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UN climate chief Simon Stiell gave a moving speech at the Cop29 opening plenary on Monday, writes Dharna Noor, fossil fuels and climate reporter for Guardian US, who is reporting from Baku.
“In tough times, up against difficult tasks, I don’t go in for hopes and dreams,” he said. “What inspires me is human ingenuity and determination. Our ability to get knocked down and to get up again over and over again, until we accomplish our goals.”
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
11/11/2024 - 02:23
11/11/2024 - 02:00
The ‘theme’ chosen for Cop29 must be some kind of dark joke. This summit, like those before it, is a mere act of greenwashing
During rapidly escalating climate and humanitarian crises, another authoritarian petrostate with no respect for human rights is hosting Cop29 – the UN’s latest annual climate summit that starts today and is being held after the re-election of a climate-denier US president.
Cop meetings have proven to be greenwashing conferences that legitimise countries’ failures to ensure a livable world and future and have also allowed authoritarian regimes like Azerbaijan and the two previous hosts – the United Arab Emirates and Egypt – to continue violating human rights.
Greta Thunberg is a Swedish activist and international climate crisis campaigner
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11/11/2024 - 01:49
In today’s newsletter: As delegates gather for the world’s biggest climate conference, many are asking what the re-election of the man who thinks global heating is ‘a hoax’ will mean for the planet
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It is now “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the warmest year in recorded history. And just like 2023, the past 12 months have been characterised by extreme weather events – from cyclones in Australia to wildfires in Brazil to last month’s lethal floods in Spain – made more intense and more frequent by the climate crisis.
US election | Donald Trump has been declared the winner in Arizona, completing the Republicans’ clean sweep of the so-called swing states and rubbing salt in Democrats’ wounds as it was announced that the president-elect is scheduled to meet with Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the presidential handover. Trump reportedly spoke on the phone with Vladimir Putin on Thursday and discussed the war in Ukraine, telling the Russian ruler not to escalate the conflict and reminding him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”.
House of Lords | The Liberal Democrats will try to hijack the government’s bill to ban Lords from inheriting their seats in parliament this week in an attempt to force a vote on an entirely elected upper chamber. MPs are expected to vote overwhelmingly in favour of the Labour legislation but the Lib Dems want to go drastically further.
Immigration and asylum| A Home Office artificial intelligence tool that proposes enforcement action against adult and child migrants could make it too easy for officials to rubberstamp automated life-changing decisions, campaigners have said.
Health | The government is likely to offer a financial lifeline to the hospice sector amid fears end-of-life care providers are at risk of closure due to the double blow of the employers’ national insurance rise and higher wage bills, the Guardian understands.
Nursing | Increasing numbers of UK-trained nurses are set to leave the profession in England within a decade of registering, in a trend that could jeopardise the government’s overhaul of healthcare, according to a union.
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11/11/2024 - 01:40
Producing something ‘living, fresh and green’ for astronauts to eat on the moon and Mars among ultimate aims but first test is whether plants can survive
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An Australian-led project to grow plants on the moon has secured a ride on a lunar mission scheduled for takeoff in 2025.
Plants and seeds ensconced in a carefully engineered capsule will make the 380,000km trip aboard an Intuitive Machines lunar lander.
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11/10/2024 - 22:31
Nationals senator Matt Canavan and MP Keith Pitt both spoke out about the party’s climate policy in the wake of Donald Trump’s win
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Nationals leader David Littleproud, shadow transport minister Bridget McKenzie and Senate Liberal leader Simon Birmingham have all rejected a backbench push to use Donald Trump’s election in the US to abandon support for net zero by 2050.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has said he is completely committed to the target, attempting to fight the next election on the Coalition’s vague taxpayer-funded nuclear plan that will likely extend the use of coal and gas rather than the 2050 target.
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11/10/2024 - 19:01
US suffered greatest economic losses, report commissioned by International Chamber of Commerce finds, followed by China and India
Violent weather cost the world $2tn over the past decade, a report has found, as diplomats descend on the Cop29 climate summit for a tense fight over finance.
The analysis of 4,000 climate-related extreme weather events, from flash floods that wash away homes in an instant to slow-burning droughts that ruin farms over years, found economic damages hit $451bn across the past two years alone.
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11/10/2024 - 19:01
Early signs of success seen in area where native European oysters were fished to local extinction by early 1900s
Thousands of oysters released into the Firth of Forth appear to be thriving again after a century-long absence from the Scottish estuary since they were lost to overfishing.
Marine experts from Heriot-Watt University who have helped reintroduce about 30,000 European flat oysters to the estuary said divers and underwater cameras showed they were doing well.
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11/10/2024 - 13:25
Verse’s connection to nature can inspire awareness and hope amid the climate crisis, offering clarity beyond data
Poetry has a big debt to nature, its muse and source of metaphor for centuries. As the UN climate conference begins, it is time to pay it back. Poetry must give nature a voice to express its dire predicament. “I will rise,” declares the furious river in the Scottish makar Kathleen Jamie’s poem What the Clyde Said, After Cop26 – just as the River Xanthus in Homer’s Iliad rose in revenge against Achilles for filling it with so many bodies.
Ms Jamie’s poem appears in a new anthology, Earth Prayers, edited by the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. “We are in the age of anthropogenic climate breakdown, possibly the Age of Grief,” Ms Duffy writes in the foreword. The 100 poems, ranging from classics such as Matthew Arnold’s 1867 Dover Beach to #ExtinctionRebellion by Pascale Petit, remind us not just of the beauty of the natural world, but its fragility.
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11/10/2024 - 11:00
Once heavily scorned because of fraud and poor outcomes, carbon trading is likely to be high on the agenda in Baku
For the next two weeks, countries will gather on the shores of the Caspian Sea in Baku, Azerbaijan, to discuss how to increase finance for climate crisis adaptation and mitigation. A global agreement on carbon markets will be high on the agenda as countries try to find ways of generating the trillions they need to decarbonise in order to limit heating to below 2C above preindustrial levels.
Here is what you need to know.
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11/07/2024 - 00:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 07 November 2024; doi:10.1038/s44183-024-00094-2
Urbanizing river deltas are highly susceptible to sea level rise and extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. Water-related disasters are already happening more often due to climate change, rapid urbanization, unsustainable land use and aging infrastructure threatening a large fraction of human and natural environments in these low lying and sinking areas around the globe. As stress levels of climate change are accelerating, societal and physical transformations are essential for adapting our deltas to climate change. In the Netherlands, imagination and evidence by design in the form of a long-term spatial vision, played a pivotal role in the past century to set, share and accomplish a new direction to overcome flood disasters by altering the coastlines and riverbeds of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. The unprecedented rainfall in July 2021 and the storm in December 2021 which hit Western Europe revealed the effectiveness of this new direction. We therefore plea for a prominent role of design in climate science and delta management to imagine, analyse and communicate future perspectives for climate adaptation in urbanizing deltas.
