I am teaching three courses this semester at UF. Essentially all of the content of these courses is relevant to climate change. These are: BSC2862 Global Change Ecology, BSC3307C Climate Change Biology, and IDS2935 Communities and Climate Change. As a service for my students I am posting news updates as information accumulates from my reading of climate change events. I am reposting these updates here rather than developing new content for Environmental Century. I hope to return to creating my own content probably in Summer 2024.

Updates #3 – 3 September 2023

Drilled has a new website and link for podcasts.  Amy Westervelt is an award-winning environmental journalist. The Drilled podcast is a must if you wish to keep up with climate activism and analysis of the strategy and tactics of the fossil majors. You can fast forward through the ads, or you can subscribe and pay a fee to avoid the ads.
https://drilled.media/ and https://drilled.media/podcasts/drilled

Air pollution is the greatest global threat to public health. The majority of air pollution is generated from the burning of fossil fuels.
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-air-pollution-greatest-global-threat.html

Aquifers in the U.S. are drying up.  This review by the NYTs is an excellent analysis of where groundwater is being depleted. The Ogallala Aquifer is of critical importance to U.S. agriculture and parts of it are almost depleted. You will be able to get free access to this article through the UF Library. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groundwater-drying-climate-change.html

Global renewables deployments to hit record levels in 2023. Although the speed of deployment of wind and solar continues to increase, it is not near fast enough. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-global-renewables-deployments-to-hit-record-levels-in-2023

Climate activists target jets, yachts, and golf in string of global protests. https://apnews.com/article/climate-activists-luxury-private-jets-948fdfd4a377a633cedb359d05e3541c

The climate justice movement requires us to think deeply about how a new world might look and how we can create this as fast as possible. This interview with Selin Nurgün suggest ways for us to bring the whole body to the climate movement. https://gendread.substack.com/p/how-to-bring-your-whole-body-to-the

We really dodged a bullet that might have had catastrophic effects on living systems when we implemented the Montreal Protocol to ban CFC. Andrew Dessler is a leading climate researcher at UT Austin. He explains the disastrous effects of losing the ozone shield in the stratosphere. Recall that ground-level ozone is a pollutant, while the ozone in the stratosphere shields us from UV-B radiation. https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/ozone-depletion-the-bullet-that-missed

Global climate driven tipping elements in the Earth System. This review in Grist is a good starting point for understanding tipping elements.  https://grist.org/climate-tipping-points-amazon-greenland-boreal-forest/

The Inflation Reduction Act has spurred more than 100 cleantech manufacturing announcements and nearly $80B in private investment in the U.S. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufacturing/the-us-climate-law-is-fueling-a-factory-frenzy-heres-the-latest-tally

Commentary by senior scientist Sandra Steingraber: The Dying Sea Around Us. https://www.sehn.org/sehn/2023/8/24/the-repercussion-section-the-dying-sea-around-us