Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning “The Sixth Extinction” and “H is for Hope”, writes about the devastating effects of climate change on the Greenland ice sheet. The consequences of its melting will be global, ranging from the obvious rise in sea levels to difficult-to-model effects on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) (also listen to "The Hole in the Map of the World" from the September–October 2024 issue of Wired at New York Times Audio). The gripping (and long) article tells the story of Eismitte, explains the mechanism of feedback loops and ice cores.

Thomas Flight, who usually analyses films on his wonderful YouTube channel, lives in Asheville, North Carolina, USA, which was hit by Hurricane Helene in late September 2024. In his most recent video, Flight reflects on the depiction of disasters in social media, news and documentaries. While these images may inform and raise awareness, they all fail to do so adequately.

Kimmerer argues that “the most profound act of linguistic imperialism was the replacement of a language of animacy with one of objectification of nature, which renders the beloved land as lifeless object, the forest as board feet of timber.” Her main point of argument is the use of it in the English language for „being[s] of the living earth”. Derived from the Potawatomi “Aakibmaadiziiwin” (a being of the earth), she suggests the pronoun ki. She believes that words matter, and that a more inclusive pronoun could unlock a new (and ancient) way of thinking that puts human exceptionalism aside and brings us closer to the “commonwealth of life.” Kimmerer acknowledges that Russian  – and German too – does ”embrac[e] animacy in its structure” (by not using it pronouns for animals), but still argues for our reflection on language because it “reveals unconscious cultural assumptions and exerts some influence over patterns of thought.”

Utilising 150,000 data points from climate proxies, including fossils and statistical methods such as data assimilation, a team of scientists led by Emily J. Judd has produced the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth‘s past temperatures to date. The timeline illustrates the historical temperature fluctuations and the correlation between rapid changes in temperature and mass extinctions. The previous higher temperatures may be misinterpreted as evidence against the current climate debate; however, they demonstrate that humans evolved in an icehouse climate. The unprecedented change in temperature also raises concerns, as it indicates that the average temperature could reach 17 °C, which has not been seen for 5 million years.

What does more harm: Killing animals (or being vegetarian) or abusing animals (or being vegan)? Along two articles, PJ Vogt and the author of the articles, Annie Lowrey, discuss our irrational relationship with animal rights.

The first story is about the Turkey Trot festival in Yellville, Arkansas, where the annual tradition of dropping about 10 turkeys from a plane has drawn national criticism. But what is more brutal: Dropping birds that cannot fly from a plane, or the 45 million turkeys killed in the US every year (and mostly from the surrounding area).

The second article looks at the systemic issues that lead to animal suffering. Because organic certification rules (in the US) prohibit the use of antibiotics, cow 13039 suffered from “eye cancer” and was not treated properly. This raises the question of whether to prioritise the health of consumers (who want to avoid milk contaminated with antibiotics) or animal welfare.

Bill McKibben, author of the The End of Nature (the book which is regarded as the first book on global warming written for a general audience), uses the newsletter “The Crucial Years” to directly talk about “Working on Winning the Climate Fight”

This episode of The Daily looks at how air conditioning has become both our answer to a warming planet and a major obstacle to actually tackling it. When Willis Carrier invented the first version of air conditioning in 1902 (to control the moisture content of printed documents), it suddenly made places like Las Vegas, Dallas and Houston, which had previously been almost uninhabitable, attractive places to live (often requiring an additional artificial water supply). Because energy was cheap, buildings could be inefficient: glass instead of stone, air conditioning instead of windows, and less clever architectural features like window awnings. Many people now live in these "greenhouses", which are not only very vulnerable to power outages, but also contribute to 30 per cent of greenhouse gases in the United States.

South African photographer Dillon Marsh combines photography with computer-generated images of material extracted from the landscape he portrays. In the series For What It’s Worth, the artist visits former copper, diamond, gold, and platinum group metal mines that are now scars on the landscape to create salient visualisation of extraction. 

The Palabora mine, pictured above, is almost 2 km wide and over 800 m deep. 4.1 million tonnes of copper have been mined here, but this total is dwarfed by the massive hole left behind.

One of the most striking and instructive graph in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report: It lists the potential contribution to net emissions reductions by 2030 for different migration options in sectors such as energy, AFOLU (Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses), buildings, transport and industry. In addition to the width of the bars, it also shows colour ranges for the cost of the reduction potential of the options.

The areas with the highest potential contributions are solar and wind energy, halting deforestation, better agriculture, strengthening ecosystems and hydrogen in industry.

Wind and solar energy are cheap up to 2 GtCO₂-eq per year, while the often-promised carbon capture is expensive from the outset and has very little potential.

The graphic is part of the Summary for Policymakers in “Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”.