Australian Geographic recently published “Antarctica: a continent in crisis” — a special report on how Antarctica is already responding to a warming world.

This is a heartbreakingly sad yet beautifully presented summary of the ongoing and deepening crisis at the bottom of the world.

A short excerpt is below, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.
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A document signed by hundreds of scientists from 20 different countries calls for urgent and immediate action to stem what is occurring at Earth’s remote, most southerly region:

“Antarctica is currently experiencing dramatic changes at unprecedented rates, marked by repeated extreme events. These include heatwaves with temperatures soaring up to 40ºC above the average. Both last summer and this winter, sea-ice extent has reached record lows. These changes have happened even faster than scientists predicted.

“This is a critical moment, impacting our well-being, future generations and ecosystems globally. Confronted by this evidence, we urgently call on nations to intensify and exceed their current commitments to greenhouse gas emissions reductions.”
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2023/12/antarctica-a-continent-in-crisis/

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency

From Tom Engelhardt, we get this disturbing (but apt) comparison of the Gaza crisis to our planetary climate/ecology crisis...
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Humanity in its time on Earth has already come up with two distinct ways of destroying this planet and everything on it. The first is, of course, nuclear weapons, which once again surfaced in the ongoing nightmare in the Middle East. (An Israeli minister recently threatened to nuke Gaza.) The second is what we’ve come to call “climate change” or “global warming” — the burning, that is, of fossil fuels to desperately overheat our already flaming world. In its own fashion, that could be considered a slow-motion version of the nuking of the planet.

Put another way, in some grim sense, all of us now live in Gaza. Most of us just don’t know it yet.

If you actually do live in Gaza, your life is now officially hell on Earth. Your home has been destroyed, your family members wounded or killed, the hospital you fled to decimated. And that story, sadly enough, has been leading the news day after day for weeks now. But in the process, in some sense even more sadly, the deepest hell of our time has largely disappeared from sight.

I’m thinking about the urge to turn our whole planet into a long-term, slow-motion version of Gaza, to almost literally set it ablaze and destroy it as a habitable place for humanity and so many other species.

In the midst of the ongoing Middle Eastern catastrophe, the latest study by James Hanson, the scientist who first sounded the climate alarm to Congress back in the 1980s, appeared. The study suggested that our planet is heating even more rapidly than expected. The key temperature danger mark, set only eight years ago at the Paris climate agreement, 1.5 degrees Centigrade above the pre-industrial level, could easily be reached not in 2050 or 2040, but by 2030.

Meanwhile, another recent study suggests that humanity’s “carbon budget” — that is, the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere while keeping global temperature rise at or under that 1.5-degree mark — is now officially going to hell in a handbasket.
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FULL ESSAY -- https://tomdispatch.com/a-slow-motion-gaza/

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency