A dry Danube

 Via Rolf Oldejans

The bed of the Danube on August 21, 2026, near the city of Ruse (Bulgaria).  Not quite completely dry — see the trickle in the distance.  Extraordinary.  A result of the Europe-wide drought.  I wonder how many thousands of years it's been since it last looked like this.

The coming AI crash

 From Owen Jones, talking to Professor Steve Keen, who correctly forecast the GFC.   He reckons the current AI boom will fizzle out within a year, to be followed by an AI bust as AI takes over more and more jobs.  He points out that a UBI will be essential, or people will starve to death, and there will be severe civil unrest, a dystopian "Hunger Games" scenario.  A new Great Depression, leading to massive economic and social change.

Outsized climate cost

If you wanted to know how climate change is costing us .....

This graphic comes from a report by the Insurance Council of Australia.  It shows the average annual per capita cost, adjusted for inflation, of climate disasters in 6 developed countries.

Over the last 40 years, the cost per person has risen in Australia from $60 to $193, in the US from $56 to $451. 

And it's nowhere near over.  Even if emissions have peaked, temperatures won't stop rising until emissions have fallen by ~90%.  In the meantime, the cost of climate catastrophes will continue to grow exponentially.

A sobering look at key climate indicators

 From Dr Aaron Thierry

A sobering look at some key #climate indicators from last year - CO2 Emissions in 2024 - Record High Coal - Record High Gas - Record High Oil - Record High (tied 2019)

www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-glo...

CO2 Concentrations in 2024 - Record High www.noaa.gov/news-release...

Rate of Increase in CO2 Concentrations - Record High insideclimatenews.org/news/2404202...

Surface Air Temperature - Record High First year over 1.5°C above pre-industrial climate.copernicus.eu/year-2024-se...

Ocean Heat Content - Record High phys.org/news/2025-01...

Planetary Albedo (reflectivity) - "declined over the 25 years of precise satellite data" www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailin...

Earth's Energy Imbalance - "More Than Doubled in Recent Decades" agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Rate of Global Sea Level Rise - "doubled during the past three decades" www.nature.com/articles/s43...

"Oil and gas annual upstream capital expenditures rose by $63 billion year-on-year in 2023 and are expected to rise a further $26 billion in 2024, surpassing $600 billion for the first time in a decade." www.ief.org/focus/ief-re...

This makes depressing reading, doesn't it?  Yet we are not helpless.  If we stop eating meat, we can cut emissions by +-30%.  You could become vegetarian, replace cow's milk with plant milks, and cut your personal emissions.  That is entirely in your control.  It's your choice.  

Second, you can replace your petrol car with an EV, if you can afford it.  In some countries, the sticker price for EVs is already the same as for ICEVs (petrol/diesel cars).   In others, you'll need an above average income to do it.  

You can put solar panels on your roof.  Again, that costs, so you need to have the money.  But if you do, you can cut your emissions, and help save the world.

And you can vote, for the greenest party available, even if it's not perfect.

WE. ARE. NOT. HELPLESS.  Do something.

They both want peace

 

Amazon deforestation may start feeding on itself

Source: The Economist

From The Economist:

SINCE THE 1970s nearly 800,000km² of Brazil’s original 4m km² (1.5m square miles) of Amazon forest has been lost to logging, farming, mining, roads, dams and other forms of development—an area equivalent to that of Turkey and bigger than that of Texas. Scientists worry this is uncomfortably close to the threshold for tree loss, of between 20 and 25%, beyond which deforestation begins to feed on itself, turning much of the Amazon basin into drier savannah known as cerrado. Under Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing president of Brazil who was inaugurated in January, the Amazon appears to be rushing towards that tipping point.

The deforestation rate had slowed between 2004 and 2012, when the government beefed up its environmental protection agency, Ibama, and an international Amazon Fund was created to pay for conservation projects. But it began ticking up again after a weakening of environmental legislation and budget cuts during Brazil’s recession of 2014-2016. Between August 2017 and July 2018 Brazil lost 7,900km² of Amazon forest—nearly a billion trees. This year’s figure is almost sure to be higher. Preliminary satellite data showed that 920 km² were cleared in June, 88% more than the same month in 2018. In July 2,255 km² were cleared, a startling 278% more than the same month last year (see chart).

Environmentalists blame Mr Bolsonaro’s insouciance about the Amazon. It is a “virgin” that should be “exploited” for agriculture, mining and infrastructure projects, he says. The environment minister, Ricardo Salles, fired 21 of Ibama’s 27 heads; he has yet to replace most of them, crippling the agency’s enforcement duties. In response to increasing alarm about the jump in tree-clearing, Mr Bolsonaro fired the head of the agency that tracks deforestation, called the data “lies” and told a journalist that those concerned about the environment should eat less and “shit every other day.”

The consequences of the destruction of the Amazon rain forest will be severe.

The forest also influences the water cycle on a regional and perhaps even global scale. As moisture comes off the Atlantic Ocean it falls on the forest as rain. This water gets sucked up by deep roots, then moves through plants and across the surface of leaves before returning to the atmosphere. Winds blowing over the uneven forest canopy create turbulence, which allows the atmosphere to absorb more moisture.

