Heatwave in south and wildfire smoke in north buffet US from both sides  More than 80m Americans under air quality alerts while temperatures hit triple digits in south and south-west. Chicago and Detroit both had the most unhealthy air in the world for several hours on Tuesday evening, CNN reported, as smoke drifts from record Canadian wildfires. More than 80 million people, largely from the midwest to the east coast, are under air quality alerts.  “Until the fires are out, there’s a risk,” said Bryan Jackson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “If there’s any north component to the wind, there’s a chance it’ll be smoky.” The warming planet will produce hotter and longer heatwaves, making for bigger, smokier fires, said Joel Thornton, professor and chair of the department of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.   https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/28/us-heatwave-wildfire-smoke-air-quality-extreme-weather    

If we keep abusing nature, it will collapse taking us with it. We need a new mindset.....At Cop meetings in Egypt and Canada, humanity faces two doors. Door one leads to untold misery. We have no choice but to take door two  by Christiana Figueres   Over the last 50 years, an ill-fated paradigm has shaped western thought and action: the “tragedy of the commons”. This is a situation in which everyone operates according to their own self-interest and ultimately depletes our shared resources. Ever since the term was first coined in 1968, we have been acting it out to its fullest with devastating consequences for our land, water and atmosphere. The climate and biodiversity crises have made it abundantly clear that we need to correct this fallacy and take care of the global commons. We all need clean air, fertile soil, thriving biodiversity and healthy oceans to survive and prosper. The temperature limits set by the Paris agreement will not be achieved without halting the conversion of intact ecosystems now, and regenerating what’s already been depleted.                                                                                                                                Much of nature is on the brink of collapse because of rising CO2 emissions, industrial farming and pollution. That’s why this year at the twin Cops – the climate Cop in Egypt, and the biodiversity Copin Canada – we need an ambitious, joined-up action that delivers on promises to cut emissions and commits to stopping and reversing catastrophic biodiversity loss and species extinction. It’s time to halt the tragedy, and focus on the necessity of the commons. Every drop of water we drink, every molecule of oxygen we breathe and every morsel of food we eat comes from nature. The evolution of the human race shows that we need nature much more than she needs us!! The major challenge in front of us is not technical or financial. What’s needed is a mindset shift. Yet changing mindsets is not mentioned in many of the excellent climate action and nature conservation roadmaps that leaders consult. It’s time we called that out. Sticking with the idea that the self-serving use of common resources is inevitable or irreversible, at a time in which deep, systemic collaboration is called for, will not deliver good results. For us to achieve a decarbonised economy in which people and nature thrive, we need action at both the local and global levels. One company or one government alone cannot make the kind of difference we need; the transformations must be systemic and exponential, and delivered with justice in mind. It’s only by changing the way we think, from competitive towards collaborative, that we will be able to work together and accelerate these efforts. This radical mindset shift would open up our horizons and allow us to seek others in our sectors, cities, neighbourhoods and regions who we can collaborate with.                       https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/02/nature-climate-crisis-new-mindset  

We weren’t a week into May before 30,000 people had been evacuated because of dozens of fast-moving wildfires in Alberta. Structure losses were mounting, and politicians were trotting out words like “unprecedented.” Unprecedented? Where were they in 2017, when British Columbia had its worst fire season on record and generated four simultaneous pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms? Where were they in 2016, when Fort McMurray burned – for days – along with 6,000 square kilometres of forest? What about 2011, when Slave Lake lost its town hall, library, radio station and 500 houses in a few hours? No, the current fire situation is not unprecedented, and calling it the “new normal” is offensive. There’s nothing “normal” about it. Do I sound angry? I have a right to be, and so do you. In the late 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists predicted that the effects of increased industrial CO2 would penetrate the “noise” of random climate fluctuations and become measurable in the form of rising global temperatures, especially at higher latitudes like ours.    It’s easier to wrap your head around the impact of a fire-powered civilization when you get past euphemisms such as “fossil fuels,” “coal” and “oil and gas,” and call our prime mover by its true name: fire. In this historical moment, fire is what drives us, what empowers us, what enables and enriches us, and it raises a burning question: Who is empowering whom? Fires are now burning where they’ve never burned before: Greenland, the High Arctic, and in rainforests from B.C. to Brazil. In 2021, even the International Energy Agency – historically, a friend to the fossil-fuel industry – said: Enough! If we are to maintain any semblance of climate stability, we must stop building fossil-fuel projects right now. If the IEA is freaked out, you know we’ve turned a corner. Fire, and our slavish devotion to its force-multiplying power, lies at the root of our current situation. With our cars and stoves and central heating, hundreds of millions of us now live like emperors of old – only instead of enslaved people and draft animals serving us, we have fire-powered machines. Billions of us are engaged in these activities. Lightning strikes the Earth millions of times a day, starting thousands of fires, but lightning’s got nothing on us. For starters, about three billion people are still cooking and heating with open fires. Meanwhile, in the developed world, you’ve got hundreds of millions of gas stoves, water heaters and home furnaces. The list of flammables goes on, and on and on!] Bottom line: When you extract, upgrade, refine and burn toxic substances such as coal, bitumen, oil and gas at the rate we are burning them, decade after decade, you’re going to see changes. Atmospheric CO2 levels are now fully 50 percent higher than pre-industrial times, and it affects everything we care about, from fetuses to phytoplankton, from water to winter.....read on, there's a lot more!              https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-no-wonder-alberta-is-on-fire-we-made-this-planet-into-a-volcano/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Evening%20Update&utm_content=2023-5-19_17&utm_term=Evening%20Update%3A%20Danielle%20Smith%20picks%20her%20own%20adventure&utm_campaign=newsletter&cu_id=LEk3Sa7aZAWMtN7YDRqBVUsvVditvUZk

 Grim surprises on the climate front. Hurricanes are starting to come back for a second hit and an urgent search is underway to determine how imminent the threat of accelerated sea level rise is, Gwynne Dyer writes. Two new things on the climate front this week, both bad news. Hurricanes used to be like drive-by shootings: one pass, one hit and then gone. Now they’re starting to come back for a second hit. And until now scientists only worried about the West Antarctic ice-shelf sliding into the sea (which would add three or four metres to sea-level). But they have just discovered that the main ice-sheet that covers Eastern Antarctica, 10 times bigger, is also in motion (potentially 52 metres of sea-level rise). Why do we keep being ambushed by bad news like this? "Thirty years of climate science has given us so much understanding, and what I now see very clearly as a red thread during that entire journey is that the more we learn about the Earth System, the more reason for concern we have,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told me three years ago. “People think we raise the alarm because human pressures are increasing, but that’s not the case at all. It’s just that we are learning how the planet works, and the more we learn the more vulnerable she is.    https://www.thespec.com/opinion/contributors/2023/03/16/grim-surprises-on-the-climate-front.html