Pistachio Wars With Iran, Slave Labor, and Wildfires: the Absurd American Dystopia of 2025
Pistachio Wars With Iran, Slave Labor, and Wildfires: the Absurd American Dystopia of 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTn_tE_fF8c
Tag: global warming
We were supposed to hit peak emissions. Why won’t they stop rising?
“The big reason is that fossil fuel consumption is up. Oil and gas account for the bulk of this increase in emissions, with coal a distant third. While greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are rising, their output is level or falling from some of the largest historical emitters. The European Union’s emissions are declining. US emissions are holding steady. China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, is on track to see its output grow by just 0.2 percent this year, one of the tiniest increases in years.
Bucking this trend are many developing countries like India, currently the world’s third-largest emitter. India has seen a huge increase in renewable energy deployment, but its still developing energy from all sources, including fossil fuels. The Global Carbon Budget found India’s fossil fuel emissions are on track to increase 4.6 percent this year.
There are a few additional factors that drove up emissions this year. The lingering effects of El Niño helped push global temperatures to record highs. Extraordinary heat waves in India and China pushed up energy demand for cooling, and that meant burning more fossil fuels. “We’re beginning to see some of those negative feedback loops where the climate crisis itself is impacting on the energy system and making it harder to reduce emissions,” Grant said.
Still, there are glimmers of good news. More than 30 countries have already managed to grow their economies while cutting carbon dioxide pollution, a clear sign that coal, oil, and natural gas are not the only paths to prosperity. These countries have already summited their emissions peaks and are now on the descent, breaking a pattern that has held for nearly two centuries.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/385183/cop29-climate-change-emissions-rising-trump-baku
Top Economist: Why Climate Change Economics is Dangerous
Economists are greatly underestimating the costs of climate change due to a variety of bad methods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNLZWVbEa1s
EU all but guaranteed to miss global deadline for climate targets
“global warming is now taking a backseat to economic woes and the war in Ukraine. Governments seem not to be in a hurry to start a discussion on new climate targets. While a handful of EU countries, Denmark among them, have endorsed a 90 percent target for 2040, others, including Poland, aren’t yet ready to do so.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-all-but-guaranteed-to-miss-global-deadline-for-climate-targets/
Is climate change really making hurricanes worse?
“Several factors converged to make 2024 so fertile for tropical storms. Hurricanes feed on warm water, and the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico provided ample nourishment as they reached record-high temperatures. Wind shear — where air currents change speed and direction with altitude — tends to rip apart tropical storms before they can form hurricanes, but there was little of that this year due in part to the ripple effects of the shift to La Niña in the Pacific Ocean.”
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“The world has already heated up by about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. There’s some evidence of this warming playing out in various hurricane traits, but there are also places where it’s absent.”
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“scientists need more observations and more time to confirm whether climate change is having any influence on the number of hurricanes.”
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“the IPCC report does show hurricanes changing in ways beyond their overall numbers. One is that hurricanes in recent decades have likely been shifting toward the poles, farther away from their normal habitat in the tropics. That makes sense knowing that hurricanes need warm water, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, so hotter oceans mean these storms can have a greater range.
Another changing trait is that hurricanes appear to be moving slower. That means the storms that make landfall spend more time parked over a given region, forcing the area to endure more wind and rainfall. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was an exemplar of this as it sauntered along the Texas coast at 5 miles per hour and drenched Houston.
Rapid intensification is a climate change hallmark as well. This is where a tropical storm gains 35 miles per hour or more in windspeed in 24 hours. Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 180 miles per hour in just one day. The IPCC found that the global frequency of rapid intensification in tropical cyclones has likely increased over the past 40 years to an extent that can’t be explained by natural variability alone.
One of the strongest signals of climate change in hurricanes is rain. The average and maximum rainfall rates from hurricanes are increasing, largely a function of rising water and air temperatures. More recently, some researchers have begun to connect the increase in rainfall from individual hurricanes to climate change. The World Weather Attribution research group analyzed the rain from Hurricane Helene. They found the precipitation from the storm was 10 percent heavier due to climate change and that such extreme rain is now 40 to 70 percent more likely because of warming. Looking at Hurricane Milton, the researchers reported that heavy one-day rain events like those spawned from the storm are at least 20 to 30 percent more probable.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/378359/hurricane-climate-change-flood-helene-milton-warming
One chart shows how Hurricane Helene turned into a monstrous storm
“This record ocean heat is a clear reason why Hurricane Helene — which has been traveling through the Gulf on its way to Florida — has intensified so quickly. Put simply, hotter water evaporates more readily, and rising columns of warm, moist air from that evaporation are ultimately what drive hurricanes and their rapid intensification.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/373874/hurricane-helene-florida-forecast-warm-ocean-water
Get used to more absurdly hot Octobers
“This October heat is largely the result of a phenomenon currently happening in the West known as a “heat dome” — which involves a high-pressure system trapping heat closer to the Earth’s surface.
Long-term climate change, however, is likely exacerbating the heat dome’s effects. Greenhouse gasses that fuel climate change also trap heat, leading to higher temperatures that can make an already hot heat dome even hotter.
According to a study from the climate nonprofit Climate Central, 91 million people in the US experienced 30 or more “risky heat days” this summer, and those were made twice as likely because of climate change. The organization describes “risky heat” days as ones warmer than “90 percent of temperatures observed in a local area over the 1991-2020 period.”
Climate change has also led to higher temperatures around the world throughout this past year, including a particularly hot summer in states across the US. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this was the country’s fourth-hottest summer on record, when looking at temperatures from June through August 2024. During those months, the average temperature in the contiguous United States was 73.8 degrees Fahrenheit — 2.5 degrees above the average from 1991-2020.
That was noticeable in multiple places, including Phoenix, which experienced more than 100 consecutive days of 100-degree heat or higher this year. Globally, the world could also be on track to hit its hottest year on record.
In addition to getting warmer, summers are getting longer, with Drexel University researchers noting that seasonal temperatures are lasting 30 days longer than they have in the past, meaning well into October for some in the northern hemisphere.
That means fall doesn’t bring the same relief from heat it once did. As a September Climate Central report, which looked at 242 US cities, found, fall temperatures went up 2.5 degrees, on average, between 1970 and 2023.
The warmer fall days could have major implications for natural disasters, especially for wildfires in places like Southern California, where heat amplifies the risk of potential blazes on drier landscapes that have also seen decades of fire suppression. While wildfire season has typically run from early summer into the fall, it has the potential to go longer as higher temperatures persist.
More days with higher temperatures can also translate to increased cases of heat stroke, cardiovascular problems caused by stress on the heart, and respiratory challenges. They can extend, too, the window when people experience seasonal allergies.
Additionally, warmer falls could affect plant and animal preparations for hibernation, severely shortening the time they usually take to prepare for winter, and delaying processes like changes in foliage and leaf dropping. Farmers may increasingly need to shift planting and harvesting schedules for different crops as temperatures continue to fluctuate as well.
Short of major changes needed to curb human contributions to global warming, this year’s October heat waves aren’t likely to be a fluke. As Mann told Vox, “The warming will continue until we bring carbon emissions to zero.””
https://www.vox.com/climate/375996/extreme-heat-october-climate-change
Aftermath of Trump’s win eclipses Chinese solar project in Texas
“Trina Solar was in line to receive nearly $1.8 billion in tax credits under President Joe Biden’s climate law, as one of several Chinese solar businesses setting up factories in the United States to benefit from the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. But President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to dismember Biden’s climate agenda, and has called for taking a hard line against economic competition from China.
Trina said Trump’s victory had “nothing to do” with the sale of the factory near Dallas to the Georgia-based battery manufacturer Freyr.
“Rather, it is based on the company’s long-term growth in the country,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
But analysts said the news illustrated the impact of Trump’s victory on energy markets.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/11/chinese-solar-giant-america-biden-windfall-trump-00188598
Biden’s historic climate record has one big problem
“The challenge is that permitting is an expensive, tedious, and time-consuming process, sometimes stretching decades. Developers often find there’s a lack of accountability between the local, state, and federal authorities that have a say in granting approval for things like wind energy farms or interstate power transmission lines.
The current system puts a lot of project developers in a frustrating limbo — not a “no,” not a “yes,” but a “maybe, we’ll see” that can stretch indefinitely.
This uncertainty makes it harder for companies to make a business case and often leads to proposals falling apart. The net result is that few things get built at all. In the past decade, the United States has built transmission lines at half the rate as in the 30 years prior. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $7.5 billion to build thousands of electric vehicle charging stations, yet only a handful are operating. The American Clean Power Association, an industry group, reports that permitting delays have cost the US economy more than $100 billion in lost investment. Earlier this year, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory surveyed wind and solar power developers and found that one-third of permit applications for placing wind turbines and solar panels in the ground were canceled over the past five years.
These false starts cost businesses a lot of money: The average sunk cost was more than $2 million on average for a canceled solar project and $7.5 million for a scrapped wind farm. The main causes cited for these axed proposals were difficulties in getting approvals from zoning boards, in connecting to the power grid, and opposition from local communities — all issues that inhibit permitting.”
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“That brings us to permitting reform. The idea is to change the existing system of rules — smoothing out the application process, setting tighter deadlines, reducing veto points — to get a verdict on projects faster.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/367950/permitting-reform-biden-climate-manchin-renewable-energy
This chart of ocean heat is terrifying
“The Gulf is now the hottest it’s been in the modern record, according to Brian McNoldy, a climatologist at the University of Miami, who produced the chart. Taking a dip would feel like a bath: The average temperature of the surface is close to 90 degrees, according to recent measures of sea surface temperature.
“This is out of bounds from the kinds of variability that we’ve seen in [at least] the last 75 years or so,” Ben Kirtman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, a joint initiative of the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told Vox. “That can be scary stuff.”
These record temperatures are just one signal of a more widespread bout of warming across the North Atlantic that ramped up last year. It’s still not entirely clear what’s causing it, though scientists suspect a combination of factors including climate change — which raises the baseline ocean temperature — as well as lingering effects of El Niño, natural climate variability, and perhaps even a volcanic eruption.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/368324/hurricane-season-2024-gulf-mexico-ocean-warming