… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Category: Climate Crisis

  • Climate protests news review

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    Climate [ed: strikes] were worldwide on Friday.

    https://insideclimatenews.org/todaysclimate/the-return-of-the-youth-climate-strike/

    https://fridaysforfuture.org/march19/

    FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE…

    or FFF, is a youth-led and -organised global climate strike movement that started in August 2018, when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began a school strike for climate. In the three weeks leading up to the Swedish election, she sat outside Swedish Parliament every school day, demanding urgent action on the climate crisis. She was tired of society’s unwillingness to see the climate crisis for what it is: a crisis.

    To begin with, she was alone, but she was soon joined by others. On the 8th of September, Greta and her fellow school strikers decided to continue their strike until the Swedish policies provided a safe pathway well under 2° C, i.e. in line with the Paris agreement. They created the hashtag #FridaysForFuture, and encouraged other young people all over the world to join them. This marked the beginning of the global school strike for climate.

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    Young people on first climate strikes since COP26

    Young people in Scotland are taking part in climate strikes from schools, colleges and universities for the first time since COP26.

    They are calling for faster action on climate change as they believe little has been done since the global summit.

    The demonstrations are part of more than 700 similar protests taking place around the world.

    Hundreds gathered outside the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh before marching to the city chambers.

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    Australia has seen protests by Blockade Australia blockading infrastructure before Friday – Sydney’s Port Botany, roads and railways in Sydney – as well as climate strikers.

    Activists dismiss NSW government crackdown on Sydney port protests

    State government announces strike force and penalties, while two German nationals will be deported

    Climate change protesters who have caused blockades at Sydney’s major port this week say tougher penalties and the deportation of two activists will not stop them from continuing their campaign.

    The New South Wales government announced on Thursday that it would ramp up its response to protests by the climate group Blockade Australia, including the creation of a strike force aimed at disrupting activists, increased penalties and possible jail time.

    The penalties, including fines of $22,000 and up to two years jail time for people who blockade tunnels and bridges, follow three days of protests around the port which have seen the arrests of five people including two German nationals.

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    Senior ex-ADF officers name climate change as Australia’s biggest threat

    A roll call of senior ex-Defence officers and security experts have put their names to an open letter naming climate change “the greatest threat to the future and security of Australians”.

    The letter, published on the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group website, called on political leaders to make climate change a primary focus ahead of the 2022 Federal Election.

    “The first duty of government is the safety and protection of the people, but Australia has failed when it comes to climate change threats,” the letter read.

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    Climate protest shuts down Port Botany for third time in a day after man climbs crane

    Climate activist group Blockade Australia shut down operations at Port Botany three times on Friday, marking its fourth consecutive day of climate inaction protests in Sydney.

    Around 2pm, a 26-year-old, identified by the activist group as Max, gained access to the port in less than 10 minutes and began scaling a 60-metre crane, tying himself to the main arm of its top while live-streaming the incident on Facebook.

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    Earlier on Friday, a grandmother aged in her 60s, who identified herself as Sharon, climbed on top of a cargo train in Sydney’s inner west as part of the same climate change protest. She was arrested and taken to Mascot police station where she is expected to be charged.

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    Another woman staged a protest in Tempe, identifying herself as Emma on her Facebook stream. She was arrested after she suspended herself from a bipod structure on a freight line.

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    Australian school students join global climate protest

    Scott Morrison reminds students skipping school for climate protests that ‘learning gets done in schools’

  • ‘Unthinkable’: Scientists Shocked as Polar Temperatures Soar 50 to 90 Degrees Above Normal

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    Republished from Common Dreams

    Scientists expressed alarm as temperatures near both poles soared to 50°-90°F above normal in recent days. (Image: Climate Reanalyzer)

    “With everything going on in the world right now, the dual polar climate disasters of 2022 should be the top story”

    BRETT WILKINSMarch 20, 2022

    Scientists expressed shock and alarm this weekend amid extreme high temperatures near both of the Earth’s poles—the latest signs of the accelerating planetary climate emergency.

    “This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system.”

    Temperatures in parts of Antarctica were 50°F-90°F above normal in recent days, while earlier this week the mercury soared to over 50°F higher than average—close to the freezing mark—in areas of the Arctic.

    Stefano Di Battista, an Antarctic climatologist, tweeted that such record-shattering heat near the South Pole was “unthinkable” and “impossible.”

    “Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” di Battista wrote.

    The joint French-Italian Concordia research station in eastern Antarctica recorded an all-time high of 10°F on Friday. In contrast, high temperatures at the station this time in March average below -50°F.

    Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, told The Washington Post that “this event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system.”

    “This is when temperatures should be rapidly falling since the summer solstice in December,” Wille tweeted. “This is a Pacific Northwest 2021 heatwave kind of event,” he added, referring to the record-breaking event in which parts of Canada topped 120°F for the first time in recorded history. “Never supposed to happen.”

    Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, told USA Today that “you don’t see the North and the South [poles] both melting at the same time” because “they are opposite seasons.”

    “It’s definitely an unusual occurrence,” he added.

    As Common Dreams has reported, the Arctic has been warming three times faster than the world as a whole, accelerating polar ice melt, ocean warming, and other manifestations of the climate emergency.

    “Looking back over the last few decades, we can clearly see a trend in warming, particularly in the ‘cold season’ in the Arctic,” Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute, told the Post. “It’s not surprising that warm air is busting through into the Arctic this year. In general, we expect to see more and more of these events in the future.”

  • Why are there calls to ban Bitcoin mining?

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    https://techmonitor.ai/technology/emerging-technology/european-bitcoin-ban-ethereum

    Why are there calls to ban Bitcoin mining?

    Bitcoin, Ethereum and other PoW cryptocurrencies create significant carbon emissions with each transaction. According to the Digiconomist Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, a single transaction creates 1259 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, which is the same carbon footprint of a trans-Atlantic flight from London to New York and back again.  

    To look at it another way, a single financial transaction using Visa consumes 1.5Wh of electricity on average. Digiconomist says that the average energy use per Bitcoin transaction is 2258 kWh, which is enough to power a single US household for two and a half months.  

    Alex de Vries, founder of Digiconomist, told Tech Monitor that the Bitcoin network alone generates 200-quintrillion “guesses” a day as part of a numbers game to create one block.  

    “You have all these machines in the network effectively playing a massive game of guessing numbers and the only one who guesses correctly gets to rate the next block,” he explains. “That’s a huge amount of energy you need to do that to create those new blocks.” 

    https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/5ZsRr/1/

    He explains that per year there are 100 million Bitcoin transactions, which is relatively low. However, the carbon footprint to generate new blocks is over 100 megatons of carbon dioxide. “That’s twice the size of Greece’s [carbon footprint],” he says.  

    The Bitcoin network also uses specialised hardware that creates 386 grams of electronic waste (on average) per transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain. “This is the equivalent to the equipment weight of two iPhones,” explains De Vries. 

    …

  • Climate protesters storm Baftas and sit on red carpet as A-listers walk past – video

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    Protesters from the campaign group Just Stop Oil stormed the Baftas red carpet ceremony on Sunday. Some managed to get in and sat on the carpet chanting slogans as A-listers walked past. The Guardian’s Damien Gayle spoke to some of them before the event
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    https://www.desmog.com/2022/03/10/nigel-farages-net-zero-referendum-drive-is-steeped-in-climate-science-denial/

    This week the GB News host and former UKIP leader said he was launching a campaign for a public referendum on the UK’s net zero policies, under the slogan “Vote Power, Not Poverty”.

    He repeats familiar talking points from public figures blocking climate action, including the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of MPs, who argue that the war in Ukraine means the UK should extract more fossil fuels and overturn its moratorium on fracking. Farage went further – arguing for coal extraction at the proposed mine in Cumbria.

    Farage, who has a long record of rejecting climate science, is running the referendum campaign with Richard Tice, a millionaire property developer who bankrolled campaigns for the UK to leave the European Union. “Vote Power, Not Poverty” has received widespread media coverage, especially in Brexit-supporting outlets like the Daily Mail.

    Farage has likened his net zero campaign to his push for Brexit and clearly hopes to repeat the populist tactics used ahead of the 2016 EU referendum. DeSmog has verified that the “Vote Power, Not Poverty” Twitter account is the old Brexiteer “Leave Means Leave” Twitter account with a new name.

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    Insulate Britain protests: Police charge 74 activists

    Police have charged 74 people over Insulate Britain protests.

    The charges relate to demonstrations at the Port of Dover and the Dartford Crossing, which caused heavy traffic tailbacks, in September and October.

    There are a total of 104 charges, 73 for public nuisance, 29 for obstruction and two for criminal damage, a further 19 people who were arrested were released without charge.

    Crawley Magistrates’ Court will begin hearing the charges from April.

    [It is difficult to take only quote a small section of this article since it is so short.]

    IPCC Report Calls Out ‘Vested Interests’ Delaying Climate Action

    The UN’s expert climate science organization has criticised the “vested interests” obstructing efforts to cut emissions for the first time this week.

    The world’s leading climate scientists warned of the “irreversible” impacts of global warming in the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describing the window of opportunity to act as “brief and rapidly closing”.

    The review, which focuses on adaptation, said that despite scientific certainty around human-caused climate change, “vested economic and political interests” were delaying efforts to tackle it.

    These have “generated rhetoric and misinformation that undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency”, it noted, resulting in “public misperception of climate risks and polarised public support for climate actions”.

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    Anti-Net Zero MP Steve ‘number two’ Baker Took £5k From Chair of Climate Science Denial Group

    A Tory MP leading a backbench revolt against climate action recently received £5,000 from the chair of the UK’s most prominent climate science denial group.

    Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, insists that his Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) of MPs accepts climate science and is only concerned about the cost and efficacy of the UK’s 2050 net zero target. 

    But the parliamentary register of interests shows that Baker received £5,000 from Neil Record, a Tory Party donor and chairman of both the climate science-denying Global Warming Policy Forum and the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank, which has received funding from oil giant BP, and has a record of opposing government climate policies. 

    The Forum, which rebranded as Net Zero Watch in October, is the campaigning wing of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which Baker joined as an unpaid trustee last year.

    GWPF-founder Lord Nigel Lawson, who is also a board member of the Forum/Net Zero Watch, recently wrote that “global warming is not a problem”.

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    Tens of thousands take part in climate protests across France

    Tens of thousands of people protested across France on Saturday to call for more attention to the climate crisis in the runup to the presidential election next month.

    “Look up,” read one message in giant orange letters demonstrators held up in Paris, urging politicians to make protecting the planet a priority.

    The sign was a nod to Netflix hit Don’t Look Up, in which astronomers who discover a comet will wipe out the Earth try in vain to get politicians to take the threat seriously. “When are we going to talk about it?” read another sign.

    The climate crisis took up only 1.5% of talking points in media coverage of the election campaign from 28 February to 6 March, a recent survey by climate justice NGOs has found.

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