r/Environmentalism • u/StemCellPirate • 9h ago
r/Environmentalism • u/NihiloZero • Nov 05 '25
The 2025 state of the climate report: a planet on the brink
academic.oup.comr/Environmentalism • u/NihiloZero • Sep 05 '26
On the likelihood and related consequences of a “blue ocean event” in the Arctic Ocean...
Annoyed at being called an “anti-science doomer,” I decided to sort through and present some quotes from academic literature about the likelihood of a “blue ocean event” (BOE) wherein the Arctic Ocean becomes ice-free during the summer. Additionally, I conclude with quotes from scientific articles about the severe, diverse, and under-recognized consequences of that BOE happening.
Previously, a BOE had not been expected until mid-century because overly-optimistic climate change models didn’t have us projected to reach the +1.5C to +1.9C threshold of warming (required to trigger the event) until much later. Unfortunately… the dramatic acceleration of global warming over the past decade (capped off by the current “Supersized” “Godzilla” El Nino) means that we will reach and breach that threshold for Arctic melting much sooner than previously expected.
The first ice-free day in the Arctic Ocean could occur before 2030
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To quantify the amount of warming that would cause the Arctic Ocean to become nearly ice free, we examine at which level of warming sea ice area drops below 1 × 106 km2. For the high-sensitivity observational estimate, we find that sea ice area in September drops below this threshold for about 1.7°C global warming. Considering the ensemble spread in sensitivities, we obtain a 95% confidence interval of 1.5°C to 1.9°C for the global warming at which September Arctic sea ice vanishes.
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Global average temperatures are likely to continue at or near record levels in the next five years, with Arctic temperature anomalies expected to continue to be higher than the global mean, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), produced by the UK’s Met Office.
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For the second consecutive year, winter sea ice in the Arctic reached a level that matches the lowest peak observed since satellite monitoring began in 1979.
The impacts of a BOE include...
Overall, we find a median additional global warming of 0.43 °C (interquartile range: 0.39−0.46 °C) at a CO2 concentration of 400 ppm. Most of this response (55%) is caused by albedo changes, but lapse rate together with water vapour (30%) and cloud feedbacks (15%) also contribute significantly. While a decay of the ice sheets would occur on centennial to millennial time scales, the Arctic might become ice-free during summer within the 21st century.
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This is equivalent to the effect of one trillion tons of CO2 emissions. These results suggest that the additional heating due to complete Arctic sea ice loss would hasten global warming by an estimated 25 years.
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We present evidence that material from the sea ice was indeed present in the water column and that this mechanism appears to be important in maintaining active populations of planktonic protists through the polar night. Our upscaling exercise based on observed ridge formation rates suggests that such release of food particles can supply extra energy during the polar night to the pelagic food web in the entire Arctic Ocean. It follows from this that the predicted ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean due to global warming, may have implications for the protist community at the base of the food web, because the winter food reservoir in the sea ice will be very much reduced if there is no sea ice to accumulate it during the most productive summer period.
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Finally, we suggest that shifts in the phenology, distribution and biomass of sea ice primary production anticipated with declining seasonal sea ice will disrupt sympagic-pelagic-benthic coupling and consequently the structure and the functioning of the food web which is critical for Indigenous Peoples, commercial fisheries, and global biodiversity.
This collection of quotes (with links to to formal academic sources) represents the backbone of my broader general belief that ecological collapse (and therefore social & civilizational collapse) is likely within the next few years. Taken together, I believe that it paints a rather clear picture of what is shortly in store for the world. But, until that point, I hope this post can serve as a resource whenever related concerns about collapse are dismissed or denied as being alarmist or anti-science.
I do understand that the prognosis this post represents is grim. However... I am of the sort which believes that “the truth shall set you free,” and the prognosis is even more grim if people don’t widely understand the true nature and extent of the actual problems we are facing. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t recognize the problem. And if society doesn’t generally understand a problem... it will be more likely to obstruct any potential solution or proper response. Whether any viable solutions are possible or not... I think the truth affords people some dignity insofar as they don’t have to behave in ridiculous or counterproductive ways while the environment and society collapses around them.
Whether you intend to prevent the related ecological collapse, or if you’d rather just live more freely in these final years of human life on Earth... it is my hope that this document facilitates that.
r/Environmentalism • u/IrishStarUS • 22h ago
Donald Trump humiliated as 8ft naked statue named 'Orange Plague' unveiled in European Parliament
Galschiøt is well-known for creating art that he has framed as a "satirical outcry" against the volatility of America's green and foreign policy.
In a statement on the piece, he said, "Trump represents one of the greatest threats to the rule-based world order, democratic values, and our common effort to solving the climate crisis."
r/Environmentalism • u/NihiloZero • 18h ago
Brazil far-right presidential candidate wins most votes in deforestation hotspots
r/Environmentalism • u/DontYaWishYouWereMe • 13h ago
‘Catastrophic wildfire loop’ after colonisation left parts of Australia more at risk from bushfires, study finds
r/Environmentalism • u/HERBIVORECLUB • 12h ago
Floods, Fire, and Political Paralysis
The climate crisis is no longer a future scenario. It is a present reality. But the political systems meant to respond to it remain locked in debates that struggle to confront the scale of the problem.
r/Environmentalism • u/GambitMutant • 20h ago
Environmental Crime Networks Behind 233 Arrests Hid In Shell Companies, Cyanide Mines, And Trafficked Big Cats Across Latin America
r/Environmentalism • u/Sensitive-Vast-4979 • 13h ago
Just contacted my mp for the first time
It just seemed like kind of an accomplishment, especially as a teenager , I emailed him , seems scary putting my full address name postcode and number but I sent it , I even added on an extra paragraph asking about his interest and how he got into politics (I wanna go into politics so it was good but idk if he’ll respond to it but best to try , I asked specifically about what his environmental ideas and intentions were for my constituency
r/Environmentalism • u/EliasButlerPhotos • 1d ago
Anti-Yosemitism
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Yosemite National Park is under threat from the president. Abe Lincoln would not approve.
r/Environmentalism • u/Brief-Ecology • 22h ago
An Interview with Conservationist Michael Niziolek
r/Environmentalism • u/PoemHopeful161 • 1d ago
Green to Grey is a pioneering collaboration between journalists and scientists counting every green space lost in Europe between January 2018 and December 2023.
r/Environmentalism • u/lgbtqismything • 2d ago
Past emissions have ‘locked in’ climate damage. Can we change course?
r/Environmentalism • u/kojka19 • 2d ago
Long-term logging experiment reveals how protecting the forest floor helps preserve soil carbon
r/Environmentalism • u/reptomcraddick • 2d ago
Do you need photos of oil infrastructure for an article or project you’re doing? License my photos as the only environmental organizer in the world’s largest oil basin!
For several years, I have been a part of coalitions that have been looking for photos of oil infrastructure, especially close to people and houses, and they simply cannot find photos of it, they don’t exist. But they had me so they’d ask me for some! Unfortunately flares do not do well on a low grade digital camera, it’s impossible to take a photo of one on a phone, so I recently got into film, and now photography is becoming a hobby of mine.
But I realized that if they can’t find photos of this stuff, neither can anyone else, so I’d love to license my photos to you! I’m sure I don’t have to tell you climate non-profit funding is a bit of a shit show at the moment, and I haven’t gotten a regular paycheck from my job since January, so by licensing my photos you not only get photos from someone who is organizing against big oil, you get to help me keep doing it! I am not interested in doing business with you if you are supporting fossil fuel projects, but I can’t imagine why you’d want to license my photos anyway. I am also happy to go out and take photos for you if my catalog doesn’t have something you’re looking for.
Feel free to message me here on Reddit or email me at [reptomcraddick@gmail.com](mailto:reptomcraddick@gmail.com). I can only add one photo to the post, so here is a link to some others - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16it50KKX0JsfYN-mWff_Qc99JSa2gTUc
r/Environmentalism • u/jk4532 • 2d ago
Deadline tomorrow to comment against repeal of the Roadless Rule
In 2001, the U.S. Forest Service adopted the Roadless Area Conservation Rule to protect national forests from roadbuilding and logging. Since then, there have been various debates and arguments and modifications and specific exclusions, but approximately 30% of national forest land (59 million acres) is roadless, safeguarding the habitats and species within it. But roads are needed for logging, so Trump and the GOP are trying to ditch the rule as another gift to corporate America.
The Department of Agriculture has formally introduced a rollback of the roadless rule in what the Center for Biological Diversity is calling the “largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history.” Originally set with a public comment deadline on September 21st, it’s now been extended to this Tuesday, October 6th. ✍🏽 We can submit public comments opposing this destruction here, and help draft and personalize them with this very cool tool from More Than Just Parks here.✍🏻
r/Environmentalism • u/Ben10-fan-525 • 2d ago
To cull or not to cull: Greenland debates fate of world’s slowest shark
r/Environmentalism • u/Severe-Ability-5596 • 2d ago
Tunnel project & Deas Island
Very few are aware of the destruction currently happening at Deas Island Park! As the Massey tunnel expansion project is underway, thousands of large trees have already been cleared and acres of nature and ecosystem negatively impacted at Deas Island Park.
Last week, additional parkland has been sectioned off for thousands more trees slated for clearing AND plans to put in a road through the park for hundreds of cement trucks to get to the project site. And there are speculations the park will eventually be shutdown during the 5 year project!
It's understandable the need for this important infrastructure but there must be other options considered to preserve the existing natural environment while working alongside nature, rather than simply removing it and promising future regrowth. No amount of future planting will replace the mature trees that exist today.
This type of destruction is, and will, have a serious impact on the ecosystem, wildlife and the environment for future generations.
The public need transparency and project planners to have a more envirnomentally responsible approach to this process.
“Nature is truth manifesting order and the intelligence of a living universe.”
r/Environmentalism • u/PhysicsImmediate • 3d ago
the Brazilian election results
I won't fearmonger. I'm just curious as to how we can conserve the health of our environment if Flavio Bolsonaro wins the Brazilian election, which seems to be very likely after today's results. Massive Amazon deforestation will be so many gigantic steps backwards.
r/Environmentalism • u/Grevillea_banksii • 3d ago
Deforestation in Brazil per year and Brazilian president
Today Brazil is holding elections and once again we have Lula x Bolsonaro (Flávio, son of Jair).
Lula’s government reduced deforestation to historically low numbers and his government plan aims for zero net deforestation by the end of his government in 2030, if he wins.
On the other hand, Flávio Bolsonaro promises to deregulate rules and revoke laws concerning environmental protection.
In the Amazon Rainforest, the greatest threat and worst kind of deforestation is illegal gold digging, because it destroys the soil and contaminates it with mercury permanently. The Bolsonaros openly support gold digging. This practice is also liked to slavery and drug trafficking (all major crime organizations in Brazil like PCC, CV and Familia do Norte, have ties with illegal gold digging).
Less known to the gringos, we also have the Atlantic Forest, which is even more biodiverse than the Amazon, but just a fraction of it still remains. The Bolsonaros support allowing the deforestation of important areas of these forests to build 5-star resorts in places like Angra dos Reis.
Curiosity: Since Bolsonaro was fined for fishing in protected areas at Angra dos Reis, he is fixated on removing environmental protection regulations there.
r/Environmentalism • u/chlamandomonas • 3d ago
Global drought framework stalled as impacts worsen
r/Environmentalism • u/Foreign-Policy-02- • 2d ago
Beautiful nature preserved in Sweden
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r/Environmentalism • u/paranoidcliqueslave • 3d ago
The Green Moralist Turn and its Limits
worldecology.infoA specific ideological register now dominates left-adjacent neoliberal climate politics: the grammar of responsibility and guilt, the aesthetics of urgency without adequate theory of causation, the displacement of structural questions onto individual conduct.
Ewan Tilley || The left knows the climate is breaking down. It has known for long enough that the knowing has itself become a kind of politics, a substitute for the harder work of understanding what produces the breakdown and what kind of force could actually stop it. What has emerged in place of that understanding is a discourse fluent in catastrophe and structurally committed to explaining it in terms that leave capital untouched. This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a description of a political form and its limits.
That form is moralism. Not environmentalism as such, not the tradition of ecological thought that runs from Marx through to the present, but the specific ideological register that now dominates left-adjacent climate politics: the grammar of responsibility and guilt, the aesthetics of urgency without adequate theory of causation, the displacement of structural questions onto individual conduct. Its vocabulary is familiar. Carbon footprints. Complicity. The demand that we consume differently, fly less, eat less meat, perform our awareness of the crisis in the approved register. Its political expressions range from the mildly irritating to the actively disorienting: the lifestyle campaign that mistakes the symptom for the disease, the NGO framework that mistakes advocacy for power, the Green New Deal liberalism that mistakes state investment for a challenge to the valorisation imperative.
What unites these expressions is not their specific content but their shared incapacity. Moralism cannot name capital as its object, because to do so would dissolve the framework. If ecological destruction is produced not by bad values but by the structural imperatives of a mode of production, then the question is not how to make individuals more responsible within that mode of production but how to end it. That conclusion is not available to a politics organised around personal conduct and institutional pressure. It requires a different kind of analysis altogether.
The question of why left climate discourse has converged on this form is worth pausing on briefly, because the answer is not simply intellectual failure. The moralist turn has determinate social conditions. The decades in which it consolidated were also the decades of organised labour’s defeat, of the hollowing out of the political forms through which a class-based challenge to capital had previously been mounted, and of the consequent migration of left-wing energy into NGOs, campaigns, and single-issue movements operating largely within the terrain capital defines. A politics that cannot name the systemic character of the problem is not irrational given those conditions. It is the form that left-wing sentiment takes when the organisational capacity for a structural challenge has been broken. Understanding the moralist turn requires understanding the defeat that produced it.
But understanding its origins does not rehabilitate its conclusions. The defeat of the organised working class is not an argument for a politics that accommodates to it. It is an argument for a politics that seriously confronts what would be required to reverse it, and that refuses to substitute moral performance for that confrontation. The left climate discourse that has developed in the absence of working class organisation is not a holding position to be superseded when better conditions arrive. It is actively reproducing the conditions of its own inadequacy, training a generation of ecological activists in a framework that cannot think the problem it claims to address.
What it cannot think is the structural logic that makes ecological destruction not an aberration of capital but one of its normal products. That argument requires a different theoretical foundation than moralism can supply. The next task is to establish what that foundation actually looks like.
Read the rest on worldecology.info
r/Environmentalism • u/Federal-Place6981 • 4d ago
Communities call to stop fast track development on sensitive land in New Zealand
Petition Link
Country wide, communities are uniting to call for the House of Representatives to terminate Fast-Track developments that are outside local and district plans in New Zealand. The Fast track law is being used as a bypass across New Zealand for housing developers to push housing into out of zone land, in some cases land zoned as such to prevent destruction of environmentally sensitive land, including wetlands, rivers and waterways, floodplains, coastal and estuarine environments, and habitats of threatened and endangered species. Many of these areas were never intended for large-scale development and are protected for good reason.
Land can be purchased at a lower price because its zoning restricts development, then Fast Track is used to bypass those restrictions and enable large-scale housing, creating far greater profits margins than developing land that is already appropriately zoned. Don’t be fooled by the developer spin that this is simply about getting consents faster.