NYC restaurants flip out over new ‘char broil’ rule that would force them to cut emissions by 75%: ‘Stop messing with my burgers’
https://nypost.com/2025/01/12/us-news/nyc-restaurants-flip-out-over-new-char-broil-rule-that-would-force-them-to-cut-emissions-by-75/ By Carl Campanile Big Apple eateries say a new “char broil” rule is totally half-baked. The city’s environmental cops could force restaurants that use charbroilers to cut their smoky emissions by 75% — or figure out a new way to cook meat and fish. Restaurants that char-broil more than 875 pounds of meat per […]
Analysis: Most Disastrous Wildfires Are Caused By Humans, Not Climate Change
Most Disastrous Wildfires Are Caused By Humans, Not Climate Change by Susan Crockford Extended periods of hot weather and drought create ideal conditions for hard-to-fight forest fires. [emphasis, links added] Although climate models predict that such weather conditions generated by human-caused global warming will increase the incidence of wildfires, recent wildfires cannot be blamed exclusively—or even […]
‘My 40-year journey with climate change…from idealism to realism’: Former UN IPCC scientist Mike Hulme: ‘I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity’ – Now declares climate is ‘perhaps not the most important thing’
Mike Hulme, Professor at Cambridge University & one of the world’s most accomplished climate scientists. Hulme participated in the UN IPCC second and third assessments & was part of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, where he subsequently founded the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA. He has been at Cambridge University since 2017. … Mike’s publication record is expansive.
Prof. Hulme: “For a long period I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century. … I was easily convinced that the growing human influence on the world’s climate would be a reality that all nations would increasingly need to confront, a reality to which their interests would necessarily be subservient and that would be decisive for shaping their development pathways. For more than half of these 40 or so years, it seemed to me self-evident that relations between nations would forcibly be re-shaped by the exigencies of a changing climate.
But now, in the mid-2020s, I can see that I got this the wrong way round. … Too often the language, rhetoric, and campaigning around climate change remains wedded to a world that no longer exists. … Rather than geopolitics having to bend to the realities of a changing climate, the opposite has happened. … In short, this optimism was fueled by the rise of globalism; thinking strategically about climate change was caught-up in this zeitgeist. … Climate is not the only thing that is changing through our lifetimes, and perhaps not the most important thing. …
By 2007, the illusion under which I had been working—that geopolitics would bend to the force of concern over climate change—was already ending. The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, ratified in 2004, had yielded next to nothing in terms of emissions reductions. … And the denouement came in December 2009 at COP15, billed as ‘the most important meeting in human history’. During a few days in a wintery Copenhagen, China’s growing political and economic muscle was firmly exercised, the impotence of the EU’s climate diplomacy revealed, and the limits of late twentieth century internationalism exposed.
The curtain finally came down on Sarewitz’s so-called “plan” during the (northern) 2009/10 winter of climate discontent. In November 2009, the western world was blind-sided by the Climategate controversy over leaked emails between corresponding scientists, and in the early months of 2010 its confidence in climate science further undermined by several challenges to the IPCC’s trust and credibility. …
So this has been my 40-year journey with climate change, initially from idealist to pragmatist, and now from pragmatist to realist. It is not a particularly hopeful story-arc, but then why should I, or anyone else, ever think that climate change was going to offer one?…Climate is not the only thing that is changing through our lifetimes, and perhaps not the most important thing. …
I now see the need for a deeper reading of political realism and power, that goes beyond seeing science as a coercive force that trumps geopolitics, beyond appeals to a superficial cosmopolitanism. To use the language of Jason Maloy at Louisiana University, climate change is neither an emergency or a crisis; it is a political epic, “a process of collective human effort that features gradual progression through time, obscure problem origins, and anticlimactic outcomes.”
The best that we can say is that the world will continue slowly to decarbonize its energy system and, at the same time, the Earth will continue slowly to warm. And societies will continue to adapt to evolving climate hazards in new ways, as they have always done, with winners and losers along the way.
Leonardo DiCaprio escapes LA fires on private jet despite being ‘climate warrior’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-14277143/Leonardo-DiCaprio-Vittoria-Ceretti-escape-LA-fires-private-jet-despite-climate-warrior.html By TERRY ZELLER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM Excerpt: Leonardo DiCaprio and his model girlfriend Vittoria Ceretti were spotted arriving in Mexico on a private jet amid the devastating LA fires. While more than 100,000 people have been evacuated and several of his A-list peers, including Tom Hanks, Anthony Hopkins, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, have seen their homes destroyed, DiCaprio was seen landing in Cabo San Lucas on Friday. Given Leo’s […]