"Many governments, companies and communities are taking action to reduce their use of fossil fuels. The petroleum industry is responding to this threat by ramping up their campaigns to manipulate public opinion. People like to believe they aren’t susceptible to the dark art of marketing, but Canadian advertisers...."
(cont' below)
This is one of the scariest statistics I have ever heard...
🟥 Our oceans are 30% more acidic today than they were 150 years ago.
Think about that: 30% more ‼ in such a brief span of time. It's no wonder our whole ecosystem is crashing down.
For millions of years, the exchange of CO₂ between the surface of the ocean and the atmosphere remained constant. In the past 150 years, humans have greatly increased the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and changing land-use practices. As a result, the ocean has absorbed about 29% of this additional carbon.
This added CO₂ has had significant effects on the ocean. Surface waters are now 30% more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial era. Ocean acidification is now happening at a faster rate than at any point in the last 66 million years, and possibly in the last 300 million years. And projections show that by the end of this century, ocean surface waters could be more than twice as acidic as they were at the end of last century if we do not reduce our carbon emissions.
You’ve probably already seen some of the heartbreaking stories about monkeys falling dead from trees during the unprecedented killer heat wave now besieging Mexico.
Unfortunately, more bad news is on the way…
The extreme heat smothering much of Mexico has already killed dozens of people, but the hottest temperatures are yet to come, officials say.
"In the next 10 to 15 days, the country will experience the highest temperatures ever recorded," researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) said in a statement earlier this week. They called the heat wave "unprecedented."
And it’s not just the searing heat. The nation’s capital, Mexico City — one of the largest cities in the world — is also experiencing extreme water shortages which are expected to get worse.
Maximiliano Herrera (@extretemps) is a professional climatologist on Mastodon. He also posts at Xitter under an account called Extreme Temperatures Around The World (@extremetemps) and has been VERY busy there lately.
He says, for example, that Mexico City recently had their hottest day in history 🔥 (more on that in my next post). New temperature records also are being set throughout Africa — in Senegal, Niger, Mali, Chad, and Libya — along with record heat in China, southeast Asia, Pakistan, South America... the list goes on and on.
In summary, Herrera writes: “160 countries/territories have broken heat records so far this month. This is 300% more than any single month before mid-2023, and more than any month before February 2024. Many more countries will join in the next few days with record heat waves all over the world.”
2024 is not just an election year. It is THE election year.
64 countries—representing a combined global population of about 49%—are holding national elections, the results of which will prove massively consequential as we head deeper into the #ClimateCrisis
2023 marked the hottest summer in the Northern Hemisphere in 2000 years, almost 4°C warmer than the coldest summer in the same period. #ClimateCrisis#GlobalWarming
-- Sarah Collins reports. From Cambridge University -- thanks
Online discourse: "You have to convince me to vote for Joe #Biden"
Why? I don't like Joe Biden. The idea that anyone has to convince you to fall in love with Joe Biden is as absurd of a #political assertion as the #MAGA cult and #Trump, that #politics is about passion
We don't view politics as a love affair. It's tactics. And more importantly, it's your #social#responsibility to vote
Labour is planning to make the climate a key focus for its election campaign, putting its #NetZero commitments “up in lights”, and drawing a clear link between the “chaos” of the Conservative government and the effects of the #ClimateCrisishttps://buff.ly/4ati9NW
Capitalism’s mania to promote a nonstop hyperactive consumer culture is literally making us sick. All that needless plastic packaging and the cheap plastic products they sell to us soon end up as trash — and eventually as microplastics.
These poisonous remnants of billionaire greed are now in the food we eat and in the water we drink. They’re in our bloodstreams, in our brains, and even in women’s placentas.
But that’s not all. Microplastics are also making climate change worse.
It turns out plastics in the ocean do more than suffocate turtles, fish, and other marine life. A new study co-authored by Northeastern researcher Aron Stubbins shows that microplastics may reduce the ability of the ocean to offset the climate crisis by slowing down the rate at which carbon is taken from the sea surface to the depths.
For millennia, the ocean has been part of a carbon sink process in which dead phytoplankton clump together and fall into the deep ocean in showers of what look like "marine snow," says Stubbins, a professor of marine and environmental science.
But research shows that microplastics in the ocean are slowing the process down by making the "marine snow" more buoyant, Stubbins says.
"Plastics want to float. If phytoplanktons grow on microplastics instead of as free living organisms, that changes the buoyancy of the phytoplankton when they die," Stubbins says.
"Basically, the plastics are slowing down the sinking rate of the marine snow, which is potentially reducing the efficiency with which the ocean can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," he says.
I don’t think any of us really understand how quickly collapse can happen:
> About 85% of the country expected to see highs of at least 40°C
> Almost 40% of the country’s dams below 20%
> 40% are between 20 and 50%.
> Mexico City (Population 22.51 million) forced to reduce water supply as reservoirs that feed city dry up.
> Stores running out of mineral water.
#Senate#Democrats opened an investigation on Thurs into #Trump’s meeting w/ #oil & #gas execs last month to determine whether Trump offered a “policies-for-money transaction” [#bribe ] when he asked for $1B for his 2024 campaign so he could retake the White House & delete #POTUS#Biden’s #climate#regulations.
The investigation is the 2nd congressional inquiry into the April 11 fund-raising dinner…. Trump told ~20 oil & gas execs that they would save far more than $1B in avoided #taxes & #legal fees after he repealed #environmental regulations….