related

Car tyres shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment – urgent action is needed | University of Portsmouth
https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/blogs/protecting-our-environment/car-tyres-shed-a-quarter-of-all-microplastics-in-the-environment-urgent-action-is-needed

Every year, billions of vehicles worldwide shed an estimated 6 million tonnes of tyre fragments. These tiny flakes of plastic, generated by the wear and tear of normal driving, eventually accumulate in the soil, in rivers and lakes, and even in our food. Researchers in South China recently found tyre-derived chemicals in most human urine samples.

These tyre particles are a significant but often-overlooked contributor to microplastic pollution. They account for 28% of microplastics entering the environment globally.

Despite the scale of the issue, tyre particles have flown under the radar. Often lumped in with other microplastics, they are rarely treated as a distinct pollution category, yet their unique characteristics demand a different approach.

Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis, study finds, threatening millions with starvation | Plastics | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/10/microplastics-hinder-plant-photosynthesis-study-finds-threatening-millions-with-starvation

The pollution of the planet by microplastics is significantly cutting food supplies by damaging the ability of plants to photosynthesise, according to a new assessment.

The analysis estimates that between 4% and 14% of the world’s staple crops of wheat, rice and maize is being lost due to the pervasive particles. It could get even worse, the scientists said, as more microplastics pour into the environment.

Clean air policies unintentionally drive up wetland methane emissions, study finds

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-air-policies-unintentionally-wetland-methane.html

How has this happened? Put simply, sulfur provides the conditions for one set of bacteria to outmuscle another set of microbes that produce methane when they compete over the limited food available in wetlands. Under the conditions of acid rain sulfur pollution during the past century, this was enough to reduce wetland methane emissions by up to 8%.

YMLADRIS: No, tak je to v tom clanku napsany.

2.3. Conflict and negative emissions technologies
Only recently has a first framework been constructed to elucidate the potential geopolitical dimensions of negative emissions technologies as a broad suite of large-scale energy production, resource usage, carbon storage, and land-use systems [58]. Direct air capture approaches rely on massive energy costs which could be coupled with either existing fossil-fuel or novel renewable infrastructures - possessing the potential to entrench or reorient the global carbon economy and its geopolitics [59,60]. Meanwhile, land-use approaches (large-scale forestry or agricultural management) by necessity entail heavy spatial and resource usage as well as pose inequities and trade-offs for the populations currently resident on or adjacent to the land [61]. Ocean based and marine carbon removal, and even the protection of coral reefs for ecosystem restoration, could also intersect with fisheries conflicts around the world [62].
This deliberately geopolitical focus on various aspects of negative emissions and carbon removal is nascent, but raises issues highlighted by antecedent conflicts in global food systems. These studies cite land-grabs and ownership conflicts, the food versus ethanol dilemma (e.g. the 2005 global food crisis), “phantom commodities”, the consequences of shifting prices in one-resource economies, and other issues and challenges confronting rural, smallholder communities – often accompanied by the particular pressures experienced by indigenous populations, or in the global South [[63], [64], [65]]. Others cite extractive industries in energy and other natural resources as relevant antecedents, raising questions of hazardous siting and carbon infrastructure lock-in [66]. As carbon removal technologies and their related approaches are looking beyond the terrestrial and into coastal and oceanic environments, some are increasingly concerned that the same logics of exploitation and conflict more familiar in the former could be repeated [67,68].

After catastrophic floods engulfed Valencia last month, killing more than 200 people, it might seem counterintuitive to think about water shortages. But as the torrents of filthy water swept through towns and villages, people were left without electricity, food supplies – and drinking water. “It was brutal: cars, chunks of machinery, big stones, even dead bodies were swept along in the water. It gushed into the ground floor of buildings, into little shops, bakeries, hairdressers, the English school, bars: all were destroyed. This was climate change for real, climate change in capital letters,” says Josep de la Rubia of Valencia’s Ecologists in Action, describing the scene in the satellite towns south of the Valencian capital.

In the aftermath, hundreds of thousands of people were reliant on emergency tankers of water or donations of bottled water from citizen volunteers. Within a fortnight, the authorities had reconnected the tap water of 90% of the 850,000 people in affected areas, but all were advised to boil it before drinking it or to use bottled water. Across the region, 100 sewage treatment plants were damaged; in some areas, human waste seeped into flood waters, dead animals were swept into rivers and sodden rubbish and debris piled up. Valencia is on the brink of a sanitation crisis.

‘It’s not drought - it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water | Water | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/nov/23/spanish-villages-people-forced-to-buy-back-own-drinking-water-drought-flood

Pardon za délku, líbilo se mi na redditu, ještě jsem výrazně zkrátila :)

hyperobjects are a concept introduced by philosopher timothy morton to describe things so vast in scale, duration, or interconnectedness, existing through such vast expanses of space *and* time that they transcend the biological capabilities of human perception and comprehension. they are objects or phenomena that we interact with but cannot fully grasp due to their inherent complexity and distributed nature. hyperobjects include things like climate change, radioactive materials, global capitalism, or even the internet.

hyperobjects exist on such expansive spatial and temporal scales that they are quite literally everywhere and nowhere all at once. for example, you can experience the effects of climate change (like extreme weather), but you can never point to a single, tangible "climate change" because it is dispersed across the entire globe and throughout time. hyperobjects persist over timeframes that dwarf human lifespans. radioactive waste and climate change remain dangerous for thousand of years, potentially outlasting human civilization.

hyperobjects stick to you and are inescapable. you might try to avoid thinking about a hyperobject, but its presence infiltrates daily life like the slow creep of rising sea levels or the omnipresence microplastics in the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the soil your food is grown in.

hyperobjects exist not in isolation but in constant interaction with other objects and systems. for instance, the carbon cycle connects human industry, ecosystems, and atmospheric chemistry in ways that cannot be disentangled. hyperobjects are real, but they don’t appear fully at once. you can only perceive fragments of them through their effects (melting glaciers or sulfur dioxide in maritime shipping fuel) and through the models used to understand them (e.g., CMIP6).

hyperobjects push beyond what is called humanity’s epistemic horizon, the boundary of what we can conceptually process. they are too vast in both space and time, existing beyond the direct experience of one human lifespan. the geological timescales of climate change make it challenging to fully perceive its urgency or consequences. the causes and effects of hyperobjects are enmeshed in complex systems, making them harder to discern. global warming involves atmospheric chemistry, ocean currents, human behavior, economic systems and things we aren't even aware of. all of which often manifests indirectly, requiring abstract models, simulations, and data interpretation over time for us to engage with them meaningfully.

this sheer scale and complexity often leads to psychological overwhelm or cognitive dissonance, resulting in denial or inaction. humans often approach hyperobjects by breaking them into smaller, more manageable parts like focusing on reducing personal carbon footprints rather than addressing systemic industrial ecocide. even just recognizing a hyperobject requires collective action, interdisciplinary research, and systems-level thinking, again, over time. meaningfully addressing climate change would necessitate coordination between nations, localities, municipalities, industries, and individuals.

art, literature, and philosophy are further ways humans historically seem to engage with hyperobjects. perhaps the abstract, individual, hyperobject-like elements of art itself help to make hyperobjects themselves more relatable and comprehensible, even if only metaphorically. art can influence individuals as well as entire cultures.

COVID-19, UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena also known as ''the phenomena''), and AI all exhibit hyperobject-like characteristics. Also consciousness.

old news. a navic guardian a jak rika nejbohatsi osoba na svete "guardian of what?"

US election 2024 live: Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris to win historic second term as president | US elections 2024 | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/nov/06/us-presidential-election-2024-donald-trump-kamala-harris-latest-news-updates?page=with:block-672b59298f08243590db2aee#block-672b59298f08243590db2aee

An election that barely mentioned climate could end up being the most consequential for the planet in modern history. Donald Trump is expected to pull the US out of the Paris agreement, joining just three other countries, Iran, Libya and Yemen.

He is also expected to cancel many of Biden’s climate policies and, as he said, “drill, baby, drill”, turbocharging oil and gas production.

This will have dire consequences. CarbonBrief has estimated this will cause an additional 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 emitted from the US. This would negate twice over all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.

Experts believe a second Trump presidency would end all hope of keeping global warming below 1.5C, the limit agreed by scientists which would avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown. These include extreme, deadly weather events which can wipe out populations and cause mass deaths, as well as temperatures rising to make some parts of the world uninhabitable, as well as climate related severe disruptions to the food supply as fertile lands become desert.

It also has global impacts; when right wing parties falsely claim that lowering emissions and switching to a green economy is expensive, and the US is not participating in this effort, they can plausibly ask why other countries are doing that. This is likely to happen in the UK, where politicians are already falsely claiming the Labour government’s green policies will drive up energy bills and cause rationing

Climate crisis leaves European farmers vulnerable to far right, say campaigners | Europe | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/04/climate-crisis-europe-farmers-vulnerable-far-right

In recent years, farmers in western Europe have fought with increasing ferocity against policies to protect the planet that they say cost them too much. From the Netherlands, where the backlash has been strongest, to Belgium, France, Spain, Ireland, Germany and the UK, protests have led to convoys of tractors clogging roads and ports, farmer-led occupations of capital cities and even cows being herded into the offices of government ministers.

These movements have been fuelled by the genuine grievances of farmers, who say that the burden of paying more for their pollution is a step too far, after an energy crisis and pandemic left many struggling to make ends meet. They say they feel overburdened by rules and undervalued by city dwellers, who eat the food they grow without any interest in where it came from.

...

Richard Seymour, whose latest book, Disaster Nationalism, examines how the far-right is capitalising on economic shocks and climate chaos, small farmers reeling from the blows of globalisation, a changing climate, and high energy prices is part of a wider trend.

Seymour said: “For farmers there’s all of this resentment requiring a target. But many of the things that are causing the harm – globalisation, capitalism, climate change – are abstract; you can’t take climate change to court, you can’t shoot globalisation … But conspiracy theories and far-right narratives allow you to identify some specific individuals or groups – cultural Marxists, globalists, Muslims – who are doing you down, that is the appeal.”

“Downwardly mobile” farmers – those that have seen their living standards and social standing decline during their lifetimes – are particularly susceptible, according to Seymour. “The toxic feeling of failure, the feeling of being buffeted by these global forces, the feeling you have been abandoned, betrayed, when you traditionally had some sort of status, that is a toxic mix and that is where the far right comes in.”

‘Welfare for the rich’: how farm subsidies wrecked Europe’s landscapes | Farming | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/02/farm-subsidies-wrecked-europe-environments-common-agricultural-policy

the environmental aspects of the CAP changes have not worked. The European court of auditors in 2020 found little evidence of a positive impact on biodiversity from the CAP. The European Environment Agency, in its State of Nature report in 2023, found that the EU’s farmed environment had continued to decline, with the health of only 14% of habitats and about a quarter of non-bird species classed as “good”. The CAP is also making the climate worse: about 80% of the budget goes to support carbon-intensive animal food products, according to a paper published this month in Nature.

Nové hlášení od WWF - "Living Planet Report 2024"

Over the past 50 years (1970–2020), the average size of monitored wildlife populations has shrunk by 73%,
as measured by the Living Planet Index (LPI). This is based on almost 35,000 population trends and 5,495
species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles. Freshwater populations have suffered the heaviest
declines, falling by 85%, followed by terrestrial (69%) and marine populations (56%).

In the natural world, a number of tipping points are highly likely if current trends are left to continue, with
potentially catastrophic consequences. These include global tipping points that pose grave threats to
humanity and most species, and would damage Earth’s life-support systems and destabilize societies
everywhere.

Food production is one of the main
drivers of nature’s decline: it uses 40% of all habitable land, is
the leading cause of habitat loss, accounts for 70% of water
use and is responsible for over a quarter of greenhouse gas
emissions. The hidden costs of ill health and environmental
degradation in the current food system amount to US$10–15
trillion annually, representing 12% of global GDP in 2020

Globally, over half of GDP (55%) – or an estimated US$58
trillion – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and
its services. Yet our current economic system values nature
at close to zero, driving unsustainable natural resource
exploitation, environmental degradation and climate change.

Hlášení: https://wwflpr.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/2024-living-planet-report-a-system-in-peril.pdf
Exekutivní shrnutí: https://wwflpr.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/2024-lpr-executive-summary.pdf

SHEFIK: Pekny, ze prsi na Sahare. Ale zapomnel si jeste na tohle:

Southern Africa is grappling with an unprecedented drought triggered by El Niño, a recurring climate phenomenon known for its capacity to exacerbate either dry or stormy weather patterns.

Prolonged dry spells at critical moments of the 2023/2024 planting season resulted in widespread crop failure and livestock losses, in a region where 70 percent of the population relies on agriculture. While the current El Niño cycle has come to an end, the consequences will be felt for months to come, with the hunger crisis likely to worsen and persist until the next harvest season (April/May 2025)

Five countries in the region have already declared national drought disasters: Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Mozambique and Angola are also severely affected.

Southern Africa Drought | World Food Programme
https://www.wfp.org/emergencies/southern-africa-drought

Europe’s algae market expanding, driven by product innovation, climate potential – Euractiv
https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/special_report/europes-algae-market-expanding-driven-by-product-innovation-climate-potential/

The global algae products market size is estimated to surpass €8.2 billion by 2033.

According to algae farming firm Global Algae: “building algae farms to stop deforestation and enable regrowth of tropical rainforests without loss of production or revenue could reduce carbon emissions by ~10 Gt CO2-eq /year.” With large-scale algae farming for feed and fuel, reducing emissions by 13 to 20 gigatons of CO2 per year.

Recognised for their nutritional and functional benefits, algae such as seaweeds and microalgae are also used as foodstuffs. In February 2024, more than 20 algae species were added to the EU Novel Food Status Catalogue.

They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there !!

Úřady v Zimbabwe plánují dát utratit 200 slonů a jejich masem nakrmit
občany hladovějící kvůli nejhoršímu suchu za poslední čtyři desetiletí.
Minulý měsíc již podobné opatření oznámila sousední Namibie.
Celkem sucha na jihu Afriky zasáhla až 68 milionů lidí.

Zimbabwe orders cull of 200 elephants amid food shortages from drought | Zimbabwe | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/14/zimbabwe-orders-cull-of-200-elephants-amid-food-shortages-from-drought

Zimbabwe to cull 200 elephants for food amid drought | REUTERS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEbyx4cQUZc