War is a climate killer.......Russia’s war on Ukraine has pushed the climate crisis off the agenda. But we need a ceasefire and global demilitarisation for a 1.5°C world. War brings death and destruction – not least to the environment and climate. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers a depressing reminder of that fact, and further increases the military sector’s already enormous global CO2 footprint. In addition, the eastern Ukrainian cities where fighting is taking place are home to fossil fuel infrastructure such as chemical factories, oil refineries, and coal mines, the bombing of which produces a cocktail of toxic substances that has devastating environmental impacts. Efforts to arm the two sides, moreover, are consuming materials and resources that could otherwise go towards tackling the climate crisis.

Based on the global C02budget, humanity has less than eight years to ensure it still hits its 1.5-degree warming target. To do so, we need to urgently implement reforms in all areas, to bring about ‘systemic change’, as the IPCC report from early April puts it. The military sector barely gets a mention in this almost 3,000-page document, however, with the word ‘military’ coming up just six times. You might thus conclude that the sector is of little relevance to the climate emergency. The reality is rather different. Using military hardware results in huge quantities of emissions. In the war in Ukraine, 36 Russian attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure were recorded in the first five weeks alone, leading to prolonged fires that released soot particulates, methane and C02 into the atmosphere, while oil infrastructure has been ablaze on the Russian side too. The oil fields that were set on fire in 1991 during the second Gulf War contributed two per cent of global emissions for that year. While greenhouse gas emissions are one of the most significant impacts of war, the quantity emitted depends on the duration of the conflict and on what tanks, trucks, and planes are used. Another is the contamination of ecosystems that sequester CO2. Staff from Ukraine’s environment inspectorate are currently collecting water and soil samples in the areas around shelled industrial facilities.   Military emissions......The ramifications for the climate can be catastrophic in scale. According to a study by the organisation Oil Change International, the Iraq War was responsible for 141 million tonnes of C02equivalent emissions between its outbreak in 2003 and the report’s publication in 2008. By way of comparison: some 21 EU member states emitted less CO2equivalent in 2019, with only six states topping that figure. Globally, the military sector is estimated to generate around six per cent of all CO2emissions. Post-war rebuilding also produces significant emissions. Estimates suggest that reconstruction in Syria will lead to 22 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. The rebuilding in Ukraine, too, will consume vast amounts of resources. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that at least 5 billion US dollars of reconstruction funding was needed per month. Emissions from armed forces and military equipment cause considerable environmental harm around the globe. And yet, bowing to pressure from the US, military CO2 emissions were excluded from climate treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015. As a result, they do not form part of their binding agreements and are neither surveyed systematically nor published transparently. The consequent lack of data means we can only make vague estimates as to the military sector’s impact on global heating. According to a study by Neta Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, the US defence ministry alone is a bigger contributor to the climate crisis than individual countries such as Sweden or Portugal. This makes it the largest institutional source of greenhouse gases in the world. Globally, the military sector is estimated to generate around six percent of all CO2emissions. https://www.ips-journal.eu/topics/economy-and-ecology/war-is-a-climate-killer-6094/  

