It’s not enough that global warming is causing wildfires to break out faster than ever, doing horrendous damage around the planet.

Now we also have “climate terrorists” deliberately burning rainforests in Brazil.
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Some 30.8 million hectares (119,000 square miles) of vegetation were burned in Brazil in 2024, a 79% increase from 2023, monitoring platform MapBiomas has reported.

Fires in the Amazon, a crucial carbon sink for the rest of the world as well as a global hotspot of biodiversity, accounted for 58% of the damage.

The 2024 figures represent the largest area burned since 2019.

Some 8.5 million hectares of forest burned in 2024, compared to 2.2 million in 2023, and in the Amazon, fires took out more forest than grassland for the first time, according to the data.

"This is a terrible indicator, because, once forests are burned, they become more susceptible to future fires," said Ane Alencar, of MapBiomas.

In Brazil, the main driver of the fires are ranchers and farmers who clear land for pasture and agriculture — a crime the government struggles to contain.

The figures are discouraging news for Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who in November will host the UN COP30 climate conference in the Amazonian city of Belem.

Lula admitted in September that the country was not prepared to face a wave of forest fires that his government attributed to "climate terrorism."
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FULL STORY -- france24.com/en/live-news/2025…

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency

Most of what you get from me each day is updates about climate change. But there’s a whole lot more going wrong simultaneously in the natural world.

Unfortunately, it's not only the climate crisis we have to worry about, but also ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, sea level rise, deforestation, and so on. (The more you learn, the worse it gets.)

It’s convenient, obviously, to use one well-known phrase — "climate change" — as shorthand, instead of listing all those separate problems every time even though each one of them is equally important and highly consequential.

So when you put it all together, what does it mean?

Looking at the situation realistically, we should expect global warming to reach 2.0° C above the baseline by 2040 if not sooner, and then as tipping points are surpassed, positive feedbacks multiply, and cascading effects pile one on top another, temperatures could continue to climb, with catastrophic consequences.

That means repeated crop failures, refugees, wars, and likely a complete breakdown of industrial civilization. It’s too late now for renewables, or “green” energy, or Net Zero to save us from all that.

We need to act in advance of what’s coming, working together communally, independent of national governments, to meet the most acute needs of those around us. Preparing for disaster, knowing it is all but inevitable, and doing our best to ameliorate the damage.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it is what it is.

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction

Any impartial observer can easily see that we are in a planetary climate emergency. The only people who continue to deny it are capitalists, fascists, and those who support them.
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The surge in ocean temperatures to record-breaking levels in 2023 and 2024 is a sign that the pace of climate change has accelerated, say researchers.

Global ocean temperatures hit record highs for 450 days straight in 2023 and early 2024. Although some of the extra heat can be explained by an El Niño weather pattern emerging in the Pacific Ocean, about 44% of the record warmth is due to the world’s oceans absorbing heat from the sun at an accelerating rate, according to Chris Merchant at the University of Reading, UK.

Merchant and his colleagues used satellite data to analyse ocean warming over the past four decades, concluding that the rate of warming has more than quadrupled since 1985.

The team says this rapid acceleration is down to a sharp change in Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI), a measure of how much heat is being trapped in the atmosphere. EEI has roughly doubled since 2010, causing the oceans to soak up much more heat now than they used to.

Based on their analysis, Merchant and his team predict that the rate of ocean warming could continue to increase rapidly in the coming decades. “If the EEI trend extrapolates into the future, then we can expect as much warming in the next 20 years as we have had in the last 40 years, which is quite a marked acceleration,” says Merchant.
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FULL STORY -- newscientist.com/article/24656…

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency