Today @WilliamJRipple et al released the 2023 report on the terrifying state of our #climate.
It should be read by every policymaker, decisionmaker, and journalist on the planet.
Here is a thread of some key takeaways.
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"Unfortunately, time is up."
"The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected."
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[for the visual thinkers among us]
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"It appears the green recovery following COVID-19 that many had hoped for has largely failed to materialize. Instead, carbon emissions have continued soaring, and fossil fuels remain dominant, with annual coal consumption reaching a near all-time high."
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"By [2100], an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals—approximately 1/3 to 1/2 of the global population—might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, & elevated mortality rates because of...climate change"
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"We ... need to change our economy to a system that supports meeting basic needs for all people instead of excessive consumption by the wealthy."
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"Negative emissions technologies are in an early stage of development, posing uncertainties regarding their effectiveness, scalability, and environmental and societal impacts ... [Thus] we should not rely on unproven carbon removal techniques."
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"We call for an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report that focuses on the perilous climate feedback loops, tipping points, and—just as a precaution—the possible but less likely scenario of runaway or apocalyptic climate change."
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"As scientists, we are increasingly being asked to tell the public the truth ... in simple and direct terms. The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023. We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered."
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"This is our moment to make a profound difference for all life on Earth, and we must embrace it with unwavering courage and determination to create a legacy of change that will stand the test of time."
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Here is a link to the report. Please read it. If you're a journalist, please cover it. Thank you!
So I was supposed to deliver the keynote at a @columbia symposium on climate and language this Friday, but I have informed the organizers that, with true sorrow, I am pulling out because I will not be associated with this university at this political moment.
This was not an easy decision. One of the challenges for climate communication is that #ClimateChange tends to get kicked off the agenda any time anything else happens — part of my mission is to try keep the climate emergency at the foreground of everyone's attention.
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And this event is not a Climate School event: it is a meeting of an ivy-league consortium of foreign-language scholars, who just happen to be convening at Columbia this year — and not even on campus, but at Riverside Church off site.
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I want to say a more about this @SenWhitehouse @RepRaskin @SenateBudget finding, because it is so important to understand the underlying political dynamic.
This kind of collaboration—this normalization of fossil-fuel propaganda through supposedly objective institutions...
This normalization of fossil-fuel propaganda through supposedly objective institutions stands as one of the greatest barriers to phasing out fossil fuels.
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Fossil-fuel ideologies get laundered as ivy-league research (selected and elevated by the ff companies themselves), then get filtered through lobbyists to Congress and through the news media to voters, with the result that...
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This week’s recomendation is to avoid the phrase “reduce emissions” and to start using the phrase “phase out fossil fuels” in its place.
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This advice has a great deal of research behind it, but its importance was highlighted for me this week, when I read a report released by Potential Energy with @YaleClimateComm.
This report really signals a contradiction at the heart of our current climate politics.
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One of the most powerful English professors of the past 40 years stole an argument I made in a seminar presentation, turning it into the core of his next book.
The week after my presentation, he came into the classroom and...
...and he read a conference paper he was going to deliver at the Shakespeare Association that month, re-articulating exactly what I had said about the same material the week before. The 15 or so grad students around the seminar table were dumbfounded. Jaws on the floor.
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It was the classic Trumpy move: do something illegal, but be so blatant about it, trusting that your power gives you immunity, that somehow committing the criminal act manages to normalize it simultaneously.
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Here is fossil fuel companies' new defense in lawsuits accusing them of deceiving the public about climate change:
They perpetrated no deception, they say, because the "alleged impact of fossil fuel use on the global climate has been ‘open and obvious’ for decades."
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They're calling us stupid, you know.
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I really love the contradiction between the claim that the impact of fossil fuel use on the global climate is "open and obvious" and the adjective "alleged," in "alleged impact."
Talk about wanting to have it both ways! Is the impact obvious, or is it "alleged"?
I'm lucky enough to be reading an advance copy of @MichaelEMann's new book. It is really fascinating!
Mann acts like the Virgil to the reader's Dante, taking us on a deep tour of past uninhabitable climates to reveal wild facts about science & our possible futures.
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Eg. did you know that during the Pliocene, CO2 concentrations were btwn 380 & 420 ppm, yet the planet was much warmer than climate models project for such concentrations today? Mann shows why this is the case, and why seas were much higher than models project too.
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What's really valuable about this kind of analysis is that it teaches us (or at least taught me) that as much as warming is a function of atmospheric CO2, climate is an expression of the structure of the biosphere — a wholistic, systemic perspective we so need.
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