1. For all readers who don't warm to the idea of future palm-fringed beaches in the Arctic, I wrote an explainer about COP26, climate change, and why we need to do more.
2/12. Current policies set us on track to about 2.7Β°C or 2.9Β°C of warming by the end of this century, a disastrous cause to a world where you don't want your children to live.
4/12. This graph shows that in the past 800,000 years, the CO2 concentrations fluctuated (and so did the temperatures), but they never rose above 300ppm. They are now well over 400ppm.
6/12. IPCC baseline scenarios (without explicit additional efforts to constrain emissions) may raise this number further to 1000ppm by 2100. Thatβs like some 50 million years ago when crocodiles lived in the Arctic.
7/12. Global emissions need to be falling, but they are still rising. The world has not yet peaked, and we pull our roller coaster cart slowly but surely further upwards on the steep slope.
The higher we go, the more scary the ride will be.
8. Some day you will tell your grandchildren about today's beauty of the planet. They will chuckle at the small percentage of our GDP needed to stop global warming. But then demand answers why our generation did not take action while we could.
9. This chart shows that we are making progress relative to a world without any climate policies, but we are still far from the progress we need to achieve international targets.
10/12. And one more graph, which shows that the longer we delay a peak in emissions, the more drastic these reductions would need to be. It also shows that we can't postpone taking action if we want to stay below the disastrous 1.5Β°C.
11/12. Even a hot planet of say 2.5Β°C is still preferable to one of 3Β°C. We have two tasks; to stop the heating and help each other prepare for the impact. That requires solidarity amongst all of us on this small heated planet.
2. Traditions can alienate you if you don't feel part of it. So in my efforts to blend in with the Canadians, I searched the internet to explain #Halloween and found that we have to go back into history as I so often do in The Planet newsletter.
3. There was not much of #Halloween celebration in colonial New England, where rigid Protestant beliefs prevented frivolously celebrating, especially of traditions with some doubtful pre-Christian fingerprints all over it.
1. Iβm fascinated by the beauty of nature and enjoy learning more every day. Look for instance at these mushrooms realising millions of microscopic spores to propagate.
𧡠A thread about the beauty of planet earth, our only home.
1. Brazil and Argentina lobby against evidence in the draft scientific UN/IPCC report on the need to reduce meat consumption to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
@BBCNews reports this, based on leaked documents obtained by @UE (follow them).
3. Australia is not alone: it is also revealed how OPEC and Saudi Arabia are lobbying the UN's climate change experts to delete the finding that the world needs to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.
1. Suppose an alien spaceship will land on earth next week.
After many light-years of travel through space, some friendly little green creatures decide to get out and stretch their legs on our planet.
What would they report home?
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2. I guess their first description would be ecstatic.
Hidden in the fast, cold, and dark universe, they discovered a blue planet that brims with an incredible diversity of life, aided by ideal living conditions.