GLOBAL WARMING IS BECOMING OVERWHELMING - BETWEEN CLIMATE CRISES, ECONOMIC CRISES AND ENERGY CRISES –

China has the largest coal production in the world due to abundant resource requirements for economic development. In recent years, the proportion of opencast coal mine production has increased significantly in China. Opencast coal mining can lead to a large number of environmental problems, including air pollution, water pollution, and solid waste occupation. The previous studies on the environmental impacts of opencast coal mine production were focused on a single production process. Moreover, mined land reclamation was an important process in opencast coal mine production; however, it was rarely considered in previous research. Therefore, this study attempted to perform a whole environmental impact analysis including land reclamation stage using life cycle assessment (LCA) method. The Yimin opencast coal mine was selected to conduct a case study. The production of 100tons of coal was used as the functional unit to evaluate the environmental risks in the stages of stripping, mining, transportation, processing, and reclamation. A total of six environmental impact categories, i.e., resource consumption, acidification, global warming, solid waste, eutrophication, and dust, were selected to conduct this assessment. The contribution rates of different categories of environmental impacts were significantly different, and different stages exhibited different consumption and emissions that gave rise to different environmental effects. Dust was the most serious environmental impact category, and its contribution rate was 36.81%, followed by global warming and acidification with contribution rates of 29.43% and 22.58%, respectively. Both dust and global warming were mainly affected in mining stage in Yimin opencast coal mine based on comprehensive analysis of environmental impact. Some economic and feasible measures should be used to mitigate the environmental impacts of opencast coal mine production, such as water spraying, clean transportation, increasing processing efficiency, and improving mining technologies. This study can be considered as a useful reference for a deeper understanding of key environmental impacts related to the whole coal production in opencast coal mine.

It is challenging to estimate how the regional climate will be shifted under future global warming. To reduce the potential risk of regional climate shift under future climates, examining the change in climate features over Asia is important, as approximately 60% of the world's population resides there. In this study, climate shifts are assessed over the Asian monsoon region under global mean temperature warming targets from 1.5°C to 5.0°C above preindustrial (PI) levels based on different shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) scenarios. Global warming impacts the individual climate variables, and consequently, it impacts the regional climate features across the Asian region. Temperature change patterns are more dominant contributors to the spatial extent and magnitude of climate shifts than precipitation change patterns. Changes in regional climates show different behaviors according to the degree of global warming rather than the type of SSP scenario. Climate shifts are intensified under a higher level of global warming that is above the PI levels. The largest climate shifts in this region are shown under global warming of 5.0°C based on the SSP5‐8.5 scenario, especially in current polar climate zones. Future change patterns in individual climate zone can differ. Regions with tropical climates and arid climates are likely to be expanded, whereas some regions with warm temperate climates, cold climates, and polar climates are likely to shrink under global warming conditions. Therefore, this study supports the necessity of mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and establishing an adaptation plan for future global warming conditions.

Moving toward Net-Zero Emissions Requires New Alliances for Carbon Dioxide Removal

Report of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death: bringing death back into life

Global warming in the minds of Mexican higher education students: an exploratory study

The speed of environmental changes, the increase in the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere and its abnormal warming, the greenhouse effect, and the increase in desertified areas are linked to climate change. Trend tables indicate that global changes are worsened by changes in temperature and rainfall resulting from climate change, with a strong anthropogenetic influence. Reports from the United Nations/UN, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) indicate that the world has already suffered a 1.0 °C global warming above the pre-industrial levels, with a variation between 0.8 and 1.2 °C. Drylands and the poorest countries would be the most affected by these transformations, which involve aggravation of ecological, social, and economic problems. The desertification would spread due to this situation. Among the effects of global climate change, desertification is one of the most complex and harmful. It involves several factors and causes affecting natural, rural, and urban areas, posing major challenges for governments, civil society, the private sector, and future generations. The discussion on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially Goal 13 (urgent measures to combat climate change and its impacts), tries to mitigate these issues. However, the mechanisms linked to climate change are still elements of skepticism for scientific denialists.

Time to pay the piper: Fossil fuel companies’ reparations for climate damages

Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we combine counterfactual historical temperature trajectories from a suite of global climate models with extensively replicated empirical evidence of the relationship between historical temperature fluctuations and economic growth. Together, these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output. We find very high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased economic inequality between countries. For example, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17-31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ∼90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease. The primary driver is the parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth, with warming increasing growth in cool countries and decreasing growth in warm countries. Although there is uncertainty in whether historical warming has benefited some temperate, rich countries, for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred. Thus, our results show that, in addition to not sharing equally in the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many poor countries have been significantly harmed by the warming arising from wealthy countries' energy consumption.

The chapter investigates how the economic factors influence the path of development of regional organizations and their objectives. In particular, it focuses on two variables. First, the chapter investigates the differences in the objectives of regional organizations depending on the level of economic development of their members and the distinction that exists between poor and rich countries from this point of view. Second, the chapter discusses how short-term economic dynamics (especially economic crises) can shape the development of the regional organization. The second crucial factor we identify is the economic development of member countries. The analysis, in particular, highlights how regional organizations type can be – both intentionally and unintentionally – transformed by economic crises.

Impacts and risks of “realistic” global warming projections for the 21st century

The IPCC AR6 assessment of the impacts and risks associated with projected climate changes for the 21st century is both alarming and ambiguous. According to computer projections, global surface may warm from 1.3 to 8.0 °C by 2100, depending on the global climate model (GCM) and the shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) scenario used for the simulations. Actual climate-change hazards are estimated to be high and very high if the global surface temperature rises, respectively, more than 2.0 °C and 3.0 °C above pre-industrial levels. Recent studies, however, showed that a substantial number of CMIP6 GCMs run “too hot” because they appear to be too sensitive to radiative forcing, and that the high/extreme emission scenarios SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 must be rejected because judged to be "unlikely" and "highly unlikely", respectively. Yet, the IPCC AR6 mostly focused on such alarmistic scenarios for risk assessments. This paper examines the impacts and risks of “realistic” climate change projections for the 21st century generated by assessing the theoretical models and integrating them with the existing empirical knowledge on global warming and the various natural cycles of climate change that have been recorded by a variety of scientists and historians. This is achieved by combining the "realistic" SSP2-4.5 scenario and empirically optimized climate modeling. The GCM macro-ensemble that best hindcast the global surface warming observed from 1980–1990 to 2012–2022 is found to be made up of models that are characterized by a low equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) (1.5<ECS<3.0 °C), in contrast to the IPCC AR6 likely and very likely ECS ranges of 2.5-4.0 °C and 2.0-5.0 °C, respectively. This GCM macro-ensemble projects a global surface temperature warming of 1.68-3.09 °C by 2080–2100 instead of 1.98-3.82 °C obtained with the 2.5-4.0 °C ECS GCMs. However, if the global surface temperature records are affected by significant non-climatic warm biases — as suggested by satellite-based lower troposphere temperature records and current studies on urban heat island effects — the same climate simulations should be scaled down by about 30%, resulting in a warming of about 1.18-2.16 °C by 2080–2100. Furthermore, similar moderate warming estimates (1.15-2.52 °C) are also projected by alternative empirically derived models that aim to recreate the decadal-to-millennial natural climatic oscillations, which the GCMs do not reproduce. The obtained climate projections show that the expected global surface warming for the 21st century will likely be mild, that is, no more than 2.5-3.0 °C and, on average, likely below the 2.0 °C threshold. This should allow for the mitigation and management of the most dangerous climate-change-related hazards through appropriate low-cost adaptation policies. In conclusion, enforcing expensive decarbonization and net-zero emission scenarios, such as SSP1-2.6, is not required because the Paris Agreement temperature target of keeping global warming below 2 °C throughout the 21st century should be compatible also with moderate and pragmatic shared socioeconomic pathways such as the SSP2-4.5. Reference: Scafetta, N.: 2024. Impacts and risks of “realistic” global warming projections for the 21st century. Geoscience Frontiers 15(2), 101774. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2023.101774

A Review of “Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection,” by Henry Shue Edwardo L. Rhodes (bio) Henry Shue’s Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection offers an extremely useful and readable guide to the key challenges, workable objectives, and possible responses to a major—if not the major—global problem faced today. For anyone interested or working in the area of international carbon emission control and remediation, this book places the subject in a combined philosophical and economic development framework while imposing an overarching principle of fairness. Henry Shue presents an interesting and informative collection of essays and articles on climate change and the need for a method of global response to deal with the prickly issues of global warming. (In some of the later chapters or essays, “global warming” is replaced with the term “climate change.”) Shue covers a wide array of issues including classification and identification of the major players in the global climate justice drama, the vastly different perspectives of the major players, the essential elements of any viable global warming solution, and his repeated theme: the four fundamental questions that any plan of climate justice must address. The seventeen chapters of the book represent seventeen essays or articles written by Henry Shue between 1992 and 2013. The earliest ones lay the foundation for those that follow. Given the twenty-year span of the readings, the reader is afforded a rare opportunity to actually observe and track the evolution of how Henry Shue understands climate justice. As one small example, in the earliest chapters, Shue argues for a minimum subsistence level of emission for a poor country necessary for it to survive.1 He later modifies that position, arguing for a minimum subsistence level of energy availability or access.2 This more advanced position indicates that the key issue for [End Page 697] poor countries is not what their level of emission from carbon fuel consumption is, but rather whether it has access to adequate levels of energy necessary for production and development.3 The relatively long introduction is very important to read. It provides the reader with the information necessary to connect the chapters of the book, which were originally written as freestanding, independent articles. In fact, in contrast to most policy books, the reader can jump around the book, focusing on just the topic of a particular chapter without needing a great deal of preparation from previous chapters or leaving some issues uncovered for later chapters. At the same time, because the chapters were independent essays, with minimum modification when combined into book form, one encounters considerable repetition of the same arguments and the same outline of positions throughout the book. Beginning in the introduction and really developed in the first several essays (chapters) of the book, Henry Shue paints a very rich and detailed picture of the central issues of “climate justice.”4 To begin, the central question for him is “[h]ow can we limit the dangers resulting from climate change without driving additional hundreds of millions of people into poverty?”5 Shue posits that the major dividing lines are between rich countries that have exploited carbon resources in the past to get to their current level of economic development and poor countries that have not realized such economic development.6 Furthermore, in the current context of climate change, these poor countries face the very real problem of being forced to make developmental sacrifices to correct or limit global climate wrongs or climate distortions, which they had no part in creating. Introduced formally in chapter two and repeated in each of the subsequent early chapters comes what are called the four questions of justice7: 1. What is a fair allocation of the costs of preventing global warming that is still avoidable? 2. What is a fair allocation of the cost of coping with the social consequences of global warming that will not in fact be avoided? [End Page 698] 3. What background allocation of wealth would allow international bargaining (about topics like issues one and two) to be a fair process? 4. What is a fair allocation of emission of greenhouse gases (over the long term and during the transition to the long term...

A “lifeline out of the <scp>COVID</scp>‐19 crisis”? An ecofeminist critique of the European Green Deal

Defenders of globalization often argue that, whatever distress it may cause for the rich-world workers, it has been good for poor or less affluent countries. The inequality as measured by the distribution of income between the rich and poor countries, has globally narrowed. But within each country, the story is less pleasing. We may use three different arguments to support this conclusion: 1) differentiation among workers. A-skilled workers in rich countries; B-low skilled workers in rich countries; C-high-skilled workers in poor countries; D-low-skilled workers in poor countries. The new slogan originating in the Silicon Valley works with the ?gig economy? and with the appearance of the new workers category - contract workers. 2) growth of crony capitalism (measured by the crony capitalism index). 3) social and economic mobility. The authors came to the conclusion that inequality of workers in the Central European post-communist countries will never reach the income level corresponding to their counterparts of groups A and B in the developed economies of the EU and the inequality in the Czech Republic contrary to the general accepted opinion about egalitarian society has been growing.

Using Voting Advice Application (VAA) data from the EU Profiler/euandi Trend File, we studied how parties’ positions towards European integration relate to their positions on other important issues, and how this varies across EP elections, and between European regions. We hypothesized that the association between parties’ EU-integration positions and their positions on other issues was affected by the three major crises that hit the European Union (EU) between 2009 and 2019: the economic, migration, and climate crises. Additionally, we hypothesized that the economic and migration crises asymmetrically affected the association between cultural and economic issues on the one hand and the EU dimension on the other across the EU’s three macro regions (NWE, SE, and CEE). Our results show that neither the economic crisis nor the migration crisis or the climate crisis had an EU-wide impact on how European integration relates to other issue dimensions. As we hypothesized, economic issues were particularly strongly linked to EU-integration positions in SE in 2014, but our results additionally indicated that the longstanding interpretation of EU integration as a mainly economic issue in SE diminished after the start of the migration crisis. Finally, EU integration became related to immigration issues in CEE while this is not the case in the other regions. The main takeaway is that EU integration is interpreted differently by parties across the EU, which is important to recognize for parties that seek to work together in transnational party groups, and for scholars that aim to understand EU policy making.