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      This aerial view shows Amazon forest degradation in the Menkragnoti Indigenous Territory in Altamira, Pará state, Brazil, on August 28, 2019.

      Human Activity Has Degraded Amazon Rainforest Much More Than Previously Thought: Study

      With Lula in power "there is hope now, but our paper shows it is not enough to resolve deforestation," said one co-author. "There is much more work to be done."

      Kenny Stancil
      Jan 27, 2023

      Peer-reviewed research out Friday shows that human activity has degraded much more of the Amazon rainforest than previously believed, with over a third of the remaining forest area afflicted and at risk of being irreversibly damaged.

      Deforestation in the Amazon has been well-documented, but the new paper published in Science focuses on anthropogenic disturbances that harm what is left of the biodiverse ecosystem and threaten its future.

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      Amazon Rainforest
      Workers clear out debris off San Carlos Boulevard in Fort Myers Beach, Florida

      2022 Will Be Remembered for Its Brutal Climate Change Impacts

      At the same time, 2022 was a breakthrough year of climate action juxtaposed on the increasingly stark evidence that fossil fuels and their producers are the primary cause of the planet's growing peril.

      Jonathan Overpeck
      Jan 02, 2023

      The year 2022 was a tough year around the world in terms of climate disaster, something that the just exploded "bomb cyclone" seemed to punctuate with an exclamation point as the storm crippled much of the nation in a sub-zero deep freeze and led to the death of at least 40 people in western New York. Fortunately, we were spared the theatrics of misleading statements and snowballs in the halls of Congress as scientists explained how rapid warming of the Arctic may have led to the major disruption of the "polar vortex" allowing the dramatic escape of winter Arctic air to wreak havoc far to the south.

      A record-deadly blizzard stands as a bone-chilling paradox in the face of the much more deadly poster child of climate change—record-breaking heat waves supercharged by climate change. And 2022 saw lots of these.

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      Opinion
      climate
      Firefighter during Caldor fire in California

      No More Dire Warnings: It's Time to Fight to Win

      Yes, we have courage. Yes, we are millions of people who will not accept to stand by and watch while the future is thrown down a cliff.

      João Camargo
      Dec 31, 2022

      We need to put it clearly: 2022 was an unyielding disaster. The effects of what happened this year will echo for decades to centuries, but far from there being any lessons learned from it, what the managers of global capitalism are doing is trying to make next year even worse.

      The most worrying statistic of the year, the one that assures us that what happened in 2022 is not fleeting, is the fact that the record for global-scale greenhouse gas emissions has been broken again. With a 1% increase over 2021, the decrease in emissions that occurred during the pandemic has already been surpassed. The year's increase was led by the burning of more fossil fuels, particularly in the United States and India.

      The volume of extreme events this year, both meteorological and social, economic, and political, means that most of them have simply been wiped from our collective mind and consciousness, because we effectively have no capacity to process what is happening to us, and the institutions that run global capitalism even less so. The cost of living crisis, intrinsically linked with the gas on which so much of the European economy depends, looks like the crisis that will precipitate a new global recession. That is the decision of governments and central banks. These institutions have decided that prices and inflation will be reduced by rising interest rates, that is, by widespread defaults on loans, evictions, bankruptcies, unemployment and austerity.

      The global average temperature for the year was 1.15°C above the pre-industrial era, which will make this year the 5th or 6th warmest year ever recorded. This comes in the third year in a row that we have been under the "La Niña" phenomenon, which generally lowers the temperature. Next year there will be no La Niña, so an even greater increase in temperature is expected.

      This was a year of great losses in glaciers around the world. All melting records in the European Alps were broken, with a decrease of between 3 and 4 meters in ice thickness. In the Swiss Alps, the ice volume was reduced by 6.2%. In Zermatt, a Swiss town in the shadow of the Matterhorn, the temperature reached 33ºC at 1620 m altitude. For the first time, there was widespread ice loss on the summits in July, ensuring no accumulation of new ice. The water cycle in the Himalayas is also breaking down, with permafrost in the Asian range melting ever faster, leading to glacier collapse, landslides and downstream flooding.

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      Opinion
      Climate Emergency
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