Climate Change ⛈

Tehran is running out of water.

Rationing has begun in Iran’s capital city, with some of the approximately 10 million residents experiencing “nightly pressure cuts” between midnight and 5 a.m. The entire country is in an unprecedented drought, facing its driest — and hottest — autumn in nearly 60 years. Tehran has received no rain at all since the start of September, and no rainfall is expected for the foreseeable future.

The city depends on five major reservoirs for its water supply. One has dried up completely, with another below 8 percent capacity. The managing director of the Tehran Regional Water Authority told state media last week that the Karaj Dam has only two weeks of drinking water left. The drought extends beyond the city, too. The water reserves of Mashhad, the second largest city in the country, have dropped below 3 percent capacity, putting 4 million people at imminent risk.

But if nothing changes, Tehran may soon face Day Zero — or when a municipality can no longer supply drinking water to its residents and taps run dry. In October, President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed that Tehran could no longer serve as the country’s capital, citing the water crisis as a major factor.

”If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to [formally] ration water,” Pezeshkian told Iranian state media on Thursday. “And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran.”

Most people probably think that the rainforest of central and west Africa, the second largest in the world, has been around for millions of years. However recent research suggests that it is mostly just 2,000 or so years old. The forest reached roughly its modern state following five centuries of regeneration after it was massively fragmented when the dry season suddenly became longer some 2,500 years ago.

(Older article, but still interesting, and increasingly relevant.)

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Is it 14%, 18%, 24%, 34%, 51%, 53%, 66%, 87%, or 118%? There are a whole lot of percentage figures associated with the climate impact of animal agriculture. In this article, we will examine why there are such wide discrepancies and where the truth actually lies.

At Climate Healers, we’ve been saying 87% and now 118%, while most others seem to be stuck on 14% at the other end. So, what is the truth behind these numbers?

Two Questions

The two main questions around which scientists have been compiling animal agriculture’s climate impact estimates are:

A) How much of the annual climate impact is caused by animal agriculture?

B) How much of the cumulative climate impact is caused by animal agriculture?

While Question A is concerned with the rate of change in warming, Question B is concerned with the totality of warming since the pre-industrial era.

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Where the Truth Lies

In reality, the estimates for both questions should take into account all 12 emissions components, not just a subset of them.

If we use ERF as the metric of choice, we can augment the 66% estimate with a COC component to answer Question B.

In order to answer Question A, we need to compute the derivative of the answer to Question B. This analysis is being conducted at the moment and we will report on our findings shortly.

...and the follow-up: Where the Truth Lies

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According to MPs who have seen a “terrifying” external threat assessment kept secret by the Albanese government for nearly three years, Australians have been given only half of the “wake-up call” needed on the threat of climate change.

The warning comes as the government announced a 2035 emissions reduction target range of 62 to 70 per cent. Defying climate and science groups, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese regards the range as the “sweet spot” for a target to be both ambitious and achievable.

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Top regulatory officials met with agricultural and chemical industry representatives dozens of times in the first few months after President Donald Trump took office in January, government records show — meetings that were followed by a series of regulatory rollbacks and a downplaying of pesticide concerns by the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) Commission.

From February to mid-May, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) leaders accepted meetings with representatives from at least 50 industry associations and companies, including agricultural and chemical giants such as Bayer, Corteva, BASF, Dow and the agrichemical lobbying group CropLife America, as well as the American Soybean Association, the National Cotton Council and others.

The meetings also included energy giants like ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, and companies working in plastics or chemical production such as Occidental Chemical Corporation. Some scheduled meetings involved representatives from multiple companies and their legal counsel or lobbyists.

Notably, the industry meetings involved former industry insiders who now are in top positions at the EPA: Nancy Beck, formerly an executive at the American Chemistry Council who is now the EPA’s principal deputy assistant administrator in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, and Lynn Ann Dekleva, who previously worked at DuPont and as a lobbyist at the American Chemistry Council and is now the deputy assistant administrator of the same EPA office.

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Utah laws cap wildfire damages and let utilities pass the cost onto customers. Utility lobbyists are pushing the model in other states.

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“The risk is there,” Jenks said. “Climate change has made our forests so much drier than they used to be, and we don’t have the same June rain. Our forests weren’t designed for this.”

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The water cycle has become increasingly erratic and extreme, swinging between deluge and drought, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It highlights the cascading impacts of too much or too little water on economies and society.

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Iranians blame climate change, sanctions, mistakes and neglect, and Iran’s vice-president wants to tackle them all

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The UN aviation organisation has been captured by the industry, a report has concluded, leading to the urgent action required to tackle the sector’s high carbon emissions being blocked.

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Fossil fuels made the nation prosperous but as reserves dwindle, do they drill deeper, even as the Caribbean feels the heat of the climate crisis, or shift to a greener economy?

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27733096

• New research analyzing more than 3,000 tropical forest sites reveals that areas with fewer seed-dispersing animals store up to four times less carbon than forests with healthy wildlife populations.
• The study found that 81% of tropical trees rely on animals to disperse their seeds, establishing an ancient partnership now threatened by human activities such as deforestation, road construction, and hunting.
• Researchers mapped global “seed dispersal disruption” and found it explains a 57% reduction in carbon storage potential across proposed forest restoration areas.
• The findings demonstrate that protecting wildlife and addressing climate change are interconnected challenges, with conservation strategies like wildlife corridors and species reintroduction offering approaches that serve both biodiversity and climate stability.

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Every year in the Gulf of Panama, between December and April, trade winds from the north push warm surface water away from the coast, allowing cool, nutrient-rich water from the depths to rise, in a process called upwelling. This is critical for the region’s marine life and fisheries. However, for the first time in at least 40 years, this upwelling failed in 2025, likely due to altered trade winds, a recent study reports.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27726079

Growing tall trees to provide shade for cocoa plantations in west Africa could sequester millions of tonnes of carbon, according to a new study.

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The grim death toll from heat waves across European cities this past summer would be captured in shocking headlines if they happened all at once, in a bombing or plane crash—835 in Rome, 630 in Athens, 409 in Paris.

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“Experts do not believe that we can adapt health systems adequately to cope with the temperatures that we are currently facing. That’s why reducing fossil fuel use is one of the most important public health interventions of our time.”

Reducing fossil fuel use too rapidly would be suicidal; the rapid increase in temperature would make adaptation more difficult.

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The main driver of climate change is the burning of fossil fuels like gasoline, oil and coal.

Misinformation. No matter how many times journalists repeat this line, the facts do not change. The only way to reach this conclusion is using severely flawed emissions accounting.

Coal, oil and gas have been killing people for centuries. We’re still paying for it.

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Here we go again. An obscure, methodologically poor, paper published with little to no review makes a convenient point and gets elevated into supposedly ‘blockbusting’ science by the merchants of bullshit, sorry, doubt. Actual scientists drop everything to respond, but not before the (convenient) nonsense has spread widely. Rebuttals are written and submitted, but by the time they are published everyone has moved on.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/28324402

Earth’s water cycle is becoming harder to predict as the climate changes, UN scientists have warned.

Last year was the sixth in a row to show an erratic cycle and the third where all glacier regions reported ice loss, according to the World Meteorological Organisation’s (WMO) state of global water resources report for 2024, released on Thursday.

They found that around 60% of rivers globally showed either too much or too little water compared to the average flow per year.

While the world has natural cycles of climate variability from year to year, long-term trends outlined in the report indicate the water cycle, at a global scale, is accelerating.

Stefan Uhlenbrook, WMO director of hydrology in the water and cryosphere division, said scientists feel it is “increasingly difficult to predict”.

“It’s more erratic – so either too much or too low on average flow per year,” he said.

As global warming drives higher global temperatures, the atmosphere can hold more water, leading either to longer dry periods or more intense rainfall.

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