Do holidays make you count your blessings and feel gratitude for the comforts of home and family (and, if you’re fortunate, paid time off)? Or do they highlight the losses and worries and deficits of the year that was? Probably a little of both, if you’re like me.
Here is some climate coverage from the last two months: wins, losses, and everything in between.
Climate impacts
A warming planet is creating a booming, and dangerous, disaster-restoration industry (Grist, September 30, 2023)
Technically, that New York City flood was “mild” (HEATED, October 4, 2023)
On climate unpredictability:
It came from the skies (The Snap Forward, October 11, 2023)
Trash
Microplastics pose risk to ocean plankton, climate, other key Earth systems (Mongabay, October 9, 2023)
Japanese scientists find microplastics are present in clouds (Al Jazeera, September 28, 2023)
EU to crack down further on microplastics after glitter ban (Guardian, October 17, 2023)
In-depth Q&A: What food waste means for climate change (Carbon Brief, October 3, 2023)
This Is Where Your Old Clothes Go: A landscape of discarded textile rises in Chile’s Atacama Desert (Orion, October 2023)
Energy
On “natural gas” and the threat it poses:
The urgent need for methane literacy (HEATED, October 19, 2023)
Major Fossil Fuel Producers Are Likely To Blow Past Climate Change Targets (The Messenger, November 8, 2023)
Old, but making the rounds on Bluesky for some reason. I only got half of the questions right but learned a lot.
Think You’re Making Good Climate Choices? Take This Mini-Quiz (August 30, 2020)
Eat the rich
Our modern-day Columbuses (HEATED, October 9, 2023)
Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says (The Guardian, November 19, 2023)
Overconsumption Is an Easy Problem to Fix: That’s Why Talking About It Is a Threat (Drilled, November 25, 2023)
Science!
I have only explored a fraction of Feral Atlas, but it’s a really intriguing concept and execution–the site is designed to encourage exploration.
Mud cores are just one of the climate proxies used to create the composite view of climate history as we now understand it–there are also ice cores, tree rings, packrat middens, and many more–but I loved this close look at how such records are stored and studied.
Mud libraries hold the story of the Earth’s climate past — and foretell its future (Vox, November 26, 2023)
Good stewardship
How Migrating Crabs Help Us Rethink Our Roads (Atmos, October 16, 2023)
Cranberry growers are bringing wetlands back from the dead (Woodwell Climate Research Center, October 23, 2023)
Not a recent article, but recently reshared by a climate scientist I follow on Bluesky with the observation that it’s not humanity that’s bad for the environment; indigenous forest stewardship shows that it is specifically extractive and exploitative practices that harm the environment. That is something that can be regulated.
Indigenous Forests Are Some of the Amazon’s Last Carbon Sinks (World Resources Institute, January 6, 2023)
You Can’t Fight Extraction With Extraction (Drilled, October 6, 2023)
Obligatory note of hope
I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore. (New York Times [gift link], November 18, 2023)
A glimpse of optimism on climate change (The Hill, November 23, 2023)
…and just for fun
I recently received a boxed edition of Daybreak, a cooperative climate change-focused board game from the makers of Pandemic. If you don’t have a physical copy, though, you can actually play online! Play Daybreak
Sara Davis 