Source: One of Us! One of Us!

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

If you’ve been paying attention to the media coverage of the war in Ukraine, you’ve heard it:

“This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”

“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair … being killed every day.”

“Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe!”

The shock. The horror. Won’t someone THINK of the WHITE people!

Before I go any further, let me be clear: we absolutely should be thinking of the Ukranians in this hour of dire need. Any barrier to helping them should be removed immediately. We should recognize their humanity and match it with humane treatment. We should see ourselves in them. But to state the please-God-let-it-be-obvious: we should do so not because they are European, but because they are human. And we should extend the same compassion to Congolese and Eritreans and Liberians and Arabs and Persians and Kurds and Indians and Bangladeshis and Filipinos and Martenese and Rohingya and all the other people all over the world running from conflict and collapse all over the world.

Why Is the IPCC Report So Inaccessible?

By Amy Westervelt

You might have heard there was a new IPCC report out this week and it was, predictably, full of bad news…because world leaders still haven’t acted on the last report and problems left ignored get worse, duh. It also delivered the message that the terrible trajectory we’re on can absolutely still be changed, it just requires FUCKING DOING SOMETHING.

I’m not here to talk about the contents of the report, though. I’m more interested in  the context. I’m talking about more than 3,000 pages written in inscrutable academese, interspersed with parentheticals after every sentence that indicate how confident researchers are in it (low confidence, medium confidence, high confidence, and very high confidence). Here’s an example:

Why yes those ARE parentheticals and footnotes in the same dense paragraph! But it’s not just the document itself; sure it can be cumbersome and hard to parse but you get there eventually. The report is  also shrouded in secrecy before its release and the IPCC makes it damn  difficult to register as media. (You have to sign up and pay for an international press pass, then register for each installment of the report. No, you cannot just register once and forget it.)

And here’s my biggest gripe: press get the report less than 24 hours before it’s published, typically. This latest installment was 3,676 pages. I have this weird skill where I don’t really read line by line, I kind of  “absorb” pages, which makes me a really fast reader, but even I can’t get through nearly 4,000 pages in an afternoon. And then we wonder why the coverage is always so blah. This is extra frustrating because most media outlets only want to run something the day of or the day after a report comes out, but every journalist I know just started to really wrap their heads around this report by the end of the week.

It’s a critically important document. I can’t help but think if it wasn’t kept almost entirely separate from the public, it could do more to help actually shape policy. Maybe they can’t get rid of the parentheticals or the mind-numbing language, but surely the IPCC could give press a week to make sense of its thousands of pages of detailed research? It would go a really long way toward effectively communicating the findings (very high confidence).

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Digest

NOTE: Most weeks, we source articles from Earther, Gizmodo’s excellent climate site – but we’re skipping them this week. Why? The Gizmodo union (which includes Jalopnik, Jezebel, The Root, Earther, and more) is on strike while they negotiate better wages and working conditions with their parent org, G/O Media, and we stand with the workers. Don’t cross the digital picket line!

Rising Temperatures, Rising Tides

IPCC report: The world is hitting the limits of climate change adaptation – Vox, by Umair Irfan

Climate change is intensifying Earth’s water cycle at twice the predicted rate, research shows | Grist, by Donna Lu

As planet warms, less ice covering North American lakes | AP News, by Brittany Peterson

Dengue, Lyme, and cholera: how climate change is spurring disease | Grist, by Zoya Teirstein

UN: Climate change to uproot millions, especially in Asia | AP News, by Victoria Milko and Julie Watson

Deforestation emissions far higher than previously thought, study finds | Grist, by Patrick Greenfield

Putin, Russia and the Ukraine War: What It Could Mean for Fossil Fuels – The New York Times, by Somini Sengupta

IPCC Report: The Climate Crisis Requires Solutions That Do It All | Atmos, by Yessenia Funes

Combat at Ukraine Nuclear Plant Adds Radioactive Dangers to Russian Invasion – The New York Times, by Valerie Hopkins and William J. Broad

Climate change brings extreme, early impact to South America | AP News, by Diane Jeantet, Mauricio Savarese and Debora Rey

‘Crisis’: Climate panel flags Great Barrier Reef devastation | AP News, by Kristen Gelineau

Climate change: IPCC report warns of ‘irreversible’ impacts of global warming – BBC News, by Matt McGrath

Climate Change’s Effects Outpacing Ability to Adapt, IPCC Warns – The New York Times, by Brad Plumer and Raymond Zhong

Time Is Running Out to Avert a Harrowing Future, Climate Panel Warns, by Brad Plumer, Raymond Zhong and Lisa Friedman for The New York Times

Warning: Threats are accelerating, by Somini Sengupta for The New York Times

Climatologists: Drought to worsen in Oregon, Idaho this year | AP News, by Gillian Flaccus

5 Takeaways From the UN Report on Climate Hazards – The New York Times, by Raymond Zhong

UN: Africa, already suffering from warming, will see worse | AP News, by Wanjohi Kabukuru

UN: Droughts, less water in Europe as warming wrecks crops | AP News, by Aritz Parra and Sergio Rodrigo

Heat wave a glimpse of climate change’s impact in N. America | AP News, by Gillian Flaccus

IPCC paints a grim picture, but it’s still not too late to act | Letters in the Guardian