THE BRIEF [Jan 09-15 ‘23]
Past 8 years were the hottest, vocabulary update: Weather whiplash, become an electrician and oil executive to lead 2023 UN COP.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉
References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].
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‼️News you can’t miss
Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.
🙀 The past 8 years have been the warmest ever recorded
😻 New word for your climate change vocabulary: Weather whiplash
😼 Want job security for the next decades, become an electrician
💩 I vote to cancel future COP meetings
This week’s highlights
[#plasticfree24h] — This a hilarious in one way, scary in another and just depressing in a third way attempt by one writer to not even interact with plastic for 24 hours. As you might guess, this is damn near impossible and he violates the rule several times during the 24 hour period not to mention how much preparation he has complete just to do basic things such as brushing his teeth without touching plastic. But it really does say something so crystal clear about the climate crisis: The fossil fuel industry is EVERYWHERE. It’s in every nook and cranny of our lives and from the looks of this guys 24h attempt it’s going to be close to impossible to get rid of.
[#cancelCOP] — Unless this will be changed this is going to be the last article in my policy section as I’m going to remove it and I probably won’t be following policy very closely in the future unless there’s some genuinely good news. I haven’t really been a big believer in politics as solution for a while now but this is the proverbial straw that broke the camels back or for those of us who don’t have camels, the drop that made the glass overflow. Ok that’s a lot of gall, so now the for actual news item. The UN COP meeting next year will be held in UAE and guess who they selected to chair it: The freaking oil executive of UAEs largest national oil company. That is it for me. They should just cancel these and save the CO2 for somebody who are actually working on solving this thing. Look at what happened in Egypt in 2022 and it wasn’t even a blatant fossil fuel fest as the UAE one from the looks of it will be. So either we cancel them or somebody please explain to me why we shouldn’t 🙏 (comments welcome below).
[#deforestation] — A new study has found that tropical forests that have been cut down is a significant source of carbon emissions for at least 10 years after it has been cut down. This even accounts for forests that have been replanted as the issue here is the decaying soil organic matter and deadwood that are left after the logging is completed.
That’s it for this week folks!
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See you all next week 👋