Shell wins landmark climate case against green groups in Dutch appeal

I haven't found an anglophone link yet, but: the president of Azerbaijan who is currently hosting just called fossil fuels "a gift from god".

You can't make these things up.

Tarvitsemmeko edelleen komediaa, kun uutisista tulee tmmisi takeja

Fifth storm in less than a month bears down on the Philippines

Some 20 major storms hit the archipelago or its waters each year, but they are intensifying due to climate change

Beach volleyballer Lina Yanchulova-Taylor on the Olympic mindset that helped her step-up climate action through education

As one of four winners of the 2024 IOC Climate Action Award, she shares with Olympics.com, how she is raising awareness in sports by coaching athletes and NOCs on their roles to mitigate the negative environmental impacts on and off their fields of play

Governments create cruel laws and rules to keep immigrants and refugees out of their respective countries, and ignore measures to mitigate or combat climate change: utterly failing to recognise that climate change will come to their country and their citizens will have nowhere to go then.

Four in five people want their country to do more on climate change, according to the UNDP and University of Oxfords Peoples Climate Vote, the largest initiative to survey global climate opinion, published again this summer. In the study, an even greater majority of 86 per cent call for countries to set aside disagreements to collaborate on climate change

"It took 68 years for the world to reach 1 terawatt of solar PV capacity. It took just two years to double it"

week 45

UNFCCC Executive Secretary: Climate finance is also an insurance to prevent global inflation

"Unless every country takes bolder climate action, the increased effects of climate change will lead to inflation"

Shell wins appeal against landmark Dutch climate ruling

Oil and gas company Shell on Tuesday won its appeal against a landmark climate ruling in the Netherlands, which in 2021 ordered the oil and gas company to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Brazil announces new climate goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 59-67% by 2035

Climate fight is bigger than one election, US climate adviser tells COP29 (Video)

#climatechange #cop29

More and more people should consider who the real terrorists are

Chart of the week: How Methane gas is warming our planet 80 times faster than C02

Methane is a short-lived greenhouse gas with far greater global warming potential than Co2

This will simply not be possible without drastically reducing the emissions from transport.

I do not anticipate announcements about incentives to cut commuting, nor about massive investments in rail freight infrastructure.

Climate crisis threatens 120M displaced people: UNHCR

The U.N. refugee agency on Tuesday warned that half of the worlds over 120 million displaced people are increasingly finding themselves on the front lines of the global climate crisis, facing a lethal combination of threats but without the funding and support to adapt

Found this on my morning walk. I love how that piece of littering seems to tell that this ground is indeed our main Earth, and that it's best not to remove the reminder.

"Das Meer holt sich 2m pro Jahr..."

New on our blog!

Reassessing Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities

12.11.2024 - 08:00 Uhr
Chart des deutschen Strommix ber die letzten 6 Stunden.

COP29: What is the latest science on climate change Environment

Pleased to see a policy resolution I supported pass. The Green Party of Ontario is no longer against nuclear power.

UK has huge opportunity to lead on green investment, says
PM says can win the race as Trumps election casts doubt on global efforts to tackle climate change

Some stuff on what Biden's doing with , the , and on his way out...

Keir Starmer to unveil ambitious new UK climate goal at Cop29

South China Sea a busy place for November storms.

"Its time for a reassessment. For if centrist and liberal narratives continue to fail, voters will keep turning to those who acknowledge their struggles even if they offer only hollow solutions"

This is kind of shocking to read now.

Miljjuristerna anmler regeringen fr olagligt klimatarbete Arbetaren

Ledare: Frra veckan sa det poff energin frsvann ur frhandlingsrummet

Sverige fr inte backa fr Trump

 MP: Vi uppmanar Tidpartierna till eftertanke

Agera om vi ska rdda stersjn

 Baltic waters: Inget hav vrms upp snabbare

Here's an article by adammorton.bsky.social in The Age from 2009 detailing Ian Plimer's false claims: And Tony Abbott: Now 2024 is the hottest year on record, partly thanks to these 2 liars.

If communities want to pursue climate mitigation and resilience in a Trump era:

Just tell the GOP youre a bunch of survivalists looking to build an independent future, free of state and federal government and meddling. For the town is prepping for judgment day.

And its very true

The rest of the world SHOULD oblige, and give Trump and his supporters what they want: Isolation.

Dont count on world leaders to step up, but consumers from around the world have a choice, and DO have a way to express their indignation at what theyre witnessing, including Trumps appalling environmental policy positions: By refraining from purchasing American goods or services.

COP29 LIVE: Azerbaijan hosts U.N. climate summit (Video)

#azerbaijan #climatechange #live

wrote:

Thanks for taking the time to lay that out

No problem.

I took a look through your profile You seem to really dislike AI. I think the main issue when people think of AI is that they believe their own sense of self is realer than ChatGPT, for example. You are not real, nor am I. Or, more accurately, it is better to say that our consciousness is a narrative very similar to fiction. From a biological perspective, your consciousness is an epiphenomenon of your brain. A critical aspect of consciousness is the ability to apprehend counterfactuals. For example, I can think, What if Kamala Harris won the 2024 election She didnt, ergo it is a subjunctive conditional. However, I can think of that because Im conscious. The mind, as we experience it subjectively, is constructed or an emergent phenomenon based on underlying physical brain activity.

So, from that perspective, as things approach consciousness, they will approach the ability to apprehend counterfactualsthat is, hallucinate. A capacity for counterfactual thinking could be something that arises as artificial intelligence systems become more advanced. As AI systems grow more sophisticated, they might begin to simulate the ability to think in ways similar to ours, including imagining what could be rather than just processing what is. Reality is noumenal. We never come into contact with reality, and our consciousness doesnt exist. We create models of reality that approach reality but are not reality. The consciousness our brains generate functions as prediction machines.

Have you ever stopped to wonder exactly how much energy your brain uses Its a large reason why humans are predators. The amount of energy our brains need, if converted to physical mass, would make us the size of elephants. People are not aware of the sheer amount of devastation agriculture has done in ecological systems. Well, part of defining human civilization is the presence of agriculture. What makes the scope so bad is the amount of humans you have to feed.

That is 18.4 terawatt-hours of energy per year for 8 billion humans. I am not an idiot. I understand that this is a fraction of the energy required for the demands of LLMs, inferences, and queries, but even without LLMs, that is still a lot. Thats enough energy to power around 1.7 million U.S. households for an entire year! That is how much it takes to keep 8 billion humans alive. In all honesty, there is no happy ending to this, because when a population grows past the carrying capacity of its ecological niche, very, very bad things happen.

If a population exceeds its carrying capacity, this can lead to resource depletion, food shortages, and competition, which can cause a population to decline through starvation, disease, or emigration. Or, in the case of humans, war. This is a population crash. Humans have fewer offspring than other other animals because we consume so much energy and our offspring require a lot of resources. Thats why we, as a species, are cooperative breeders. Our long childhoods requires more investment in care compared to other animals. Human life is expensive. Humanity is going to crash because there are too many of us and there is no moral way to correct it.

What is the difference between being born and being built I think people approach this subject from an intuitive, tacit form of nave vitalism, where they separate the living from the non-living. Fire is not alive because it has no internal orderthat is, no information. Being alive involves an increase in complexity and the development of structures, often governed by genetic information. Fire is pure randomness, so there is no order.

So, the only thing that separates you, as a living thing, from a candle flame is literally randomness and information. People think their minds are real. Theyre not. Your mind doesnt exist. Its just your brain, and consciousness is a fiction. Neurologically, its possible that math is analogous to a hallucination. You have never seen a 1, and neither have I. What you see are symbols that point to concepts. Numbers and geometric shapes, like circles and squares, are a priori. We cannot empirically observe them. Some people literally hallucinate math when on drugs. We do not go out and see numbers rather, we infer and intuit them.

I think people get so heated about the topic of AI because they attribute a significant difference between themselves, machines, and even other forms of life. The birth of organic chemistry overturned vitalismthe idea that there was a substance that living things had that non-living beings did not. Organic is really anything that has carbon.

On the topic: no, AI will not solve the climate crisis, especially since it is exacerbating it. However, it will create fictions, speculations, and counterfactuals similar to what a human could create. Theres an implicit archetype of entelechy lurking around criticisms of AI. The cosmological principle literally states that there is nothing special about Earth therefore, there is nothing special about humanity.

I normally dont get into the discourse because, as a scientist who works in biotech, how little people know and how much they think they know annoys me. People dislike AI on a visceral level because they feel as if it diminishes their humanity and its value however, that presupposes there was something special about humanity such that those distinctions matter. Does it matter if something is programmed via neuroproteins (i.e., polypeptide chains) or if it is transistors The outcome is the same.

The most important thing that defines life is, well, information. If we consider life as a system that processes and utilizes information, then the distinction between living and non-living might come down to the degree of complexity in the information being processed and the systems ability to use that information to maintain order, adapt, and reproduce. Honestly, I think even the atheists have animistic views subconsciously that create an initial bias. I dont think people consider what it means for something to be living or how much energy they consume just being alive.

I think people have strong, subconscious, and implicit feelings about the uniqueness and specialness of humans, and the simulacra LLMs threaten that. I view life as a complex automaton, and I mostly study germs, so for me, intuitively, there is little difference between a chatbot and a virus. I have no strong feelings either way.

#AI #artificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #climate #climateChange #election2024 #LLM #politics #uspol

EU all but guaranteed to miss global deadline for climate targets  POLITICO