"I push back on doomism because I don’t think it’s justified by the science, and I think it potentially leads us down a path of inaction,” said Mann during a talk last Thursday at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“And there are bad actors today who are fanning the flames of climate doomism because they understand that it takes those who are most likely to be on the front lines, advocating for change, and pushes them to the sidelines, which is where polluters and petrostates want them.”

Diana Bell, Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of East Anglua, urges the world to "completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale" and to "make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally".

"The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks."

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10267743

In November, the Pacific Institute released a major update to the Water Conflict Chronology, adding more than 350 new verified incidents when water has been a trigger, weapon, target, or casualty of violence.

But new research by the Institute also shows significant opportunities to expand water efficiency and reuse strategies. In turn, these can reduce pressures on water resources—and reduce the risk of conflict.

Research launched last month found there is substantial opportunity to capture more urban stormwater across the United States, thus enhancing communities’ water resilience. The pivotal study found the US average annual urban stormwater runoff exceeds 59.5 million acre-feet (73.5 cubic kilometers) annually, equivalent to 93% of municipal and industrial water withdrawals. This equates to more than 53 billion gallons per day using an annual average!

New approaches like increasing stormwater capture can help urban communities address water scarcity risks, more severe and frequent flooding and drought due to climate change, and constraints on traditional water supplies. Pacific Institute research highlights how such water efficiency and reuse strategies can play a major role—both in the United States and globally—meeting key UN Sustainable Development Goal targets, while reducing pressures on water resources and the risk of conflict.

Initial research shows that AI has a significant water footprint. It uses water both for cooling the servers that power its computations and for producing the energy it consumes. As AI becomes more integrated into our societies, its water footprint will inevitably grow.

The growth of ChatGPT and similar AI models has been hailed as “the new Google.” But while a single Google search requires half a millilitre of water in energy, ChatGPT consumes 500 millilitres of water for every five to 50 prompts.

Not sure how to link a Mastodon Post to Lemmy?

As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the top contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But in an interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not primarily responsible for the climate crisis.

The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too expensive for consumers’ liking.

“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”

Judge Silas Reid’s climate change scepticism came during an ongoing trial at Inner London Crown Court that began on Monday 19th February, regarding five women from Extinction Rebellion in the UK. Giving directions to the jury ahead of their deliberations, Reid said: “It is important to note that the circumstances which are relevant are those of the damage and not other circumstances… The circumstances of the damage do not include any climate crisis which may or may not exist in the world at the moment nor does it include whether nonviolent direct action can prompt change."

Judge Reid famously imprisoned one of the defendants currently on trial, Amy Pritchard, along with others, for mentioning the words ‘climate change’ whilst on trial last year. The report references UK courts’ attitudes to climate and environmental activists:: “They have forbidden protesters from mentioning climate change, thereby preventing them from explaining the reasons for their protest. Courts have held convicted environmental defenders who disregarded this prohibition in ‘contempt of court’ and imprisoned them for up to eight weeks.”

Judge Reid's newly expressed doubts about the reality came on the same day as the United Nations Special Rapporteur, Michel Forst, released his latest report claiming that "state repression of environmental protest and civil disobedience" would pose "a major threat to human rights and democracy."

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9669854

Unsustainable development threatens the health and diverse fish populations of the Mekong river, with one-fifth of fish species in Southeast Asia's main artery facing extinction, a report by conservation groups said.

The Mekong, stretching nearly 5,000 km (3,000 miles) from the Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea, is a farming and fishing lifeline for tens of millions of people in China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Threats to its fish include habitat loss, conversion of wetlands for agriculture and aquaculture, unsustainable sand mining, introduction of invasive species, worsening climate change and hydropower dams fragmenting the flow of the river and its tributaries, according to the report compiled by the World Wildlife Fund and 25 global marine and wildlife conservation groups.

"The biggest threat right now, and a threat that's still potentially gaining momentum, is hydropower development," said fish biologist Zeb Hogan, who heads the Wonders of the Mekong, one of the groups behind the report.

Dams alter the flow of the world's third-most biodiverse river, change water quality and block fish migration, he said.

Proliferating Chinese-built hydroelectric dams upriver have blocked much of the sediment that provides essential nutrients to tens of thousands of farms in the Mekong River Delta, Reuters reported in 2022.

A hidden crisis is unfolding across the South China Sea. While regional powers work to strengthen their claims to disputed waters and territories there, the marine environment in which they maneuver has been declining to critical levels.

In recent decades, increased fishing, dredging, and land fill, along with giant clam harvesting, have taken a devastating toll on thousands of species found nowhere else on earth.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12439229

Warning: has footage of dead and dying non-human animals

dzud

On February 24, the Mongolian State Emergency Commission (SEC) revealed that 2.9 million heads of livestock perished as a result of the ongoing dzud in the country. Dzud is a natural disaster that usually takes place in the winter due to heavy snowfall, cold winds, and extreme cold temperatures and leads to the mass death of livestock. The head of the SEC’s Emergency Staff, set up in response to the unfolding disaster, shared that 80 percent of the country was experiencing dzud.

According to the authorities, 21.8 percent of the affected areas are experiencing what the Mongolians refer to as tumur (iron) dzud. This particular type of dzud happens when an unnatural period of warmth is followed by extreme cold, resulting in snow's sudden melting and freezing into an impregnable layer of ice above the ground, making it impossible for animals to access pasture. The remaining 78.2 per cent are experiencing tsagaan (white) dzud, characterized by heavy snowfall that limits animals’ access to pasture and mobility.

The Doomsday Clock is a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet.

When the Doomsday Clock was created in 1947, the greatest danger to humanity came from nuclear weapons, in particular from the prospect that the United States and the Soviet Union were headed for a nuclear arms race. The Bulletin considered possible catastrophic disruptions from climate change in its hand-setting deliberations for the first time in 2007.

Microplastics have already reached every corner of the ocean, Romera says. It is so much that it can't be cleaned up anymore.

"There is some initiative to remove large plastics from the surface, but only 1% of the plastic that reaches the sea has been found on the surface. The other 99% is presumed to be in the water column or on the seabed," she says.

"It is very difficult to clean up, and the technology that has been proposed will also remove the micro-organisms that are critical to the marine ecosystem."

Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities and climate change. In the present paper, we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioural drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot. We demonstrate how current interventions are largely physical, resource intensive, slow-moving and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (such as climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive behaviours). We argue that even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more than ephemeral progress. We explore three drivers of the behavioural crisis in depth: economic growth; marketing; and pronatalism. These three drivers directly impact the three ‘levers’ of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. We demonstrate how the maladaptive behaviours of overshoot stemming from these three drivers have been catalysed and perpetuated by the intentional exploitation of previously adaptive human impulses. In the final sections of this paper, we propose an interdisciplinary emergency response to the behavioural crisis by, amongst other things, the shifting of social norms relating to reproduction, consumption and waste. We seek to highlight a critical disconnect that is an ongoing societal gulf in communication between those that know such as scientists working within limits to growth, and those members of the citizenry, largely influenced by social scientists and industry, that must act.