Governments Stress Links Between Climate and Nature Collapse (theguardian.com) 53
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."
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."
Is this where the models fail? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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Re: Is this where the models fail? (Score:1)
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.
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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
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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)
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
Re:As world leaders gathered in Colombia ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or the evidence that our world has been warming since the Ice Age, and through vastly greater temperature swings than we've seen in centuries [science.org].
LOL- you could not have missed the point and data in that article any more if you had actually tried.
You should read shit you copy-pasta.
They show temperature swings that happened over the course of millions of fucking years and then clearly state that "if life doesn't have millions of years to adapt to this, it will die."
Are you a troll, or are you just too fucking stupid to converse on this topic?
Re:As world leaders gathered in Colombia ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was right in front of your face, and you ignored it.
You picked the parts that supported your weird fucking narrative, and ignored any of the context around them.
You point at "swings" larger than today, while ignoring that it took the world 20 million years to transition between the extremes, extremes that we will hit in hundreds at today's doubling rate.
And before your ignorant ass goes "hundreds of years is a long time, we have lots of time to change the course" or whatever other ignorant bullshit you come up with, the extremes above aren't "wow, it's hot outside."
They're flatly fucking uninhabitable for life as we know it.
The largest extinction event in history- the PT event- was caused by a sudden imbalance in the world's carbon cycle, caused by the eruption of the Siberian Traps. Far worse than that one time a fucking impactor put a several hundred mile wide crater in the Yucatan.
What in the fuck are you talking about we don't control shit, and our CO2 isn't a drop in the ocean? We're at 400ppm, you imbecile. We are the literal cause of the carbon cycle imbalance that is causing the atmospheric levels to rise.
You are a fucking moron.
Do this world a solid and go play in traffic.
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Let's pretend we're all in agreement and your racist response of taxing "white people" to reduce tree-friendly CO2 is correct.
wtf are you talking about, lol.
Did you accidentally respond to me when you meant to respond to the right winger above who trolled you? lol
What data convinced you that taxing people by skin color will improve weather on a global scale?
Nobody believes this.
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It might feel that way from your perspective, but my understand is lots of things are scary and confusing for the truly dumb.
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Let's pretend we're all in agreement and your racist response of taxing "white people" to reduce tree-friendly CO2 is correct. How do you expect the (presumably brown-colored) recipients will spend the carbon tax windfall?
Rich countries develop better technologies to produce energy with lower carbon dioxide emissions, and implement the technologies on an industrial scale; once the technologies are developed, they are picked up by the poor countries.
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As if giving more money to governments is going to improve anything. When you're an adult you'll understand.
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Fucking classic.
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okay someone is being honest. You are saying the quiet the part out loud!
What you want is the rest of us to give up our quality of life, or sacrifice the future of our own children for someone elses.
We are carbon based life forms, everything we do boils down to shuffling carbon around. If we do less of it, it means we are in decline. Being more or less efficent about it might introduce noise into that signal but ultimately reduced emissions mean more poverty and fewer of us!
The real problem if there is one
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The real problem if there is one is not how much carbon is emitted but that we are creating a bulge the carbon cycle.
Correct.
We should focus on actual solutions, ie figure out howto speed up the other parts of the cycle to match our needs, rather than trying to impoverish everyone.
Better figure out those solutions, or the problem will do far worse than impoverish everyone.
It's not the ice age [Re:As world leaders gath...] (Score:2)
We're not supposed to notice that. Or the evidence that our world has been warming since the Ice Age, and through vastly greater temperature swings than we've seen in centuries [science.org].
You, or some sock puppet identical to you, post this every single time climate is mentioned on Slashdot; it's debunked every time, but lo, next time climate comes up, the very same post pops up again (the same even up to the same use of the word "ice age" to mean "glaciation".)
No, the most recent glaciation finished warming eight thousand years ago. The ice-age cycle of glacial advances and retreats is governed by Milankovitch variations, changes in the Earth's orbit and obliquity over time scales of tens
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The Quaternary began ~2.5mya.
The graph on the link deals with temperature over 500 million years. The current ice age- much less the current interglacial period- are a short and curly hair at the end of it.
Worse, if you look at that graph- you can see exciting events on it like the PT extinction event, which we are currently telling to hold our beer, and he's using that as an example of "see? could be worse."
He saw a wiggling graph and thought "see,
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Indeed: not understanding time scales that differ by many orders of magnitude is also a feature of these deniers. "Climate changes over a period of a hundred million years!", "climate changes over a period of ten thousand years," and "climate is changing over a period of decades" are all the same thing.
But it doesn't matter; next time the word "climate" comes up here, this post will pop up again (complete with repeating the same confusion of 'glaciation' and 'ice age.')
Whattabout... [Re:As world leaders gathered in...] (Score:2)
How did they get there? Private jets spewing tons of carbon.
Whataboutism.
But airplanes contribute about 4% of carbon dioxide emissions, and of that only a tiny fraction is private jets.
Yes, they contribute to the problem. But even eliminating private jets won't make a dent in the problem as a whole. Saying "whaddabout private jets!" doesn't contribute to solving the problem.
A pertinent quote (Score:3)
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and that you can't eat money
Speak for yourself. I find anything becomes palatable with enough barbecue sauce.
need more Nuclear power! (Score:1, Troll)
need more Nuclear power!
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Do you really trust Microsoft, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk to manage those well? They are the lead funders of such.
Think Boeing + Chernobyl.
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Blaming problems of your own making on the rain (Score:1, Troll)
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.
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Um, global warming is of our own actions. The fact that it also has, sometimes obvious, feedbacks within nature doesn't detract from this.
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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
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You're basically saying "look over there" to deflect blame to others. Sounds a tad hypocritical.
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You're basically saying "look over there" to deflect blame to others. Sounds a tad hypocritical.
Absolutely not.
There is no (glub glub) problem (glub) (Score:1)
Climate deniers will deny even after they drown from rising seas. Zealotry from being in a corporate-funded echo chamber causes denial.
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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?
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Yup just them white people.... no one else is comsuming... causing problems...
I hope your post was sarcastic and I missed it.
Also, why don't people talk about living in places where, well they most likely shouldn't. I know, build huge cities in places where they have "hurricane season". Might be a bad move also.
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why don't we tax the poor instead? There are after all more of them. If its about the saving the planet should we not do the most effective thing?
What's the big deal? (Score:2)
Who needs nature? What's it ever done for us? /s
sorry guys, we don't buy your lies anymore (Score:1)
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