Running seawater through an ocean carbon capture plant could chemically convert carbon dioxide to limestone on a grand scale
Category Archives: climate destabilization
When sorrows come, they come not single spies
Belize, Fiji and Mozambique (among many other countries) “owe staggering amounts of money to various foreign lenders. They face staggering climate risks, too. And now, with the coronavirus pandemic pummeling their economies, there is a growing recognition that their debt obligations stand in the way of meeting the immediate needs of their people — not to mention the investments required to protect them from climate disasters.”
Another reason to prefer the term “climate destabilization”
“Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe conditions — as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure. …
“[U]nless grid planners start planning for increasingly wild and unpredictable climate conditions, grid failures will happen again and again.”
“Thank God they didn’t know how to run a government”
“It could have been a lot worse.” Indeed.
As a New Englander born in Maine, this is scary
I usually don’t post things a month and a half old but Yikes!
The fishery is buffeted by the climate crisis and other problems but the coronavirus pandemic has opened a new front
“If our collective future were a movie, this week would be the trailer”
Hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves and disease outbreaks are all a preview of our hotter future. Dramatically cutting greenhouse gas emissions would help.
Republican climate change denial is ruining the planet
Paul Krugman in NYT: “But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn’t even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.
“However, I don’t believe that it’s just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there’s a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you’re more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda. …
“The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it’s the only hope we have.”
Those Chinese hoaxers have it in for Qatar
For Qatar, global warming is an engineering problem. But while it may be able to cool outdoor malls and stadiums, it cannot cool the entire country.
More than just the climate is being destabilized
You can batten the hatches against a storm, but bureaucracy is harder to ride out. Last week, one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record made a direct h?
Judicial activism (not that we should complain)
In the summer of 1990, I studied the law of the European Community (as it was then known) at a program in Brussels. The lecturer on European environmental law was an official from the European Commission. At a Q&A session afterward, he was very candid when asked about global warming (as it was then known). He said that upcoming elections in the UK and US made immediate action politically impossible but assured us that, once those elections were past, the issue would be dealt with. Boy, was he wrong! If it had been, this case would never have been brought and we would all be better off today.
Dutch ruling could trigger similar cases worldwide with citizens taking their governments to courts to make them act on climate promises