[Nov 28-Dec 4’22] Drought, storms and wildfires

Activist jailed for 6 months, EV sales predicted to reach 90% market share, the future will be awesome and greenwashing in “sustainable” funds.

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

Next week unfortunately, the newsletter will be paused due to the fact that I have an exam in a wine course that I’m taking and I need to focus all my efforts on that. So all paid subscriptions will be paused for a week starting tomorrow.

A quick wine and climate sidenote: I got into wine because of the fascinating complexity that climate, weather, geology, nature, geography and fermentation can produce in a beverage, but recently I realized that wine is the only way I can think of where you can literally taste climate change — which I wrote a blogpost about on my personal blog — if you’re interested. Because of that the wine industry is very vulnerable to climate change. Everything from wines like Sauternes that rely on high humidity to Champagne that relies on cold weather will be affected.

Anyway, wish me luck and the newsletter will resume on Dec 19.

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‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Just Stop Oil activist jailed for 6 months

😻 EV sales expected to account for 90% by 2027

😼 Remember: The future where the climate crisis is solved will be awesome

💩 Got money invested in a “sustainable” fund? Well maybe you don’t.

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#maunaloa] — When I first heard about the Mauna Loa eruption the first thing I thought about was not the human misery that might follow this eruption, but what will happen to our CO2 measurements 😬. The measurements we rely on today are measured atop Mauna Loa on the Mauna Loa Observatory. This NYT article talks about this problem, because of the eruption power was cut to the observatory on Thursday and thus CO2 measurements stopped for the first time in 60 years.

[#water] — A detailed new study from Sweden looks at the many ways that water plays a key role in solving climate change. From peatlands to oceans. But also how water can play a negative role like untreated wastewater.

[#hurricanes] — Hurricane season in the US is officially over and it’s time to tally up the numbers. 14 storms makes this an average year, but two late season hurricanes in September were very deadly — one of them the worst in two decades.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#nuclear] — Japan is going all-in on nuclear in an attempt to get off fossil fuels by 2050. It will restart nuclear power plants that were shut down after Fukushima in 2011 and it will even build new next-gen ones.