Climate change and climate justice

And Toronto leads the way. Which I can attest to.

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How’s the taste?

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lol. Gamey

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“It’s difficult to evaluate the importance of this positive feedback,” he said, “but it is something which is currently underestimated in the ice sheet models used for performing future projections.”

Positive feedback loops never end well, I believe. Once again, pointing out that every single estimate of climate change has turned out to be overly optimistic. And some of those are pretty damned grim.

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DTE Energy is disconnecting thousands of customers while increasing rates and expanding fossil fuel infrastructure, according to a new report. Despite growing energy affordability concerns, the company has continued investing in natural gas and opposing community solar, even as its profits surged 41% in 2024.

The report, released by the Center for Biological Diversity, analyzed shutoff data and financial records from six major utilities, finding that DTE cut power to 150,000 customers in 2024—most during the summer—while paying $607 million to shareholders.

Advocates say the company’s business model prioritizes profits over affordability and reliability, with rate hikes and time-of-use pricing disproportionately impacting low-income households. Meanwhile, DTE continues investing in gas-fired power and fighting policies that could expand community solar access for residents struggling with high bills and frequent outages.

Fossil fuel-driven heating, climate disasters and utility rate hikes often hit vulnerable populations hardest, said Selah Goodson Bell, energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity and co-author of the report.

“Extreme temperatures force customers to use more electricity to keep their homes cool or warm,” Goodson Bell told Planet Detroit. …

Paging Luigi…

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I think I remember hearing that was done deliberately because they thought nobody would believe them or something like that?

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Prof. Hansen again; time for another less than happy message from a climate scientist who is often right.

And the original article:


Hansen, J. E., Kharecha, P., Sato, M., Tselioudis, G., Kelly, J., Bauer, S. E., … Pokela, A. (2025).
Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?
Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 67(1), 6–44.

We find that most of the other half of the warming was caused by a restriction on aerosol emissions by ships, which was imposed in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization to combat the effect of aerosol pollutants on human health.

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The fucking billionaires will not save us. Absolutely not. We need to get onto saving ourselves. Possibly by fertilizing that tree of liberty, you know…

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I just finished the original article and I think the Guardian has not given it due treatment. The body is 40 pages, three columns; it could easily be produced as a short book (with double the page count) especially if the supplements and some of the referenced papers were included.

As much as it is information dense, it communicates well, with its data communicated in helpful plots, and is really not particularly technical. The notes are extensive and between those and the supplementary material, provide the detail and background used to draw conclusions that carry serious urgency.

Urgent take-aways for me were

  • that the worst-case IPCC warming scenarios are 50% off the mark.
  • The removal of sulphur from shipping fuel is indeed a far better explanation for the warming of the past two years than the Tonga Hunga eruption. Hansen identifies the factors that had confounded earlier analysis. Aerosols in the atmosphere have been cooling the earth at a rate that has been under-estimated, particularly pollution over otherwise pristine environments such as the oceans.
  • I’d also not read much, at least that I’d absorbed, about the Eemian warming of 120,000 years ago. Hansen speaks of his 2016, peer-reviewed study, pointing out the rapid 50-150 year sea level rise was under climate heating milder than we are experiencing now. Ice modelling is hard, and assumptions in the IPCC models often can’t produce events in the paleological record.
  • The 4 page Epilogue has a number of interesting insights into the politics that has so far failed to address what is a mounting problem. The details are frustrating. Hansen’s frank support of a fast nuclear build-out has probably dampened enthusiasm for his message from the less nuclear-hardened among us.

Given the Guardian’s light, nigh-on dismissive treatment, I can recommend taking a couple of hours to read the paper.

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Apropos this point, I’d missed the most recent post from the The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration from December last year. There had been some news earlier pointing to a lower than expected melt rate. The hypothesis is that lighter, colder fresh water was being trapped under the glacier, protecting it from the heavier, relatively toasty seawater working its way in from the open ocean. Melting is only part of the problem…

Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf nearing collapse as cracks spread, not because of melting
December 11, 2024

Lead author of the study, Dr Christian Wild from Oregon State University says: “We anticipated that the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf would break up within the next decade, but never so quickly – it’s like watching the final act of a disaster unfolding.”

Details are in the original paper:

Wild CT, Kachuck SB, Luckman A, et al.
Rift propagation signals the last act of the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf despite low basal melt rates.
Journal of Glaciology. 2024;70:e21. doi:10.1017/jog.2024.64

The ice shelf’s speed has increased by ~70% during this period, transitioning from a rate of 1.65 m/d in 2019 to 2.85 m/d by early 2023 in the central area. The increase in longitudinal strain rates near the grounding zone has led to full-thickness rifts and melange-filled gaps since 2020.

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How anyone can hear “big savings on disaster relief” and think it’s a good thing is beyond me. (Also the whole “spent money on Democrat areas against orders” would be a serious tell, but not of anything we didn’t know.)

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They (meaning the MAGA cultists) believe that those dollars will end up going back into their pockets as tax refunds, rather than to the “undeserving” people who get money from the government…

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