that one in three GB News hosts spread climate denial on air in 2022.
GB News’s other major owner is British billionaire Paul Marshall, chairman and chief investment officer of the hedge fund Marshall Wace. DeSmog revealed that, as of June 2023, Marshall Wace owned shares worth $2.2 billion (£1.8 billion) in fossil fuel firms. This included a $213 million (£175.6 million) shareholding in the oil and gas supermajor Chevron, as well as stakes in Shell, Equinor, and 109 other fossil fuel companies.
In her statement announcing the launch of ARC, Stroud took aim at climate policies, writing that “we risk driving policy interventions to address environmental concerns without having an honest conversation about the trade-offs for the poor at home or in developing and emerging nations”.
Poor and indigenous groups in developing countries will be hit hardest by the impacts of climate change, while those suffering from poverty at home have seen their energy bills soar as successive governments have failed to implement green reforms.
ARC is fronted by Canadian author Jordan Peterson, who regularly posts about “climate apocalypse insanity” and “eco fascists” to his millions of online followers. Peterson has promoted fringe climate crisis deniers on his YouTube channel and, as revealed by DeSmog, plans to open a new online school also featuring several climate crisis deniers.
ARC’s advisory board includes writers Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger, both of whom have written books downplaying the threats posed by climate change, as well as Tony Abbott, the former prime minister of Australia and a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s principal climate science denial group.
Late last year, speaking on the outskirts of ARC’s launch conference in London, Abbott claimed climate change has “nothing to do with mankind’s emissions”. ARC advisor Vivek Ramaswamy, who also spoke at the conference, has called climate change a “hoax” and has said that “real emergency isn’t climate change, it’s the man-made disaster of climate change policies that threaten US prosperity.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, states it is “unequivocal” that human influence has caused “unprecedented” global warming.
Kemi Badenoch, whose department appointed Stroud to her new advisory role, also spoke at the ARC conference alongside Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove. The pair were joined by a number of Conservative MPs.
Stroud’s appointment to the government’s Low Pay Commission was first trailed by The Telegraph in December. A “Whitehall source” told the paper that Stroud was selected for the three-year post to block a possible left-wing appointment by a Labour government.
Carla Denyer, Green Party co-leader and its parliamentary candidate for Bristol Central said that Stroud’s appointment was “hardly the most appropriate” and that “the Conservatives seem set on placing their people across the quango world before the general election.”
Rishi Sunak on stopping Rosebank says that any chancellor can stop his huge 91% subsidy to build Rosebank, that Keir Starmer is as bad as him for sucking up to Murdoch and other plutocrats and that we (the plebs) need to get organised to elect MPs that will stop Rosebank.
There is near-universal global public support for climate action, yet people systematically underestimate the commitment of their peers, according to a new study.
The research, published in Nature Climate Change, is based on a globally-representative sample of nearly 130,000 people in 125 countries.
It finds that 86% of people “support pro-climate social norms” and 89% would like their governments to do more to tackle warming. Moreover, 69% say they would be willing to contribute 1% of their income to addressing climate change.
Yet respondents also “systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act”, according to the paper, creating a potentially challenging “perception gap”.
Carbon Brief interviewed the authors of the study to find out more. The questions and their answers are reproduced in full, below. An abridged version of the transcript was first published in DeBriefed, Carbon Brief’s weekly email newsletter. Sign up for free.
Carbon Brief: Your survey of nearly 130,000 people in 125 countries found “almost universal” support (86%) for climate action, with 89% wanting more from governments. Were you surprised?
Prof Peter Andre, Prof Teodora Boneva, Prof Felix Chopra and Prof Armin Falk: While we did expect to find high levels of approval for climate action in some of the countries that we studied, we were indeed surprised to find that the percentage of the population approving of pro-climate social norms and demanding more political action from their national government is very high in almost all countries in our sample. In 119 of 125 countries, the proportion of individuals who state that people in their country “should try to fight global warming” exceeds two-thirds. In more than half the countries in our sample, the demand for more government action even exceeds 90%.
We were probably misled by the same pessimism that we found to be so widespread across the globe. 69% of the world’s population is willing to contribute 1% of their monthly income to fight global warming. A broad majority of people across the globe is willing to pay a personal cost. In fact, in 114 out of 125 countries, a majority of respondents is willing to fight climate change. However, in 110 out of 125 countries, the majority thinks that they are in the minority: When asked about how many people in their country are willing to contribute, most respondents think that less than half of their fellow citizens would be willing to contribute.
[The figure below, taken from the new paper, shows: (top left) the share of respondents willing to contribute none, up to 1% or at least 1% of their income to tackling climate change; (top right) the same result broken down by country; (middle panel) the share believing that “people should try to fight global warming”; (lower panel) the share wanting governments to do more.]
Top panel: Willingness to contribute to climate action, %. Middle: Share agreeing that “people should try to fight global warming”. Bottom: Share wanting governments to do more. Each panel shows global (left) and national averages (right). Credit: Andre et al. (2024).
CB:A large majority (69%) said they would be willing to contribute 1% of their income to fight global warming. Do you think this would hold for specific policies, such as a carbon tax?
PA, TB, FC and AF: The popular support for specific policies will depend on many details that we had to abstract from in the global survey. How effective is the policy? Is it perceived as fair? Who supports the policy in the public debate? So one cannot simply equate support in the survey with support for specific policy proposals. In a representative US sample, we do find that the general demand for more political action is strongly correlated with demand for specific climate policies, such as a carbon tax on fossil fuels, regulatory limits on the CO2emissions of coal-fired plants, or funding for research on renewable energy. Overall, we think the important conclusion is the following: The large majority of people across the world expresses a general willingness to make costly contributions to fight climate change. This means that we can move the debate forward and focus on how we can best tap into this broad willingness to contribute to best tackle the challenges posed by climate change.
CB:There has been a resurgence of anti-climate rhetoric from politicians and the media in many countries. Do you think public opinion has shifted since your survey in 2021-22?
PA, TB, FC and AF: We do not detect any clear time trend within our samples from 2021 and 2022, but do not have data for the most recent months. If we were to speculate, we would not want to fall victim to the same pessimism one more time. We would expect that a large majority would still be in favor of climate action today, and this seems to be in line with more recent research. The year 2023 has been confirmed as the warmest calendar year in global temperature data records going back to 1850. In our study, we find that annual average temperatures strongly correlate with the proportion of people being willing to support climate action. Our best guess is that the support for climate action has increased rather than decreased in the last two years.
CB:You found stronger willingness to contribute among respondents in poorer, hotter and more vulnerable countries. Why do you think richer people are less willing to pay their way?
PA, TB, FC and AF: Two potential explanations come to mind. First, richer countries are still strongly dependent on fossil fuels. The adaptation costs could therefore be perceived as relatively high and the required lifestyle changes as too drastic. At the same time, richer countries may be more resilient: A country’s GDP per capita reflects its economic capacity to cope with climate change. The most direct and immediate consequences are likely to be concentrated in more vulnerable countries, which have fewer resources to mitigate the negative consequences of the climate crisis. However, it’s important to stress the positive message: the support for climate action is large even in the richest countries in our sample. In the wealthiest quintile of countries, the average proportion of people willing to contribute 1% is 62%.
CB:You found people systematically underestimated the willingness of their peers to contribute to climate action. Why do you think that is – and how could it be changed?
PA, TB, FC and AF: The reasons for this perception gap are likely to be manifold. In the past, media and public discussions have given a lot of focus to the small number of climate change sceptics and have fallen prey to the efforts of special interest groups. Moreover, climate change is difficult to tackle. People might mistakenly infer that the slow progress in combating climate change is due to a widespread lack of personal commitment.
In our view, correcting this perception gap is more important than understanding its origin. Humans are (what behavioral scientists call) “conditional cooperators”. They contribute more to the public good if they believe that others contribute as well. For this reason, pessimism about others’ contributions is harmful. It can constitute a critical obstacle for climate action. We thus conclude in the paper that, “[r]ather than echoing the concerns of a vocal minority that opposes any form of climate action, we need to effectively communicate that the vast majority of people around the world are willing to act against climate change and expect their national government to act”. We hope that our study sparks a debate on this topic, and increases awareness about the large global support for climate action.
