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Ontario has a new incentive encouraging homeowners to install heat pumps to reduce their energy use and lower planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions associated with home heating.
Jack Gibbons, chair of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, who recently installed a $14,000 cold climate air-source heat pump, said a heat pump can reduce heating bills by around $2,000 annually.
As vast parts of Florida scorched under blistering conditions over the weekend, TV meteorologist Steve MacLaughlin criticized Florida’s move to sign legislation last week scraping references to climate change from state law, urging people to go vote.
It’s complexity and uncertainty all the way down. “The fact that, with continued warming, AMOC will slow down is a very robust result. The uncertainty—and where science still needs to figure things out—is when,” Kilbourne. “But I kind of think that by the time we figure out when, it'll already have happened.”
good article outlining some of the issues with ramping up clean energy, which is dependent on dirty resource extraction.
"We need a rapid transition to renewables", "None of this is to say that we shouldn’t pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy. We absolutely must and urgently. But if we’re after a greener, more sustainable economy, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing energy demand at existing rates."
"How might this be accomplished? Given that the majority of our energy is used to power the extraction and production of material goods, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that high-income nations reduce their material throughput—legislating longer product life spans and rights to repair, banning planned obsolescence and throwaway fashion, shifting from private cars to public transportation, while scaling down socially unnecessary industries and wasteful luxury consumption like the arms trade, SUVs, and McMansions."
good article outlining some of the issues with ramping up clean energy, which is dependent on dirty resource extraction.
"We need a rapid transition to renewables", "None of this is to say that we shouldn’t pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy. We absolutely must and urgently. But if we’re after a greener, more sustainable economy, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing energy demand at existing rates."
raw data tables
We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of endless economic growth. How dare you!”
analysis suggests that the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth. This pathway would be propelled by strong, intrinsic, biogeophysical feedbacks difficult to influence by human actions, a pathway that could not be reversed, steered, or substantially slowed.
Where such a threshold might be is uncertain, but it could be only decades ahead at a temperature rise of ∼2.0 °C above preindustrial, and thus, it could be within the range of the Paris Accord temperature targets.
The impacts of a Hothouse Earth pathway on human societies would likely be massive, sometimes abrupt, and undoubtedly disruptive.
2 °C warming would translate to 1,119 (748–1,392) or 1,327 (1,123–1,516) cities committed under the baseline or triggered assumptions, respectively, and would affect land that is home to 19.0 (11.6–25.0) or 23.0 (16.8–28.1) million people today, respectively. Warming of 4 °C would increase central estimates to more than 1,745 cities and 30 million people under either assumption.