The Intercept provides a thorough analysis of how an oil boss was put in charge of a climate summit. Reporting by Ben Stockton and Amy Westervelt describes how leading figures in government such as John Kerry chose to support Sultan Al Jaber, who is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, known as Adnoc. This is the first time that any CEO, let alone one from the fossil fuel industry, has been a COP president. I don’t expect much from the COP28 except more “blah, blah, blah….” In contrast, The Conversation posted an opinion piece that argues that the criticism of this selection is unwarranted. To quote Al Gore on this, “How stupid do you think we are?” Here is a slide that I use in all four of my undergraduate courses:

As climatic events become more extreme and consequences are more obvious, climate denialists and misinformers have shifted into high gear. The hell-scape known as X is awash with bots and deniers. Perhaps these resources will help:

Resources for responding to climate change denial and misinformation
DeSmog databases on skeptics and dark money
Comprehensive list of denial arguments and climate myths – Skeptical Science experts
Cranky Uncle resources for responding to climate misinformation– Skeptical Science experts
Comprehensive list of logical fallacies
UQx: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial – free course with world renown experts – 31 October 2023 and archived version for later viewing

The benefits of transitioning to renewable energy are manifold and too many to enumerate. This review by Nick Eyre describes the massive efficiency gains from no longer converting energy to heat to produce electricity.

The International Energy Agency has produced the World Energy Outlook 2023. This report appears each October. This installment is astonishing because it projects that if nations’ Stated Policy Scenarios ( aka STEPS) are met, peak CO₂ emissions could happen as soon as this year. CarbonBrief reviews the results of this optimistic work. The rapid expansion of solar and wind is driving this transition.

Even with such progress, there will be significant temperature overshoot to well above 2.0˚C. We simply must push harder and move faster.

Project Drawdown has produced a Roadmap for using science to guide climate action.

The WEO 2023 describes many of the countervailing forces that continue to cause emissions to go up. Possibly the most urgent of these is the massive investment of the U.S. and Qatar in LNG exports. Qatar has the world’s largest known deposits of fossil gas and the U.S. continues to produce massive amounts of fracked gas. (bcm = billion cubic meters)

The Dublin Declaration of Scientists on the Societal Role of Livestock was created, launched, and promoted by the livestock industry. It is pure propaganda that promotes livestock meat as being an important food for human health.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has produced a review of the Canadian wildfires during 2023. Although many are still burning, these fires have emitted an estimated 1.5 billion tonnes of CO₂. This is “triple the annual climate pollution from burning fossil fuels in Canada. It is more than the combined emissions from 100 nations.” This review notes that both climate heating and inappropriate forest management have made this year’s fires so extreme. We can expect more of the same in coming years.

As part of the MIT Climate 101 series, the MIT Civil Engineering group and colleagues have explored the extent to which wind turbines kill birds. Wind turbines do kill birds, but only a fraction as many as are killed by cats, buildings, and fossil fuel operations that wind farms replace. Some taxa such as raptors are proportionally more impacted than other groups. Turbines also extract a toll on bats, which are 1/5 of all mammals and the only one that has powered flight.

The damage from hurricane Otis is rapidly becoming a humanitarian crisis in Acapulco. Otis intensified from a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours. The population of Acapulco was unprepared for such an extreme storm and the damage to infrastructure has been at least $7.5 billion. The videos in this Yale Climate Connections story are astonishing. Although Otis may turn out to be costliest weather disaster in Mexican history, with maximum winds of 165 mph Otis was less intense than other storms such as Dean in 2007, which had sustained winds of 175 mph.

I never cease to be amazed at the evil of the fossil majors and the stupidity of government policy makers. WaPo takes a critical look at CO₂ capture by fossil fuel companies. Most of this captured CO₂ is used to force more oil out of depleted oil wells through a process known as Enhanced Oil Recovery. The carbon capture process is subsidized by the U.S. government. I review this abomination in detail for my students. The Department of Energy Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management explains how this twisted application of carbon capture works.

John Oliver offers a masterful review of the corruption of carbon offsets and how major companies use the offsets market to make claims about being carbon neutral.

The British Medical Journal has declared that it is time to treat the climate and nature crisis as one indivisible global health emergency. Duh…. This is something that climate change ecologists have been saying for at least two decades.

Mainers will vote in November about whether to replace the state’s two investor-owned electric companies with a statewide nonprofit utility. The investor-owned utilities have outspent the supporters of this initiative nearly 30 to 1 to stop it. As someone who lived in Maine when I was president of Unity College, I strongly support this initiative. Maine is the ideal state to pioneer this policy because of its long tradition of participatory democracy. Of course, I think that all public utilities should be owned by the people they serve. This permits more direct access to reducing emissions without having to pander to the god of shareholder return.