environment

The weekly round-up on the climate crisis and data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. “Beyond imagination”, “Farcical”, “Lies”, “When you put Count Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank…”.The statements made public by COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber have sparked a wave of global disapproval Guardian and from Center for Climate Reporting last Sunday. Two weeks ago during an online meeting, moderated by Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, now an important supporter of the ecological transition, Al Jaber - who, in addition to the United Nations Climate Conference underway in Dubai, is also head of Adnoc, the national oil company of the United Arab Emirates, and Masdar, the state renewable energy company – he stated [min.4] that there is no scientific evidence to demonstrate that phasing out fossil fuels is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and that phasing out fossil fuels would not allow for a sustainable development unless...

COP, the United Nations Climate Conference, is probably the only place where, not at all delighted – given that everything could have been different and everything could have been done more courageously and better, but above all earlier – I will stand up and applaud an oilman, almost in tears I will embrace Ferdinand, he is truly in tears while hiding his face in his hands, and speaking in the plural I will ask the friends I will say goodbye to and see each other again in a year according to this timetable of our own:what do you think?What do we think?What do we do now? If there is one thing that this COP has demonstrated, the Spanish Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, told me, it is the power of consensus.What's more, he did it when there was no one left to believe it.Not even we, the press, the so-called guardians of democracy.Because on the penultimate day, a reporter asked whether the rules should be changed for the sake of negotiations.At the moment they re...

The weekly round-up on the climate crisis and data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The climate crisis is a fact, as is yours anthropic origin:The relationship of the 2021 IPCC showed that the increase in temperature compared to the pre-industrial age, thanks to empirical research and numerical simulations, depends mostly on human activity. Yet still today, in one mixture of ignorance and bad faith, there is no shortage of inroads in public opinion and politics to discredit the efforts of scientists, activists and a part of the ruling class who are pushing for an ecological transition, both from a legislative point of view and from the point of view of electoral consensus.One of the arguments used in Italy and abroad by the conjunction of climate deniers and inactivists is the one according to which the climate transition it would be ridden from the left to impose dirigiste and statist policies, motivated more by hatred for the free market than by science. The sca...

The weekly round-up on the climate crisis and data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. In recent days the Sultan, Al Jaber, head of the next United Nations Climate Conference, COP28, which will be held from 30 November to 12 December in Dubai, organized two days of pre-COP talks in Abu Dhabi.Many have defined them crucial.Why? Because these conversations came in a very particular context:after a summer characterized by prolonged heat waves, droughts, storms, floods;during the war between Israel and Hamas;following the publication of a series of studies and analyzes on the state of the melting of glaciers, on the trend of CO2 emissions, on deforestation, on global warming which are in some ways disheartening. A recent study on Nature found that extreme heat waves in Western Europe increased faster than the 170 climate simulations analyzed by the research expected.Extreme weather events follow one another non-stop, we know what we have to do, yet there is still a strong re...

If it is true that Nature does not need man, man certainly needs Nature.Maintaining biodiversity is crucial to our well-being and survival.The free ecosystem services that the environment guarantees us (such as the pollination of plants, the stability of the soil, the refraction of solar radiation by ice, just to name a few) cannot be replaced by artificial plants. Today we are heading towards the sixth mass extinction and man is the main cause:it is the meteorite that is destroying the diversity and abundance of living species and the ecosystems they inhabit.Charles Darwin, noble father of the theory of evolution, was among the first thinkers to accept the reality of extinctions as a fundamental feature of the history of life on Earth, a non-trivial consideration in an era in which creationist and essentialist conceptions of life dominated ( according to which living beings are immutable). Mass extinctions by convention are those in which 75% or more of the planet's living spec...