All this water then moves like a giant flowing river in the sky, falling as rain and then evaporating again and again until it reaches the Andes. Ultimately, the forest produces at least half of its own rain.

"One water vapor molecule may be recycled five to seven times before it leaves the system, either through the atmosphere or the Amazon River," says Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist with the University of Sao Paulo's Institute for Advanced Studies.

But experts increasingly fear this delicate exchange could collapse. The loss of just a fraction more of this moisture-creating forest could lead far more of it to dry out, which would reduce rainfall even more, in a self-reinforcing spiral. Already, climate change, decades of logging, and land-clearing by intentionally set wildfires have sparked record-setting droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2015-2016.
Even as Bolsonaro prepares to take office, the Amazon is already changing.

The dry season is lengthening and rainfall has dropped by a quarter in some regions. Meanwhile, precipitation, when it comes, sometimes arrives in more intense bursts, leading to massive floods in 2009, 2012, and 2014. The region's climate system is oscillating more wildly.

In the study she led, published in the journal Global Change Biology with more than a hundred other scientists as co-authors, Esquivel-Muelbert found that during the past 30 years, more drought-tolerant plant species have appeared in the Amazon, while species that predominantly emerge in wet areas are declining. Fast-growing trees and taller trees that are better at accessing the sun are outcompeting shorter, damp-loving species.

[Read more here]

Brazil's (and Indonesia's) massive deforestation more than undoes the rest of the world's reforestation efforts.  Sometimes I am convinced that mankind is doomed, thanks to our own greed and stupidity.  And what is it about the extreme right that they are so hostile to facts?

How to cut emissions by 50%

Source

The IPCC climate change report's conclusions:

• Human activities have caused about 1C of global warming since pre-industrial times (expressed as a likely range of 0.8-1.2C).
• We are seeing the effects of this through increased extreme weather, rising sea levels, coral bleaching and shrinking Arctic sea ice, among other changes.
• We’re likely to reach 1.5C warming sometime between 2030 and 2052 on the current path. The effects of this warming would be materially and noticeably different from today. It would be worse again at 2C and higher temperature rises.
• To limit warming to 1.5C we need to cut global emissions by about 45% by 2030 compared with 2010 levels.
• Scientists say it could be done but it would require rapid action now. It would mean significant changes in all sectors of society. We would also need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

[Read more here]

A 45% decline from 2010 is about a 50% decline from today.  To halve emissions by 2030, we need to cut them by 7% compound per annum, which will be very hard to do. But if we cut them by 5% per annum, that would still mean a 43% decline by 2030, a 50% decline by 2032 and an 80% decline by 2050.   Far from perfect, but doable.

How?

1. Stop building new coal power stations, and close the existing ones over the next 15-20 years. This will be much easier than it was 10 years ago. Then solar power cost 3.2 times as much as coal. Now it costs 1/3rd of coal. Wind, similarly, is much cheaper than coal. Every year from now on, the gap between the costs of coal and the costs of renewables will grow.  A switch to 80 or 90% renewables in electricity generation would reduce global emissions by 25%.

2. Encourage the take up of electric vehicles (EVs). Again, this will get easier every year.  By 2022 all except the very cheapest petrol-driven cars will have a higher "sticker price" than EVs. Governments could set the equivalent of a "cap-and-trade" system, where a target for EV sales is set, and every manufacturer which exceeds this target generates excess "credits" and those which don't meet the target have to buy "credits" from those who have generated them. China has just introduced such a system. This would reduce global emissions by 15%. More important, transport is a rapidly growing source of emissions, and accelerating the switch to EVs will help prevent a rapid rise.

3. Introduce a carbon fee, starting at $20/tonne of CO2 emitted, and rising by $5 per year, applicable to all sectors.  The carbon fee would be returned to the people by way of a quarterly dividend, and it would apply to imports from countries without a similar carbon price. This would work to reduce the emissions of iron and steel, cement, chemicals, and air and sea travel, which are each smallish, but together account for a quarter of emissions.  In the US, with per capita carbon emissions of 16.5 tonnes (2014 data), the per capita "carbon dividend" would be $330 per annum in the first year.

4. Agriculture needs regulatory change to cut emissions. And it matters--along with forest clearing, it contributes 24% of global emissions.   As individuals, we can eat less meat and dairy--the principal contributors to agricultural greenhouse gas emission .  Even cutting meat consumption to once or twice a week will make a difference.  And we can refuse to buy products containing palm oil, which is produced from plantations in cleared and burnt rain forests in the tropics.

We could do it, if we wanted to. It's entirely in hands of the people of the world.  We could vote in parties which are genuinely committed to cutting CO2 emissions.  We could implement a carbon fee, and encourage all countries to do the same by taxing imports from countries which don't have a price on carbon.  Smaller countries could club together to commit to a 5% per annum reduction in emissions and try to shame the larger ones to do the same.  40% of global emissions come from countries which each emit less than 2% of global emissions. 

Will we do it?  It's up to us.  Get active.  Get militant.  Fight for our world.