Yesterday, Nov. 18, 2023, the planet’s temperature went past the 2.0 degree Celsius barrier for the first time. It’s temporary—but it’s a terrible reminder that we’re now in the desperate end game for global warming. And yet no one noticed because—unavoidably—the world’s attention is riveted on the horrors in Gaza. The best reason for a ceasefire there is that the war is a humanitarian disaster; the macabre evil of the Hamas raid on Israel has long since been repaid by the industrial terror of Israel’s response. The proverbial eyes and teeth are attached to altogether too many literal and bloodied bodies. But if you need another reason: on a rapidly heating planet the world cannot afford to have its attention endlessly diverted. We talk about the “ancient” nature of the Mideast conflict, and indeed it’s been contested for several thousand years. But this year saw the hottest temperatures in 125,000 years—which is to say, we’re now experiencing in real time heating that outpaces anything from a very long way before human history. We have almost no time to slow that heating—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we need to cut emissions in half in the next six years to have an outside shot at holding temperatures to anything like a livable level. And that means that we’ve got a duty to move on the things that are preventing action. One, clearly, is the fight over Palestine; it’s never been clearer that these two sides are here to stay, and that some kind of working territorial compromise must be brokered. Even if all you cared about was this one region in the world, you’d want and need to do something about climate change.......because the land here, theoretically so sacred to all sides, is in danger of turning into an uninhabitable desert. At the moment, the region is warming twice as fast as the world as a whole.  Here’s some data (very little of which comes from Israel’s government, because as a detailed report in Haaretz found, the Netanyahu government has ignored the issue as profoundly as it has ignored so much else). Since 1980 the average number of high fire-risk days per year in Israel increased by a factor of 2.5 and very high fire-risk days saw a three-fold increase.In the last three decades, Israel saw a 3.4 percent decline in precipitation; in the coming decades, this is expected to increase to 24 percent less rainfall than the current annual average.  Not surprisingly, the outlook is even grimmer for Gaza. The Turkish news agency AAreportedlast month that an MIT study found that the average annual precipitation in the region will fall 10% to 30% by 2100, temperatures will increase by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius, and it will affect the region's agricultural productivity and food supply, causing price instability and food shortages.  Each day on this earth climate change is the most important thing that happens. But each day these fights stretch on is another day we don’t remember that; another day when, mesmerized by the blood and injustice, we focus instead on the deep, sick attraction of war. It’s impossible to look away; our humanness is defined in part by the short-term fascination with the violent and sad. Human nature has been conditioned by long experience to see the real fights as the ones between humans—that’s what Scripture is about, and history, and drama, with the natural world forming a backdrop. But quite suddenly that backdrop needs to be the foreground; the most essential fight on earth right now is between people and physics.            https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/its-so-hot?utm_campaign=email-post&r=mwxsy&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The hard right and climate catastrophe are intimately linked. This is how. George Monbiot    As climate policy is weakened, extreme weather intensifies and more refugees are driven from their homes – and the cycle of hatred continues. Round the cycle turns. As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programmes are shut down, heating accelerates and more people are driven from their homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times. A recent paper in the scientific journal Nature identifies the “human climate niche”: the range of temperatures and rainfall within which human societies thrive. We have clustered in the parts of the world with a climate that supports our flourishing, but in many of these places the niche is shrinking. Already, around 600 million people have been stranded in inhospitable conditions by global heating. Current global policies are likely to result in about 2.7C of heating by 2100. On this trajectory, some 2 billion people may be left outside the niche by 2030, and 3.7 billion by 2090. If governments limited heating to their agreed goal of 1.5C, the numbers exposed to extreme heat would be reduced fivefold. But if they abandon their climate policies, this would lead to around 4.4C of heating. In this case, by the end of the century around 5.3 billion people would face conditions that ranged from dangerous to impossible. These conditions include extreme disruption, morbidity and death through heat-shock, water stress, crop failure and the spread of infectious disease. The figures do not take into account the effect of rising sea levels, which could displace hundreds of millions more.       In the rich world we still have choices: we can greatly limit the damage caused by environmental breakdown, for which our nations and citizens are primarily responsible. But these choices are being deliberately and systematically shut down. Culture war entrepreneurs, often funded by billionaires and commercial enterprises, cast even the most innocent attempts to reduce our impacts as a conspiracy to curtail our freedoms. Everything becomes contested:low-traffic neighbourhoods,15-minute cities, heat pumps, even induction hobs[induction stovetop]. You cannot propose even the mildest change without a hundred professionally outraged influencers leaping up to announce: “They’re coming for your ...” It’s becoming ever harder, by design, to discuss crucial issues such as SUVs, meat-eating and aviation calmly and rationally.   Climate science denial, which had almost vanished a few years ago, has now returned with a vengeance. Environmental scientists and campaigners are bombarded with claims that they are stooges, shills, communists, murderers and paedophiles.    As governments turn rightwards, they shut down policies designed to limit climate breakdown. There’s no mystery about why: hard-right and far-right politics are the defensive wall erected by oligarchs to protect their economic interests. On behalf of their funders, legislators in Texas are waging war on renewable energy, while a proposed law in Ohio lists climate policies as a “controversial belief or policy” in which universities are forbidden to “inculcate” their students. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/15/hard-right-climate-catastrophe-extreme-weather-refugees       

Extreme weather is ‘smacking us in the face’ with worse to come, but a ‘tiny window’ of hope remains, say leading climate scientists. The record-shattering heatwaves, wildfires and floods destroying lives in the US, Europe, India, China and beyond in 2023 have raised an alarming question: have humanity’s relentless carbon emissions finally pushed the climate crisis into a new and accelerating phase of destruction? The issue is being strongly debated, with accusations of doom-mongering being countered with charges of complacency. The answer matters: how bad is it, and how can we limit the damage? To find out, the Guardian asked 45 leading climate scientists from around the world. We also asked the equally vital question of whether extreme weather events were hitting people faster and harder than expected.The scientists told us that, despite it certainly feeling as if events had taken a frightening turn, the global heating seen to date was entirely in line with three decades of scientific predictions. Being proved right was cold comfort, they said, as their warnings had so far been largely in vain. Increasingly severe weather impacts had also been long signposted by scientists, although the speed and intensity of the reality scared some. The off-the-charts sea temperatures and Antarctic sea ice loss were seen as the most shocking. The feeling of entering a new age of devastation was the result of the return of the natural El Niño phenomenon, which has temporarily turbocharged global heating, they said. Another factor was many people being confronted with extreme weather they had never experienced before, as climate impacts began to clearly stand out from usual weather. Scientists were clear the world had not yet passed a “tipping point” into runaway climate change, but some warned that it got ever closer with continued heating.  The scientists also warned that the “crazy” extreme weather of recent months was just the “tip of the iceberg” compared with the even worse impacts to come. In just a decade the exceptional events of 2023 could be a normal year, unless there is a dramatic increase in climate action. Some further warned that the tendency of climate models to underestimate extreme weather meant we were “flying partially blind” into a future that could be even more catastrophic than anticipated. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/28/crazy-off-the-charts-records-has-humanity-finally-broken-the-climate