human actions, global climate change, global human solutions

POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
VIEWED: 60750
PAGE 104 of 111

The Drying Planet

By Abrahm Lustgarten, Graphics by Lucas Waldron, Illustrations by Olivier Kugler for ProPublica

July 25, 2025, 2 p.m. EDT

https://www.propublica.org/article/water-aquifers-groundwater-rising-o
cean-levels

The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

Water From Land Has Become a Leading Driver of Sea Level Rise

Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.

The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. The technique was groundbreaking two decades ago when the study’s co-author, Jay Famiglietti, who was then a professor at the University of California, at Irvine, used it to pinpoint where aquifers were in decline. Since then, he and others have published dozens of papers using GRACE data, but the question has always lingered: What does the groundwater loss mean in the context of all of the water available on the continents? So Famiglietti, now a professor at Arizona State University, set out to inventory all the land-based water contained in glaciers, rivers and aquifers and see what was changing. The answer: everything, and quickly.

Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year. “It’s like this sort of creeping disaster that has taken over the continents in ways that no one was really anticipating,” Famiglietti said. (Six other researchers also contributed to the study.) The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions spreading across the earth’s mid-latitudes. One of those regions covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

The Drying of the Earth Accelerated in Recent Years

The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.

In the American Southwest and California, groundwater loss is a familiar story, but over the past two decades that hot spot has also spread dramatically. It now extends through Texas and up through the southern High Plains, where the Ogallala aquifer is depended on for agriculture, and it spreads south, stretching throughout Mexico and into Central America. These regions are connected not because they rely on the same water sources — in most cases they don’t — but because their populations will face the same perils of water stress: the most likely, a food crisis that could ultimately displace millions of people.

“This has to serve as a wake-up call,” said Aaron Salzberg, a former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the former director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved with the study.

Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst. For example, during droughts when California has enforced restrictions on delivery of surface water to its farmers — which the state regulates — the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more.

For the most part, such withdrawals have remained invisibl

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

We're wasting precious freshwater just like we waste everything else.

But I take exception to the title. It's not the PLANET that's drying, just the parts thst stick up above the ocean,

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=66930

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

Quote:

---

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
We're wasting precious freshwater just like we waste everything else.

But I take exception to the title. It's not the PLANET that's drying, just the parts thst stick up above the ocean,

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

---

Trumptards are NOT wasting water. They don't drill water wells, buy pumps and electricity just to waste money. They get paid for the water. The problem is that pumping is destroying the world but the destruction is not in the calculations of how much money will be made for every million gallons pumped.

The same as with water, there is money in pumping oil and gas. And the destruction caused by the pumping does NOT reduce the amount of money made per barrel of oil and per billions of cubic meters of LNG. Which brings me to new rules that guarantee pumping won't stop, no matter how much of the world is destroyed because the new rules claim that nothing is being destroyed:

The EPA gives up on climate change

The agency plans to reverse its own legal justification for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

By Cameron Peters | Jul 29, 2025, 6:00 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/421548/epa-lee-zeldin-
endangerment-finding-climate-change-emissions

President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency said today that it plans to reverse its own legal justification for regulating emissions, potentially a major blow to efforts to combat climate change.

Why does the EPA want to do this? EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has described the change, which follows a January executive order by Trump to reexamine the policy, as “the largest deregulatory action in the history of America”; more generally, it’s consistent with the Trump administration’s focus on promoting fossil fuels.

What is the agency actually proposing? In 2009, the EPA reached what is known as the “endangerment finding” — a determination that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health because of their role in climate change, on which the agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions rests. Now, the EPA proposes rolling back that finding.

What will the impact be? If the EPA proposal takes effect, it would spell the end of nearly all US climate regulations, including those governing emissions by vehicles, factories, power plants, and more. That change would come even as the US is beginning to face more severe effects of climate change and as the world struggles to fend off warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-threshold-15-degrees-sea-lev
el-2727e81c4d7f57062ab9b1637a0b4ddf

Is this a done deal? No. The EPA announced its proposal on Tuesday, but before it can reverse the finding, the plan will go through a review process, including a public comment period. It’s also all but certain to be challenged in court by environmental groups.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

The Trumptards have an explanation for climate change, but it is not fossil fuel burning:

Republicans across the country are pushing bills to stop government 'weather modification'

“If it doesn't exist,” said Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., a co-sponsor of federal legislation targeting geoengineering, “then you don't have anything to worry about.”

By Allan Smith and Matt Dixon | July 29, 2025

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/republicans-push-bills-
stop-government-weather-modification-chemtrails-rcna220045

For years, outlandish theories about the U.S. government using airplanes to spray harmful chemicals over U.S. homes or powerful elites controlling the weather were relegated to the fringes of society.

Not anymore.

As the internet has provided rocket fuel for such claims, Republican lawmakers across the country are introducing, passing and enacting laws to ban “weather modification” and environmental geoengineering and allude to the use of “chemtrails,” a longtime theory that planes are spreading chemical agents on an unsuspecting public. As more people are exposed to dangerous flooding, the GOP lawmakers have pointed to the fringe theories as potential explanations for extreme weather, pushing them further into the political mainstream. (Scientists have found evidence tying the increasing frequency of extreme weather to climate change.)

Republican lawmakers in nearly 20 state legislatures have proposed such legislation, with governors in Tennessee and Florida having signed bills into law. On the federal level, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., recently introduced the “Clear Skies Act,” which would outlaw forms of geoengineering and hit alleged weather modifiers with penalties of up to $100,000 for each violation and potential prison sentences of up to five years.

“It’s not a conspiracy theory,” Pennsylvania state Sen. Camera Bartolotta, a Republican who co-sponsored legislation in her state, said in an interview. “All you have to do is look up.”

At its core, the legislative push seeks to outlaw human-made alterations to the climate — notable, given how the party has fought to stop efforts to combat climate change tied to fossil fuel consumption and as the Trump administration has cut funding for climate change research and removed the website that hosted the government’s climate assessments.

“One political party in this country seems especially concerned about the idea of theoretical changes in the weather,” Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist for The Washington Post and other outlets, told NBC News. “Whereas that same political party will largely turn a blind eye to actual weather modification that is happening in slow motion, i.e., human-induced climate change.”

Greene, who is leading the charge to pass federal legislation to ban weather modification, said she saw “kind of a funny hypocrisy” among climate change activists who are “yelling, ‘We’ve got to stop climate change.’”

“But yet they’re like, ‘No, don’t stop manmade climate change,’” she continued. “So I find that to be a laughable hypocrisy. And so it just doesn’t add up to me.”

Greene has for years been subject to heavy criticism over her 2018 claim that lasers from space may have triggered a 2018 wildfire in California. She now feels a sense of vindication as Republicans across the country feel compelled to produce legislation similar to hers.

“This is something I’ve talked about for quite some time,” Greene said in an interview. “Got attacked for talking about it, for saying that, yes, they’re controlling the weather. I said they’re controlling the weather, and people tore me up all over social media.”

Asked who "they" referred to, Greene's office pointed to her post on X last year noting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration collects the names of companies that engage in weather modification. She pointed to decades-old government experiments involving cloud seeding, including Operation Popeye, a military effort during the V

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

Fossil Fool
How Europe took Trump for a ride

By Paul Krugman | Jul 30, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/fossil-fool

Like many U.S. institutions, the European Union has abysmally failed the Trump test. The EU is an economic superpower and could have retaliated effectively against Trump’s illegal tariffs — illegal under both U.S. and international law. Instead, Europe did nothing and even made some apparent concessions.

But notice my wording: apparent concessions. The optics of the Trump-EU deal were humiliating, and optics matter. If you examine the substance, however, it starts to look as if Europe played Trump for a fool. Specifically, a fossil fool.

The EU made two sort-of pledges to Trump. First, that it would invest $600 billion in the United States. Second, that it would buy $750 billion worth of U.S. energy, mainly oil and gas, over the next three years. The first promise was empty, while the second was nonsense.

About those investments: European governments aren’t like China, which can tell companies where to put their money. And the European Commission, which made the trade deal, isn’t even a government — it can negotiate tariffs but otherwise has little power. On Sunday Politico spoke with Commission officials, who effectively confirmed that the investment pledge was meaningless:

Speaking Monday, two senior European Commission officials clarified that money would come exclusively from private European companies, with public investment contributing nothing.

“It is not something that the EU as a public authority can guarantee. It is something which is based on the intentions of the private companies,” said one of the senior Commission officials. The Commission has not said it will introduce any incentives to ensure the private sector meets that $600 billion target, nor given a precise timeframe for the investment.

So what the EU actually promised on investment was nothing, Nichts, rien.

The pledge to increase U.S. energy exports was a lot more specific and gave a timeframe. But it’s not going to happen. In fact, it’s going to not happen on three levels.

