Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[Tamas]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/08/call-for-uk-ban-on-single-use-vapes-as-more-than-5m-discarded-each-week

Five million single-use vapes are being thrown away in the UK every week, a fourfold increase on 2022, research has found.

This amounts to eight vapes a second being discarded, with the lithium in the products enough to create 5,000 electric car batteries a year.

Scott Butler, the executive director at Material Focus, said the "problem with single-use vapes has gotten further out of control" since the organisation published research last year. "Single-use vapes are a strong contender for being the most environmentally wasteful, damaging and dangerous consumer product ever made," he said.


Discarded vapes create environmental waste and pose a threat to public safety, because their lithium batteries can become flammable when crushed.

The potential cost of collecting and recycling vapes, according to Material Focus, is £200m, which the charity says should be paid for by vape producers, importers and retailers.

Sales of disposable vapes have soared to more than 360m annually in recent years, with the number of young women vaping every day in the UK more than tripling in the past year, government figures show. Paediatricians have said vaping is "fast becoming an epidemic among children", and called on the government to ban disposable vapes.

[Josquius]

They definitely need banning. Seems to be a huge overlap in their users and absolute cunts who don't know how to use a bin.

[garbon]

Yeah ban them. What's the struggle?

[mongers]

Dernay, the Eastern Libyan port city has been devastated by flooding, fears that hundreds may have been killed as whole neighbourhoods undermined and swept away.

[mongers]

The floods did this to Derna:


Many hundreds of bodies so far recovered.

full article here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/9/12/hundreds-of-bodies-uncovered-as-eastern-libya-devastated-by-floods

[Grey Fox]

What happened? Did a levy brake?

[Sheilbh]

What happened? Did a levy brake?

Yeah, two dams collapsed:


Edit: And before and after satellite images:
https://x.com/BenDoBrown/status/1701704469166305776?s=20

[Grey Fox]

Damn.

[mongers]

This weeks seen the a natural disaster the Moroccan earthquake, a man-made/enhanced* climate disaster of the Libyan floods and the disaster made by one man, Putin's war against Ukraine.


The very strong storm/hurricane Daniel in the Western Mediterranean, hitting poorly maintained infrastructure in a war-torn county. 

[crazy canuck]

I wonder if the Libyan dam breaks are more a function of a failure to maintain them.

[mongers]

We're fucked.


Article here:
Antarctic sea-ice at 'mind-blowing' low alarms experts

[Josquius]

Sadly not especially big news either so won't be the big kick it should be.

[Jacob]

Yeah, as I understanding it a lot of the polar ice coverage is shrinking at a rate that implies noticably rising sea levels within our livetimes.

[Maladict]

Maybe my 30-year mortgage on a house below sea level wasn't such a great investment after all.

[Josquius]

A usual denier tale is that it's all related to sunspot activity. Checking that for myself - the current cycle is expected to peak in 2025.

That this explains everything is obvious bollocks. But it is related to the precise timings of bad shit. We are in for a rough next few years. The big concern is things could get to such a level it pushes things over the top into run away warming rather than the more relatively gradual and manageable warming we've had up to now.

Maybe my 30-year mortgage on a house below sea level wasn't such a great investment after all.

When I was young this seriously was the big reason I was skeptical of ever moving back to the Netherlands no matter how much I liked it. A worry which honestly has lessened for me as I got older. Though maybe it shouldn't have

I do wonder how things will go. Waterworld is of course silly but then so too are those who dismiss things as being fine and they'll just build higher dykes.