Yesterday we talked about COP28 and the move from the fossil fuel industry to stall any phase out of oil, gas and other fossil fuels. Make no mistake, the geopolitical consequences of climate change, and in particular moving towards a world which no longer uses fossil fuels, are huge. We’ll cover this in more depth in future, but this topic is timely because of the appointment of the new head of the World Bank.

When the world’s seventh largest oil producer was named host of COP28, or to give it it’s full name, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 28th Conference of the Parties, you’d be forgiven for lowering your expectations of any diplomatic breakthrough. Now we are starting to understand why.

The New York Times reports that in the Gulf of Mexico alone there are up to 14,000 old, unplugged oil wells. These wells are at risk of leaking, meaning oil and other pollutants spill into the ocean and could wash up on shore. In addition, unplugged wells can leak significant amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared on Friday that the Covid-19 pandemic no longer constituted a global health emergency, which it had since 30 January 2020. I was reminded of a cartoon I saw in The Economist (presciently in April 2020) that I wanted to share.

They say a picture paints a thousand words, and after the last couple of posts about extreme weather I went in search of the most moving photos relating to climate change - The Guardian has a selection of twenty photos that have to be seen to be believed.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post about last month’s heatwave in Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Algeria comes news that Vietnam experienced its highest ever temperature when the northern province of Thanh Hoa recorded a temperature of 44.1 degrees Celsius.

The World Weather Attribution Initiative (WWA) is a collaboration between climate scientists at universities around the world that seeks to provide quick answers as to the extent a particular extreme weather event was influenced by climate change. Previously establishing such a link could take a year or more, by which time any attribution to climate change went largely unnoticed.

The Financial Times has a story about Pete Betts, one of the world’s most experienced environmental negotiators, and some of the lessons he has learnt during the course of his career. Betts has been battling a malignant brain tumour and has been told the median life expectancy for someone in his position is 15 months.

The operations of groups like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain and Restore Passenger Rail are often in the news, with stories generally detailing the disruption they cause to commuters. However, a BBC story about the sentencing of seven Just Stop Oil protesters shows that a sympathetic ear can sometimes be found in the unlikeliest of quarters.

The Guardian published a story a couple of days ago reporting the results of a YouGov survey of people in seven European countries. The respondents were asked about their support for state-led climate action and individual initiatives, and the results showed the greatest level of support for measures that wouldn’t directly affect an individual’s lifestyle, but that the more a measure would require a change in lifestyle the less support there was for it.

Every so often a politician drops their guard and speaks the unvarnished truth. Such occasions should be celebrated and we’ll try and feature a few here.

When Cyclone Gabrielle was bearing down on New Zealand in February the government declared a National State of Emergency. The declaration was debated in Parliament on Valentine’s Day, with Green Party leader and Minister for Climate Change James Shaw giving a powerful speech that amongst other things invoked a famous quote from Winston Churchill.

In a slight detour from yesterday’s post on greenhouse gases, today we are covering off the carbon cycle. Read on to learn why the carbon cycle is vital to life on Earth!

Yesterday we covered off the basics about our atmosphere and what’s in it. We discovered that the atmosphere is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and almost 1% argon - meaning that over 99% is made up of those three gases alone. A mere 0.4% of the atmosphere is made up of greenhouse gases. So what are these greenhouse gases and why are they so potent given they make up such a small proportion of the atmosphere?

We previously covered off what the greenhouse effect is, how greenhouse gases affect the climate, and how humans have caused a massive increase in the amount of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. Now before we look at the sources of those greenhouses gases, let’s take a moment to understand what our atmosphere is and the make up of it.

Global warming, climate change, the greenhouse effect, and carbon emissions only became mainstream terms relatively recently. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that the science behind climate change has only been understood for a short period.

Believe it or not though, the first scientific discoveries relating to the burning of fossil fuels and consequent impacts on the climate took place way back in the early nineteenth century. So who were these climate science pioneers? Let’s meet them.

Despite surveys showing that a majority of the world’s population agreeing that climate change is a global emergency, recent reports that the head of the World Bank is to step down from his role a year early following comments he made last September on climate change, of outright denialism being shared online following Cyclone Gabrielle in New Zealand, and far right attacks on net zero policies show that a vocal minority remains opposed to climate change action.

Here's something I’ve dusted off and updated from a couple of years ago setting out why there should be no doubt climate change is caused by us, and one of the most pressing issues facing humanity.

Determining the sustainability of something is multi-faceted, because focusing too much on one particular outcome can have unintended consequences. Pretty much everything we produce or do has some impact on the planet, so to my mind what we are trying to do is reduce that impact.

So, can a formula be worked out that will provide a quantitative answer to sustainability? The answer is maybe, but it’s complicated.

As I set out in a previous post, sustainability is a key component of coexistence. But what does sustainable actually mean? If you look it up on Wikipedia you find reference to ‘the capacity for the biosphere and human civilization to coexist’ and a UN report defining sustainable development as “meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

By any objective measure we are not meeting this definition of sustainability. The Global Footprint Network measures the demand on and supply of nature and calculates our Ecological Footprint every year. In 2022 we exhausted our ‘supply’ of nature, meaning we used up what the Earth’s ecosystems can regenerate in a year, on 28 July.

My, and I suspect many others, favourite conversationist is Sir David Attenborough. In 2020 when he published A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and Vision for the Future I spent the weekend of its release reading the book and watching the accompanying documentary. Here is the review I wrote.

I previously had an ecommerce site called Buy Sustainably, which sold sustainable products for consumer use. I wound that site up when I moved back to New Zealand from the United Kingdom and when I came to start a new site I realised that sustainability, while a very important part of the environmentalism, didn’t cover the whole picture.

The word that seemed more all-encompassing was coexistence. The reasons why are too many for one blog post, but here’s a start. To coexist is the state of existing at the same time or in the same place, and more importantly, existing in harmony.