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Earth

Governments Stress Links Between Climate and Nature Collapse (theguardian.com) 53

Posted by msmash from the beating-all-drums dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: As world leaders gathered in Colombia this week, they also watched for news from home, where many of the headlines carried the catastrophic consequences of ecological breakdown. Across the Amazon rainforest and Brazil's enormous wetlands, relentless fires had burned more than 22m hectares (55m acres). In Spain, the death toll in communities devastated by flooding passed 200. In the boreal forests that span Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, countries were recording alarming signs that their carbon sinks were collapsing under a combined weight of drought, tree death and logging. As Canada's wildfire season crept to a close, scientists calculated it was the second worst in two decades -- behind only last year's burn, which released more carbon than some of the world's largest emitting countries.

In global negotiations, climate and nature move along two independent tracks, and for years were broadly treated as distinct challenges. But as negotiations closed at the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali on Saturday, ministers from around the world underscored the crucial importance of nature to limiting damage from global heating, and vice versa -- emphasising that climate and biodiversity could no longer be treated as independent issues if either crisis was to be resolved. Countries agreed a text on links between the climate and nature, but failed to include language on a phase out of fossil fuels.

The UK environment secretary, Steve Reed, said that attending the summit in Colombia had brought home the links between climate and biodiversity. "One of the other things that's really struck me coming here and speaking to the Colombians in particular is how for them the nature crisis and the climate crisis are exactly the same thing. In the UK, perhaps more widely in the global north, we tend to talk a lot about climate and particularly net zero, and much less about nature -- perhaps because we're already more nature-depleted. But those two things connect entirely," he said. The Cop16 president, Susana Muhamad, Colombia's environment minister, has sought to put nature on a level with global efforts to decarbonise the world economy during the summit, warning that slashes to greenhouse gas emissions must be accompanied by the protection and restoration of the natural world if they are to be effective. Her presidency has repeatedly described nature and climate as "two sides of the same coin."
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Governments Stress Links Between Climate and Nature Collapse More

Governments Stress Links Between Climate and Nature Collapse

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  • Is this where the models fail? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @10:44AM (#64918435)

    As Canada's wildfire season crept to a close, scientists calculated it was the second worst in two decades -- behind only last year's burn, which released more carbon than some of the world's largest emitting countries.

    I've been saying for a while that even the most pessimistic models for AGW don't show how bad things really are, because there are too many unforeseeable factors. I think the magnitude and frequency of forest fires might have been one of those factors.

    It wouldn't surprise me to learn that an increased rate of warming as a result of more and larger forest fires is now a part of climate change models. But was it in the models before it started happening to a significant and obvious extent?

    The reason I mention this, is that much of our planning for decreasing warming and mitigating its consequences is based on these climate models. If we aren't doing so already, maybe we need to be adding large fudge factors to the models' predictions.

    • Forest fire acreage in the US is FAR less than it was in the 1920-30s. Fires in the Amazon are set by people wanting to clear acreage for farming.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by DamnOregonian ( 963763 )
        Mostly False. [statesman.com]

      • Fires are perfectly natural. What isn't is trying to put them out all the time. Who flew the helicopter water drops before the white man arrived on this continent?

        Fires in the Amazon are set by people wanting to clear acreage for farming.

        Same thing happened before the Europeans arrived here. Farming [wikipedia.org] was common when only 100 million indigenous people occupied South America.

        • Fires are perfectly natural.

          Sure, they can be but is something like The 2018 Camp Fire which as it's understood "The Camp Fire was caused by the failure of a single metal hook attached to a PG&E transmission tower on the company's Caribou-Palermo transmission line" a natural occurance?

          Now to be fair the natural conditions at the time were ripe for a fire but in this case would a fire have been caused by nature alone, like a lightning strike? Would it have lasted as long or taken the path it did if there wasn't human development li

          • The ignition source is the least important part of a fire event. The vast majority of ignitions fizzle out at the start. The Camp Fire became the event that it was because of the ease of criticality, the immediate availability of instantly usable fuel, and the weather conditions fanning it.

            It's like blaming a Jenga collapse completely on the last player.

        • Re: Is this where the models fail? (Score:4, Informative)

          by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @01:52PM (#64919047)

          Fires are perfectly natural.

          Fires are. The extent of them is not.

          What isn't is trying to put them out all the time.

          It's a good thing we do, at today's wildfire acreage.

          Who flew the helicopter water drops before the white man arrived on this continent?

          Consult the native oral histories for the amount of years they spent entire months unable to breathe due to wildfire smoke.
          I've lived here for 40 years. Wildfires happened every year. Saw some cool clouds on the other side of the mountains caused by them.
          Only in the last 5 have we had months where it was unsafe to go outside because of the smoke, here, on the Western half of the state, because half of the fucking west coast was burning.

      • Forest fire acreage in the US is FAR less than it was in the 1920-30s

        In the 1920-30s most of the fires were set on purpose to destroy all of the old world, duh.

    • ... was it in the models ...

      I remember the 1980s model, at least the model sold to the public, had rising temperatures and oceans but the real threat was drowning in our own pollution and overpopulation. This is why recycling became the answer to everything. Alas, once people thought they were doing something, they didn't need to be responsible: Recycling efficiency and relevance (to healing the planet) were no longer an issue. After 10 years of recycling, it became obvious that it wasn't good enough to undo the damage still happe

    • I remember stories on slashdot in 2004 on how we had already passed the tipping point and global warming (then, this was before "global climate change") was unavoidable.

      20 years later, that we are in a cycle where the natural carbon emissions from events associated with climate change exceed the total carbon output of mankind, is not surprising.

      This is why adaptation is necessary.

  • A pertinent quote (Score:3)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:05AM (#64918483) Homepage
    When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money - Alanis Obomsawin

  • need more Nuclear power!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Do you really trust Microsoft, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk to manage those well? They are the lead funders of such.
      Think Boeing + Chernobyl.

      • If you look at the physics of the reactors they are building, the very physics of the reactors make meltdowns impossible. We proved it with the Experimental Breeder Reactor 2. They intentionally attempted to cause a meltdown and failed, twice. See Integral Fast Reactor [youtube.com]

  • I don't support entertaining countries attempts to blame the predictable consequences of the gross mismanagement of their own lands on global warming. They need to take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions instead of constantly trying to pawn it off on shit beyond their control.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      Um, global warming is of our own actions. The fact that it also has, sometimes obvious, feedbacks within nature doesn't detract from this.

      • Um, global warming is of our own actions. The fact that it also has, sometimes obvious, feedbacks within nature doesn't detract from this.

        I have no doubt had the 30s dust bowl in the states occurred today it too would be blamed on global warming.

        Doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand clear-cutting on massive scale leads to flooding and desertification. One can say on the margins global warming contributes yet what is actually driving the impacts in South America in particular is the fact natural resources are being grossly mismanaged on a massive scale.

        Governments in this region for decades have been making concerted efforts to deflec

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by evanh ( 627108 )

          You're basically saying "look over there" to deflect blame to others. Sounds a tad hypocritical.

  • Climate deniers will deny even after they drown from rising seas. Zealotry from being in a corporate-funded echo chamber causes denial.

    • Zealotry from being in a corporate-funded echo chamber causes denial.

      This has far less to do with "evul corps" and far more to do with our rampant breeding with zero thought for the impact it has on resources/pollution.

      But, sure, let's pretend we're not - all - individually responsible.

      Pro-tip: The clearing of the rainforest is not accidental. There is a market driver behind it. I wonder who's consuming the output? Invisible, non-existent, faeries?

  • Who needs nature? What's it ever done for us? /s

  • time to switch to something else, i suppose

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