First, the European Commission, which can’t tell the private sector where to invest, is equally unable to tell the private sector where to buy oil and gas. How would that even work?

Second, the promised level of EU imports is probably physically impossible. Shipping liquefied natural gas (LNG), in particular, requires specialized infrastructure at both ends. On the US side, LNG terminals are already operating at capacity, while Europe’s LNG facilities are “stretched to their limits.” The EU just promised to vastly increase energy imports from America over the next three years, but it’s doubtful whether Europe could build any of the infrastructure needed before the end of that period, even with a crash investment program.

And why would anyone undertake such an investment program in a continent that is rapidly shifting toward renewable energy? As one energy analyst told the Financial Times,

European gas demand is soft and energy prices are falling. In any case, it is private companies not states that contract for energy imports. Like it or not, in Europe the windmills are winning.

Emphasis added because as everyone knows, Trump has a blind, irrational hatred for wind power.

Finally, even if Europe somehow managed to overcome the legal and physical obstacles to buying a lot more fossil fuels from America, both oil and LNG are fungible commodities traded on global markets. This means that any increase in purchases from Europe would reroute U.S. exports rather than increasing them: We’d sell more to Europe but less to, say, Japan and China.

So a big increase in U.S. energy exports driven by demand from Europe is not going to happen. But how will Europe explain its failure to follow through?

It might not have to. Back during Trump’s first term, China promised to buy a lot of U.S. agricultural goods but never did. As far as I know, Trump never made an issue of it. He got to announce a

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:
UK breakthrough could slash emissions from cement – May 22, 2024

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxee01m5yero

Scientists say they've found a way to recycle cement from demolished concrete buildings.

Cement is the modern world's most common construction material, but it is also a huge source of planet-warming gas emissions.

That is because of the chemical reactions when you heat limestone to high temperatures by burning fossil fuels.

Recycling cement would massively reduce its carbon footprint. Researchers say that if they switched to electric-powered furnaces, and used renewable energy like wind and solar rather than fossil fuels, that could mean no greenhouse gases would be released at all.

And that would be a big deal. Cement forms the foundation of the modern economy, both literally and metaphorically.

It is what binds the sand and aggregate in concrete together, and concrete is the most widely used material on the planet after water.

It is also a major driver of climate change. If cement was a country, it would be the third biggest source of emissions after China and the US, responsible for 7.5% of human-made CO2.

The problem is the material’s uniquely polluting chemistry.

It is made by heating limestone to up 1600 Celsius in giant kilns powered by fossil fuels.

Those emissions are just the start. The heat is used to drive carbon dioxide from the limestone, leaving a residue of cement.

Add both these sources of pollution together and it is estimated that about a tonne of carbon dioxide is produced for every tonne of cement.

The team of scientists, from Cambridge University, has found a neat way to sidestep those emissions.

It exploits the fact that you can reactivate used cement by exposing it to high temperatures again.

The chemistry is well-established, and it has been done at scale in cement kilns.

The breakthrough is to prove it can be done by piggybacking on the heat generated by another heavy industry – steel recycling.

When you recycle steel, you add chemicals that float on the surface of the molten metal to prevent it reacting with the air and creating impurities. This is known as slag.

The Cambridge team spotted the composition of used cement is almost exactly the same as the slag used in electric arc furnaces.

They have been trialling the process at a small-scale electric arc furnace at the Materials Processing Institute in Middlesbrough.

The BBC was present when the first high grade, or “Portland”, cement was produced.

They are calling it “electric cement” and described the event as a world first.

The lead scientist, Cyrille Dunant, told the BBC it could enable the production of zero-carbon cement.

“We have shown the high temperatures in the furnace reactivate the old cement and because electric arc furnaces use electricity they can be powered by renewable power, so the entire cement making process is decarbonised.,” he said.

He said it also makes steel recycling less polluting because making the chemicals currently used as slag has a high carbon cost too.

Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at University College London, described the way the Cambridge team have combined cement and steel recycling as “genius” and believes, if it can be made to work profitably at scale, it could lead to huge reductions in emissions.

“Can it compete against the existing infrastructure that is very unsustainably going to keep pumping cement into our lives”, he asks.

“Cement is already a billion-dollar industry. It’s David and Goliath we are talking about here.”

The hope is electric cement will be cheaper to manufacture because it uses what is essentially waste heat from the steel recycling process.

Spanish company Celsa will attempt to replicate the process in its full-scale electric arc furnace in Cardiff this week.

The Cambridge team estimate, given current rates of steel recycling, their low carbon cement could produce as much as

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME