Veille 2.1

Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse

Every metric ton of carbon dioxide humans emit comes at a cost—not only in terms of the financial toll of the damage wrought by floods, heat waves and droughts but also the price in human lives. Substantially curtailing emissions today could prevent tens of millions of premature deaths over the course of the 21st century, according to a new study that calculated this “mortality cost of carbon.”

Even “sustainable” technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines face unbreachable physical limits and exact grave environmental costs

Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term “climate emergency” in its coverage of climate change. Journalism should reflect what science says: the climate emergency is here.

The war of disinformation against climate science is now essentially over. The scientific evidence has become impossible to dispute in light of the dramatic increases in extreme weather events, megafires in recent years. The deniers have not given up the battle, They have merely changed their tactics, Michael Mann contends in his book The New Climate War...

Scientists just completed one of the most comprehensive investigations of Earth’s climate history—and the findings aren’t favorable. They found that the planet could eventually warm to levels it hasn’t reached in at least 34 million years.

Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harboring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans like Ebola, HIV and dengue. But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019,

Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said