Collapse

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21033615

Not sure what the thing is with the federal LNP seat? Qld just voted in a majority LNP state Government and kicked the few Greens that were in parliament, safe to say they don't really give a care about the reef, to be fair that's the same as most of Australia and much of the world.

Ironically the new QLD LNP government has been dealing non stop with climate change enhanced disasters since they came to power, Leopards literally eating voters faces I guess ?

The Great Barrier Reef is suffering its second bleaching event in as many years, with the marine park authority reporting corals in distress due to an underwater heatwave stretching 1300 kilometres from Townsville to Cooktown.

Mass coral bleaching has occurred on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024 and now 2025

Sobering to remember the first every recorded mass bleaching was only back in 1998, nothing before that, voters literately making it worse every election is a wired thing to witness.

Editor’s summary

Metals and metalloids are ubiquitous in soils, originating from bedrock and from human activities and infrastructure. These compounds can be toxic to humans and other organisms, and their soil distribution and concentrations at global scale are not well known. Hou et al. analyzed data from more than 1000 regional studies to identify areas of metal toxicity and explore drivers of these trends. They estimate that 14 to 17% of cropland exceeds agricultural thresholds for at least one toxic metal. Climate and topography, along with mining activity and irrigation, predicted which soils would exceed metal thresholds. Soil metal pollution is a global issue that will likely increase with the growing demand for toxic metals in new technologies. —Bianca Lopez

Abstract

Toxic metal pollution is ubiquitous in soils, yet its worldwide distribution is unknown. We analyzed a global database of soil pollution by arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel, and lead at 796,084 sampling points from 1493 regional studies and used machine learning techniques to map areas with exceedance of agricultural and human health thresholds. We reveal a previously unrecognized high-risk, metal-enriched zone in low-latitude Eurasia, which is attributed to influential climatic, topographic, and anthropogenic conditions. This feature can be regarded as a signpost for the Anthropocene era. We show that 14 to 17% of cropland is affected by toxic metal pollution globally and estimate that between 0.9 and 1.4 billion people live in regions of heightened public health and ecological risks.

Some of my classmates had activated their cameras. I scrolled through the little windows, noting the alarmed faces, downcast in cold laptop light. There were dozens of us on the call, including a geophysicist, an actor, a retired financial adviser and a civil engineer. We all looked worried, and rightly so. The issue formerly known as climate change was now a polycrisis called climate collapse. H1N1 was busily jumping from birds to cows to people. And with each passing day, as Donald Trump went about gleefully dismantling state capacity, the promise of a competent government response to the next hurricane, wildfire, flood, pandemic, drought, mudslide, heatwave, financial meltdown, hailstorm or other calamity receded further from view.

I still find it staggering and heart-rending that we blew this so badly,”

I can only agree with that

new study published in the Journal of Remote Sensing has revealed that current satellite systems underestimate total CO₂ emissions from U.S. thermal power plants by 70% (±12%).

WTF ? How to "reduce" emissions, don't count some 70% of your coal power plant emissions, job done /s

Mallon warns some Australian neighbourhoods could become what he calls “climate ghettos”.

“There are certain areas where you will start to see a negative spiral,” he says.

One of the major obstacles preventing reform is that no-one is willing to admit there’s a problem, according to Mallon.

He says because banks and insurance companies have exposure in these sub-prime climate markets, it’s not in their interests to raise the alarm.

We're on the eve of destruction....

[...]this isn’t a pile-up of isolated crises. This is a metacrisis — a systemic failure driven by the logic that underpins our civilization. It’s not just that our tools are malfunctioning — it’s that our operating system is obsolete.

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change (Ripple et al. 2020). For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed—and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies (Supran et al. 2023). Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (Guterres 2024), and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100 (UNEP 2023). Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo (supplemental figure S1; CenCO2PIP Consortium et al. 2023).

Last year, we witnessed record-breaking sea surface temperatures (Cheng et al. 2024), the hottest Northern Hemisphere extratropical summer in 2000 years (Esper et al. 2024), and the breaking of many other climate records (Ripple et al. 2023a). Moreover, we will see much more extreme weather in the coming years (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2021). Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions, whereas land-use change, primarily deforestation, accounts for approximately 10% (supplemental figure S2).

Our aim in the present article is to communicate directly to researchers, policymakers, and the public. As scientists and academics, we feel it is our moral duty and that of our institutions to alert humanity to the growing threats that we face as clearly as possible and to show leadership in addressing them. In this report, we analyze the latest trends in a wide array of planetary vital signs. We also review notable recent climate-related disasters, spotlight important climate-related topics, and discuss needed policy interventions. This report is part of our series of concise annual updates on the state of the climate.

The number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. is increasing. A recent report says FEMA made a disaster declaration somewhere in the U.S. every four days, on average, in 2024

Unmanaged abandonment I guess ?

Significance

Research blending climate models with physiological data has projected that large geographical areas may soon experience heat stress exceeding limits for human thermoregulation. Modeled thermoregulatory limits were derived from laboratory research using thermal-step protocols. Despite the growing popularity of this technique, its principal assumption—that core temperature inflection during stepped increases in heat or humidity demarcates thermoregulatory upper limits—has not been validated. By exposing participants for 9 h to conditions just above or below the core temperature inflection point, we found that thermal-step protocols effectively identify the conditions above which thermoregulation is impossible. Our findings provide critical support for heat stress projections incorporating empirical tolerance limits. We also provide data characterizing physiological strain during prolonged, uncompensable heat exposure.

Abstract

Recent projections suggest that large geographical areas will soon experience heat and humidity exceeding limits for human thermoregulation. The survivability limits modeled in that research were based on laboratory studies suggesting that humans cannot effectively thermoregulate in wet bulb temperatures (Twb) above 26 to 31 °C, values considerably lower than the widely publicized theoretical threshold of 35 °C. The newly proposed empirical limits were derived from the Twb corresponding to the core temperature inflection point in participants exposed to stepped increases in air temperature or relative humidity in a climate-controlled chamber. Despite the increasing use of these thermal-step protocols, their validity has not been established. We used a humidity-step protocol to estimate the Twb threshold for core temperature inflection in 12 volunteers. To determine whether this threshold truly demarcates the Twb above which thermoregulation is impossible, each participant was subsequently exposed to Twb above (~33.7 °C, Tabove) and below (~30.9 °C, Tbelow) their respective inflection point (~32.3 °C, Twb) for up to 9 h (in random order). Core temperature rose continuously in Tabove. It was projected that core temperatures associated with heat stroke (40.2 °C) would occur within 10 h. While Tbelow was also uncompensable, the core temperature rate of rise was considerably lower than in Tabove such that it would take >24 h to reach 40.2 °C. Our study supports thermal-step protocols as an effective technique for evaluating survivability limits for heat exposure and provides a direct assessment of the limits of human thermoregulation.

Bend down on a coastal beach or a riverbank and you will inevitably spot them. A quick look into a gutter and there they are. Drag a plankton net into a lake, river, or ocean, and you will easily collect them. Plastic debris is everywhere. It knows no borders, transferring the thousands of chemicals that compose it—or attach themselves to its surface—from one ecosystem to another, along with the microorganisms (including pathogens) that colonize it.

By dedicating this special issue of Environmental Science and Pollution Research (ESPR) to the source, fate, and effects of plastic litters in the European land-sea continuum, we aimed to bring together scientists from different fields of expertise to improve our understanding of plastic pollution across ecosystem boundaries. Most of them took part in the Mission Tara Microplastics conducted over 7 months to investigate plastic pollution across nine major European rivers. They discovered that the median concentration of large microplastics (LMPs, 500 µm–5 mm)—the most studied size fraction to date—was lower in European rivers than in other global regions, while small microplastics (SMPs, 25–500 µm) were found to dominate in mass, with SMP/LMP ratios reaching up to 1000:1 in some rivers. Results were also coming from other field campaigns, including a comparison between the two most plastic-polluted zones of the world ocean (Tara Mediterranean and Tara Pacific). The use of a 3D Lagrangian simulation of the dispersion of riverine microplastics into the Mediterranean Sea indicated that 65% of river inputs consist of floating microplastics drifting in the surface layer and 35% of dense MPs sinking to deeper layers, with further dispersion at sea driven by mesoscale and sub-mesoscale structures.

A citizen science initiative with schoolchildren Plastique à la loupe was also introduced, which compared for the first time the distribution of different litter sizes (macrolitter and meso- and microplastics) over a large set of riverbanks and coastal beaches sampled in France. Special emphasis was also given to the mismanaged litters in French urban areas, with articles depicting their composition, spatiotemporal variations, sources, and transport dynamics in cities of all sizes. An example of the physiological impact of microplastics was given by exposing beached plastic pellets to mussels, key intertidal bioengineers, and filter-feeders that are particularly susceptible to both plastic ingestion and release of potentially toxic mixtures of intrinsic and extrinsic chemical compounds. Finally, a pan-European study of the bacterial plastisphere revealed for the first time the presence of a virulent human pathogenic bacterium (Shewanella putrefaciens) detected on microplastics in a river. A clear distinction between plastisphere metabolomes and diversity from freshwater and marine water was found in most of the river-to-sea continuum, helping to mitigate the risk of pathogens transfer between freshwater and marine systems. With the United Nations global plastic treaty on the horizon, this special issue emphasizes the need to unite interdisciplinary expertise to deepen our understanding of plastic pollution and to conduct reliable ecological risk assessments across ecosystem boundaries.

This is relevant document if you want a high IQ version to get your bearings of what is going on right now, rather than complete noise and low information media.

Behind most things elites do there is someone at a think-tank publishing things that usually get followed, but public usually doesn't read or know about the documents because our media is run by morons and propagandists rather than actual journalists.

Anyways in the past reading these kinds of things has given me lots of predictive insights.

below is executive summary but its worth reading the whole thing for the details

November 2024 Executive Summary The desire to reform the global trading system and put American industry on fairer ground vis-à-vis the rest of the world has been a consistent theme for President Trump for decades. We may be on the cusp of generational change in the international trade and financial systems. The root of the economic imbalances lies in persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents the balancing of international trade, and this overvaluation is driven by inelastic demand for reserve assets. As global GDP grows, it becomes increasingly burdensome for the United States to finance the provision of reserve assets and the defense umbrella, as the manufacturing and tradeable sectors bear the brunt of the costs. In this essay I attempt to catalogue some of the available tools for reshaping these systems, the tradeoffs that accompany the use of those tools, and policy options for minimizing side effects. This is not policy advocacy, but an attempt to understand the financial market consequences of potential significant changes in trade or financial policy. Tariffs provide revenue, and if offset by currency adjustments, present minimal inflationary or otherwise adverse side effects, consistent with the experience in 2018-2019. While currency offset can inhibit adjustments to trade flows, it suggests that tariffs are ultimately financed by the tariffed nation, whose real purchasing power and wealth decline, and that the revenue raised improves burden sharing for reserve asset provision. Tariffs will likely be implemented in a manner deeply intertwined with national security concerns, and I discuss a variety of possible implementation schemes. I also discuss optimal tariff rates in the context of the rest of the U.S. taxation system. Currency policy aimed at correcting the undervaluation of other nations’ currencies brings an entirely different set of tradeoffs and potential implications. Historically, the United States has pursued multilateral approaches to currency adjustments. While many analysts believe there are no tools available to unilaterally address currency misvaluation, that is not true. I describe some potential avenues for both multilateral and unilateral currency adjustment strategies, as well as means of mitigating unwanted side effects. Finally, I discuss a variety of financial market consequences of these policy tools, and possible sequencing.